Unpopular Opinions about LEGO

[CardinalBricks]

8 hours ago, MAB said:

I thought that was excellent parts usage, to make a victorian style bow window with many small panes. Like this ..

Seems I've posted my thoughts in the right discussion thread, then 

But you raise a good point, I think it would have come out much better if they were able to do a print around the borders of the window panes, to give it some color like in your example.

[alois]

I'm currently helping my eight year old son sorting out his Lego. It's way too large a task for him, which brings me to thinking that Lego has listened too much to afols in the last fifteen years, making too many parts in too many colours. For a boy with a limited collection of Lego the possibilities for play are seriously limited, now that he's old enough not wanting to build Rainbow Warriors anymore. When I was his age, I had bricks mostly in white and red, and yellow, blue and black. I could build a decent house in those colours. With the same quantity of bricks my son can't, because the same bricks now have thirty different colours. Same goes for parts variety.

It's no wonder therefore that children only build sets nowadays and don't make the step to building their own creations. It's become too complicated for them.

[The Island Chronicles]

1 hour ago, alois said:

Lego has listened too much to afols in the last fifteen years, making too many parts in too many colours. For a boy with a limited collection of Lego the possibilities for play are seriously limited

Thats not an even an unpopular opinion. That there is just straight up false. Lego has sets for KFOLS just as much as they do for TFOLs/AFOLs. But Lego also has tons of options for playability. So much so that there is absolutely no reason why possibilities should be limited. A quick visit to the official site will show you that. 

[Peppermint_M]

It all depends upon what you are buying. Classic bricks, City and 4+ sets would be the themes most aimed at little kids, they would certainly supply plenty of varied parts for building and seeing as City has a lot of Police and Fire service, that is already plenty of same colours to work with. Sure, the classic bricks are a wonderful variety of colours, pretty similar to the sets of bricks from the 90s and 80s. The 4+ all depends on what you are picking up, so that could vary the colours a lot. 

At 8 I didn't have a bank of bricks to build a perfectly coloured structure and that was well over 25 years ago. However at 8 I don't think I cared that the colours were exactly perfect, heck, at 18 I still combined cheaper brick brands to bulk out my collection and build something in near enough the perfect colour scheme.

Sure, this is a problem if kiddo wants to build Star Wars. That takes a few sets of Star Wars to gather enough grey, I am guessing this desire to build in the "right" colours comes from wanting to match you, which is sweet. Looks like it is time to start considering what sets to buy so he can MOC how he wishes 

[MAB]

7 hours ago, alois said:

I'm currently helping my eight year old son sorting out his Lego. It's way too large a task for him, which brings me to thinking that Lego has listened too much to afols in the last fifteen years, making too many parts in too many colours. For a boy with a limited collection of Lego the possibilities for play are seriously limited, now that he's old enough not wanting to build Rainbow Warriors anymore. When I was his age, I had bricks mostly in white and red, and yellow, blue and black. I could build a decent house in those colours. With the same quantity of bricks my son can't, because the same bricks now have thirty different colours. Same goes for parts variety.

It's no wonder therefore that children only build sets nowadays and don't make the step to building their own creations. It's become too complicated for them.

Why does he need a sorted collection? A sorted collection is great for someone (like an AFOL) that has a large collection and knows what they want to build, plans in advance and knows what parts they have in their storage and what parts they are likely to use for a particular function and also is willing to replace the parts in the correct places once they are done. Whereas a kid should be allowed to play, free from the constraints of a well sorted collection. Maybe sort into regular bricks, plates and tiles, modified bricks, wheels, car parts, minifigures, or whatever based on what the kid has / regularly builds but don't worry about colour. Such simple sorting is easy enough to let a kid return parts when they are done and they can have fun building and explore parts, rather than having to have an encyclopedic knowledge of what bricks are available and sticking to a cataloguing structure.

