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What happened with LEGO

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Re: What happened with LEGO

#61

Post by prezjordan »

colomon wrote: post #51
acheron wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I hope Lego will move back to the more generic themes by the time my kid(s) get old enough. (Currently my 1.5 year old loves Duplo blocks; apparently there are even licensed Duplo sets though he doesn't have any of them.)

You can get all the generic Lego blocks you would ever want. The "problem" is kids want all the fancy sets. For instance: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Bricks-More-Builders-Tomorrow/dp/...

Thank you for pointing this out. I've been looking for a set like this for quite some time, just a variety of normal, colorful pieces. Ordered on impulse :)

Now, a way to organize these...

Re: What happened with LEGO

#62

Post by danielweber »

Tloewald wrote: post #13

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other…

Steve Yegge has a rant somewhere about how Lego used to make kits that could build special things, using entirely off-the-shelf parts, with maybe one or two exceptions for things that just couldn't work otherwise. And now (for older values of "now") it sells kits loaded up with special parts so that you can't really build as good a Batmobile without getting the Batmobile set.

He was comparing it to programming languages that cram in all sorts of edge-case special features, but it still reminded me my modern Lego seems less . . . pure, I guess.

shakes cane

Re: What happened with LEGO

#63

Post by Avshalom »

cbr wrote: post #55

Alternate hypothesis: pieces are getting smaller. Cost per piece looks like it's falling because we've gone from http://brickset.com/detail/?set=WEETABIX1-1 to http://brickset.com/detail/?set=10223-1

The article mentions this and also shows that cost per gram has gone down as well.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#64

Post by gbog »

colomon wrote: post #51
acheron wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I hope Lego will move back to the more generic themes by the time my kid(s) get old enough. (Currently my 1.5 year old loves Duplo blocks; apparently there are even licensed Duplo sets though he doesn't have any of them.)

You can get all the generic Lego blocks you would ever want. The "problem" is kids want all the fancy sets. For instance: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Bricks-More-Builders-Tomorrow/dp/...

The kids want what we make them want, on tv and elsewhere. There is a general trend toward collectibles away from diy, confirmed by someone working in retail. That's very sad and probably harmful in long term for all the society: collecting things is borderline psychiatric while diy I'd the root of progress.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#65

Post by pyre »

acabal wrote: post #38
Tloewald wrote: post #13

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other…

My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should…

1. They still have the generic sets.

2. You can go to places like bricklink.com to buy almost any block or set that you want.

3. Branded sets usually mean more specialized pieces which only increase the source material you have to draw from when building things.

4. Lego also puts out stuff like this: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=67132. Highly specialized pieces that aren't tied to a brand.

When I was a kid I would have been in heaven if they had all of the sets out there today. Buying a Harry Potter set wouldn't have meant that I can only play Harry Potter[1]. It would have meant that I had more legos to combine in other ways with the rest of my parts (all sets ended up broken down and stored in a huge bin of Legos). I realize that ultra-specialized pieces like 3-CPO or R2D2 minifigs can't really be reused elsewhere, but most specialized pieces tend to be pretty generic (e.g. Harry Potter wands don't have to only be used with Harry Potter).

[1]: Example, I recently saw a Harry Potter set that used a combination of a translucent 1x1 brick and brown stud to create 'potion bottles.' It's a pretty generic idea that translates elsewhere.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#66

Post by smackfu »

acabal wrote: post #38
Tloewald wrote: post #13

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other…

My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should…

Honestly, I doubt a kid will play much differently with a PotC themed Lego ship vs a non-branded one.

They basically look the same; http://www.brickset.com/brickLists/?5954

Also, pirates was a dead theme until PotC came around.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#67

Post by Nursie »

shocks wrote: post #18

I've always called them Lego. Not Legos. Is that an American thing? (UK citizen here). Just curious.

Lego is definitely, definitely a collective noun like 'sand'.

You have a grain of sand or if you have a lot you just have sand. You have a Lego brick or if you have a lot of them you have Lego.

I am also British

Re: What happened with LEGO

#68

Post by pyre »

danielweber wrote: post #62
Tloewald wrote: post #13

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other…

Steve Yegge has a rant somewhere about how Lego used to make kits that could build special things, using entirely off-the-shelf parts, with maybe one or two exceptions for things that just couldn't work otherwise. And now (for older values of "now") it sells kits loaded up with special parts so that you can't really build as good a Batmobile without getting the Batmobile set. He was comparing it to programming langua…

Depends on how you look at it. Specialized sets with specialized pieces just increase the breadth of your Lego collection and the type of pieces available to your imagination.

Re: What happened with LEGO

#69

Post by stusmith1977 »

DanBC wrote: post #36
Tloewald wrote: post #13

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other…

I'm 42. I tend to agree with you that I dislike over-specialised pieces. But then people are creative (which is the point of Lego, after all) and they use the thing for something else entirely. I would like there to be a few good base sets. Luckily, there are, you just have to search to find them, I'd really like to be able to buy blocks by the kg - 200 g of 2x1, 300 g of 2x4; etc.

Lego Education does a spare parts catalog - but not sure if you can buy from it as a private individual. I used to use something similar when I was a kid - I couldn't afford (say) a complete new pneumatic set, so I just bought a pneumatics parts pack from a mail-order catalog and used those bits with my generic technic stuff.

(Another great resource is the ideas magazines they used to print - not sure if they still do - with loads of pictures of creations, but with minimal or no instructions).

Re: What happened with LEGO

#70

Post by ecopoesis »

jacquesm wrote: post #3

> I wrote a web scraping program Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data if you ask nicely and your goal is something non-competitive.

As long as you obey their robots.txt, who cares? Google is scraping them far more often then your one-off script is going to.
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