As to the colour issue, either be happy with using lots of shades of the base colour, go full-on BOLOCS (built of lots of colours) or buy bricks in one colour only on bricklink, like the old architecture kits. Many kids really don't care about having all the same colour, but if they do then instead of a set, buy them bulk bricks in a single colour (just make sure they like that colour).

 

[Yoggington]

On 10/16/2023 at 3:39 PM, MAB said:

go full-on BOLOCS (built of lots of colours)

 

Holy hell, I've never heard this one.

As an Irishman I'll have to stick with calling it rainbow-building in front of the nephews at least. Couldn't be telling them to build some bollocks.

[alois]

When I was eight years old I needn't have my collection sorted. He does because of the too large variety of bricks he's got. Which I didn't give him, but his uncle, grandparents, friends and so on. All where sets for his age category resulting in too many different bricks. Which are used by set designers because they can.

I'm glad I've been able to give you are a true  unpopular opinion.

[LegendaryArticuno]

Minifigs makes or breaks a set.

Went from being moderately hyped for Avenger's Tower to completely disinterested after the minifig lineup reveal.

[Natant16]

On 10/18/2023 at 10:15 AM, alois said:

When I was eight years old I needn't have my collection sorted. He does because of the too large variety of bricks he's got. Which I didn't give him, but his uncle, grandparents, friends and so on. All where sets for his age category resulting in too many different bricks. Which are used by set designers because they can.

I'm glad I've been able to give you are a true  unpopular opinion.

As an AFOL who's only recently started sorting and going back through his childhood collection from the 2010s, I've run into the same problem, most of the pieces are specialized, and there's not a lot of basic parts to just build whatever, and what there is is spread across too many colors to get much use out of.

[Vindicare]

On 10/16/2023 at 12:10 AM, alois said:

I'm currently helping my eight year old son sorting out his Lego. It's way too large a task for him, which brings me to thinking that Lego has listened too much to afols in the last fifteen years, making too many parts in too many colours. For a boy with a limited collection of Lego the possibilities for play are seriously limited, now that he's old enough not wanting to build Rainbow Warriors anymore. When I was his age, I had bricks mostly in white and red, and yellow, blue and black. I could build a decent house in those colours. With the same quantity of bricks my son can't, because the same bricks now have thirty different colours. Same goes for parts variety.

It's no wonder therefore that children only build sets nowadays and don't make the step to building their own creations. It's become too complicated for them.

I agree & disagree. I agree with you on the color part...I’m not sure why we need three shades of azure(along with all the other shades of blue we also have. I’ve only started MOCing & I still keep my set parts together, in most cases so the wide array of parts doesn’t bother me even if I do find it a bit unnecessary. 

Where I disagree(although this was later addressed) is you just have to get him certain sets to fill out parts he may use. Classic boxes have quite a variety of parts in all kinds of price ranges. 

[SpacePolice89]

On 10/16/2023 at 10:10 AM, alois said:

I'm currently helping my eight year old son sorting out his Lego. It's way too large a task for him, which brings me to thinking that Lego has listened too much to afols in the last fifteen years, making too many parts in too many colours. For a boy with a limited collection of Lego the possibilities for play are seriously limited, now that he's old enough not wanting to build Rainbow Warriors anymore. When I was his age, I had bricks mostly in white and red, and yellow, blue and black. I could build a decent house in those colours. With the same quantity of bricks my son can't, because the same bricks now have thirty different colours. Same goes for parts variety.

It's no wonder therefore that children only build sets nowadays and don't make the step to building their own creations. It's become too complicated for them.

I agree that there are too many colors. They should have stuck with the colors they had in the mid to late 90s.

[Lyichir]

2 hours ago, SpacePolice89 said:

I agree that there are too many colors. They should have stuck with the colors they had in the mid to late 90s.

I feel like there were some pretty significant gaps in the palette back then, and many of the colors they did have weren't particularly harmonious with others. I also feel like the colors we get today get much more even use than colors in the late 90s, when there were far more obscure colors with scarcely enough part variety to use effectively. Say what you will about the various azures and lavenders in modern sets, but they've been used frequently enough and in enough variety to make MOCing in them practical, which is much more than you can say for Medium Red, Light Orange Brown, or Medium Yellowish Green.

[Alexandrina]

47 minutes ago, Lyichir said:

Say what you will about the various azures and lavenders in modern sets, but they've been used frequently enough and in enough variety to make MOCing in them practical, which is much more than you can say for Medium Red, Light Orange Brown, or Medium Yellowish Green.

Earth Orange (or Light Orange Brown as you've called it) is I think a weird one because it was clearly only ever intended to be used in System sets for food/animals/hair. In its lifespan it only existed in two 'regular' parts, and both of those were introduced as part of the Tygurah creature build (their only subsequent appearances in the colour were in the Creator boxes from 2004/05 that had loads of weird parts and I'm convinced were Lego clearing out excess inventory after they contracted their range).

3 hours ago, SpacePolice89 said:

I agree that there are too many colors. They should have stuck with the colors they had in the mid to late 90s.

On the contrary, I think the palette is still too small. Lego buying in 2023 is a different proposition to Lego buying in the 1990s - we're no longer limited to standard sets and a handful of service packs. Instead, there are Lego stores all over the world with Pick a Brick walls, and Lego's very own website makes it trivial to order pretty much any currently-produced part in whatever quantity you need. Young kids might well not have enough bricks to make monochromatic creations in obscure colours (for what it's worth, I don't think there's been any drop in the amount of easily-available bricks in the 'core colours' that can be attributed to an expanded palette rather than Lego's design philosophies preferring more detailed builds rather than the blocky constructs of yesteryear) but young kids generally aren't fussy about colour. I know I've seen far more crazy rainbow warplanes and technicolour pyramids in the creations of both my friends when I was young, and relatives in recent years, than I've ever seen colour-cohesive builds by KFOLs.

When it comes to adults, though, I don't think there's much cause for complaint, specifically because it's so easy to order a large amount of bricks in whatever colour we need. Currently, you can buy 1x2 bricks in 42 different colours, 2x4 bricks in 33 different colours, 1x4 bricks in 40 different colours, 1x2 plates in 45 different colours, etc. - in short, the majority of the solid colour palette is easily available in the standard bricks. (Sidenote: I can get on board with the notion that every colour should be available in at least the standard bricks and plates, on Pick a Brick if not in sets)

This is ideal. You the consumer can buy a set if you like the build, or you can buy bricks if you just want bricks. (Or both; I buy a lot of sets for the variety of parts and exposure to techniques I hadn't considered, then supplement this with Pick a Brick for the parts I need in great plenty.) Except now, the sets look a lot better than they did in the past, because the colours are available to make them look good - for the most part. Unfortunately there are still gaps, some of which were previously occupied. We don't have a dark yellow, or a light orange, or any muted red/pink/orange equivalent to sand blue and sand green. I'd much rather see the colour palette expanded to fill these gaps, rather than contracting at the expense of some of the colours we're already enjoying - especially since you're going to be hard-pushed to find any sort of consensus as to which current colours are the most dispensible.

[Aanchir]

3 hours ago, Lyichir said:

I feel like there were some pretty significant gaps in the palette back then, and many of the colors they did have weren't particularly harmonious with others. I also feel like the colors we get today get much more even use than colors in the late 90s, when there were far more obscure colors with scarcely enough part variety to use effectively. Say what you will about the various azures and lavenders in modern sets, but they've been used frequently enough and in enough variety to make MOCing in them practical, which is much more than you can say for Medium Red, Light Orange Brown, or Medium Yellowish Green. 

Yeah. Just for comparison's sake, in 1998, there were still only like two shades that I might describe as "purple": Bright Violet and Light Bluish Violet. Prior to 1997 the latter was the ONLY shade of purple — and it was so pale and so exceedingly scarce that it was hard to coordinate with anything.

Also as of 1998, there were four shades of blue, three shades of bluish green, four shades of green, three shades of yellowish green… I hardly think that's any better than the situation with colors within that range today, especially considering that this didn't include any of the darker shades and more muted tones beloved by AFOLs today (Sand Blue, Earth Blue, Sand Green, Earth Green, Olive Green, etc)!

But roll the color palette back even just one year earlier, and you lose several beloved staple colors like Bright Orange, Bright Yellowish Green, and Bright Bluish Green!
 

Obviously, I have no desire to go back to the color palette of the early to mid 2000s (the company's crisis years), which was so bloated with so many rarely-used colors that I and many other LEGO fans didn't even realize that several of them EXISTED. But part of why that explosion in colors even occurred was that LEGO clumsily went overboard in their response to how deeply inadequate the range of brick colors in the 90s had been.

[Classic_Spaceman]

There are still quite noticeable gaps in the colour palette; only in 2022 did we get Medium Tan (a skin tone between Light Nougat and Nougat), and we are still missing the return of Very Light Bluish Grey, which I want for Star Wars sets (ships like X-wings and Snowspeeders are a shade between LEGO’s White and Light Bley). 
 

[Yperio_Bricks]

I would like to get a medium grey between DBG and LBG, as the difference between these two is quite big.

 

 

Edited October 28, 2023 by Yperio_Bricks

[MAB]

On 10/28/2023 at 5:23 PM, Alexandrina said:

On the contrary, I think the palette is still too small.

I'm the same. Personally, I think we now have enough blues and purples when it comes to bricks, but I'd like to see an equivalent to medium blue in green, red, grey and brown (the new medium brown would be fine). For me, so long as the colour has a decent coverage of 1xX bricks and plates, typically 1x1, 1x2 and 1x4 and some with stud(s) on the side then they become useful. Getting 1x3, 1x6 and 1x8 is also nice but not essential, same for bricks with clips, etc. One more green, grey and brown would be enough for me but shades of red in particular seem to be under-represented.

[Erik Leppen]

On 10/29/2023 at 12:19 AM, Yperio_Bricks said:

I would like to get a medium grey between DBG and LBG, as the difference between these two is quite big.

I have found that Sand Blue could play a role here.

[Alexandrina]

On 10/28/2023 at 8:21 PM, Aanchir said:

Obviously, I have no desire to go back to the color palette of the early to mid 2000s (the company's crisis years), which was so bloated with so many rarely-used colors that I and many other LEGO fans didn't even realize that several of them EXISTED. But part of why that explosion in colors even occurred was that LEGO clumsily went overboard in their response to how deeply inadequate the range of brick colors in the 90s had been.

Honestly I maintain that the issue in this period wasn't the range of colours at all - a lot of them (Blue-Violet, Sand Red, Medium Green, etc.) would still be useful shades today. The real issue was the insane amount of separation - so many colours pretty much only existed in Belville sets, or in Duplo sets, or in baseplates, and this meant most colours were overlooked by fans because they were functionally useless. Light Green, for example, is a lovely shade, but if you take away baseplates, Duplo bricks, Scala/Belville accessories and minifigure books, you're left with exactly three system parts which the colour even existed in. Lego's colour palette shouldn't be limited based on the idea that it was too bloated in the 2000s; they just need to commit to actually producing normal bricks in whatever colours they release, and there's no issues.

[Lyichir]

2 hours ago, Alexandrina said:

Honestly I maintain that the issue in this period wasn't the range of colours at all - a lot of them (Blue-Violet, Sand Red, Medium Green, etc.) would still be useful shades today. The real issue was the insane amount of separation - so many colours pretty much only existed in Belville sets, or in Duplo sets, or in baseplates, and this meant most colours were overlooked by fans because they were functionally useless. Light Green, for example, is a lovely shade, but if you take away baseplates, Duplo bricks, Scala/Belville accessories and minifigure books, you're left with exactly three system parts which the colour even existed in. Lego's colour palette shouldn't be limited based on the idea that it was too bloated in the 2000s; they just need to commit to actually producing normal bricks in whatever colours they release, and there's no issues.

While I agree that making 2000s colors more widespread and less theme-restricted would go a long way, I think it's fair to say that there were many redundancies as a result of that which could be hard to reconcile if all those colors were made more widespread. As a Bionicle fan, for example, a color like Trans. Neon Yellow would only really be preferable over classic Trans. Yellow in certain niche applications. Similarly, the metallic versions of some classic colors used for the Rahkshi sets were so similar to their non-metallic counterparts that many people might not even realize they're distinct colors at all.

I think one issue with having certain colors that are too similar to one another is that to somebody who's not aware that they are two different colors for different applications, it'd be possible to mistake them for discoloration or a quality defect. I feel like the retirement of certain colors may be related to this issue, such as the end of very light bluish grey (an "off-white" color that was very neat but could lead to frustration/disappointment if somebody got a set expecting it to be standard white), the retirement of trans medium blue (used in similar contexts to trans light blue but with a cooler, glassier, more fluorescent color), and possibly the recent retirement of trans neon orange (which was distinct from trans orange but was used for a lot of similar applications such as fire effects, lights, and windscreens).

[Trekkie99]

6 hours ago, Alexandrina said:

Honestly I maintain that the issue in this period wasn't the range of colours at all - a lot of them (Blue-Violet, Sand Red, Medium Green, etc.) would still be useful shades today. The real issue was the insane amount of separation - so many colours pretty much only existed in Belville sets, or in Duplo sets, or in baseplates, and this meant most colours were overlooked by fans because they were functionally useless. Light Green, for example, is a lovely shade, but if you take away baseplates, Duplo bricks, Scala/Belville accessories and minifigure books, you're left with exactly three system parts which the colour even existed in. Lego's colour palette shouldn't be limited based on the idea that it was too bloated in the 2000s; they just need to commit to actually producing normal bricks in whatever colours they release, and there's no issues.

This was probably the issue at its core.

[Alexandrina]

7 hours ago, Lyichir said:

As a Bionicle fan, for example, a color like Trans. Neon Yellow would only really be preferable over classic Trans. Yellow in certain niche applications. Similarly, the metallic versions of some classic colors used for the Rahkshi sets were so similar to their non-metallic counterparts that many people might not even realize they're distinct colors at all.

Honestly, I was never into Bionicle so I never even remember those colours exist - they're just completely out of my experience in Lego! I think a lot more fondly on the brighter colours/more distinct variants of colours which filled the system/Belville themes.

The weirdest one to me is the loss of Sand Red, almost immediately after it was introduced. It was even used in the big bucks themes like Star Wars and Harry Potter during its limited life, and had service packs of basic bricks released, but didn't last even while Sand Blue and Sand Green prospered.

[LegendaryArticuno]

Chinese/Lunar New Year is lowkey one of Lego's best designed theme at reasonable prices.

Please have whoever is designing Lunar New Year switch to Marvel Super Heroes.

[The Island Chronicles]

On another note, according to the 2024 City page, this seems to be a rather unpopular opinion. But 2021 and 2022 were two of City's best years. We got all sorts of vehicles and buildings including two town planning sets. 

[Lyichir]

4 minutes ago, LegendaryArticuno said:

Chinese/Lunar New Year is lowkey one of Lego's best designed theme at reasonable prices.

Please have whoever is designing Lunar New Year switch to Marvel Super Heroes.

I think you might be mistaking cause and effect a bit. The Lunar New Year sets are cheaper and better-designed compared to many licensed themes like Marvel in part BECAUSE they are non-licensed themes with more open-ended design prompts, more emphasis on strong set designs over recognizable characters, no pressure to stick close to pre-existing designs (including prerelease concepts that may not reflect final movie content), no external licensing fees that have to be factored into set prices... the list goes on and on.

There's a reason why for many years now I've favored non-licensed themes over licensed ones—the open-ended, self-directed nature of non-licensed themes compared to licensed themes like Marvel and Star Wars is a big part of why designers for those sorts of themes can put out some of Lego's best work.