Hi

i am wondering why sets always been compared to each other or their value is measured in price per piece. I know this is a value can be seen on most of Legos sets.

Sets with many pieces and a good price per piece ratio (ppp) have mostly VERY small pieces. Examples? The new Technic crane, ~ 1000 pins, Robie House, ~700 1x2 plates, and Winter Village sets in general.

Just compare the volume/weight of pieces you will get with the new Sydney Opera houes. Many large pieces.

Do not get me wrong, i like and need the small ones, but large pieces are harder and more cost intensive to produce. They take much more space in the molding machine plus they ned more ABS. Its not the number of pieces that makes it valuable.

I do not have significant data but my feeling says there are many 100bucks/€$£/republican credits sets that have a similar weight althought they do not have a similar parts count.

The ppp value only makes sense if that is Legos way to value a set. It does not matter if there are 500 more parts in it if they are only Technic pins or 1x1 round plates.

What do you think?

Dino

Edited July 11, 201311 yr by Darth Dino

Yes the value if large and small parts are different, but the price per piece idea is more of a general idea. It's not really intended to be an exact measurement of the value of each part. Just a vague estimate of how much you're paying for. It's still a good way to value sets, determining if its overpriced or not.

To me, the price per piece (ppp) only gives an indication. I've noticed most technic sets have a low ppp (supercar 8070 for example, even with power functions!), whereas small licensed sets have a high ppp (polybags and battle packs for example). Minifigs are counted as pieces, but it probably costs more to produce them, and I guess it is the same for printed parts. Licensing a set also costs.

Once you fix the theme --- for example "creator", where there is no minifig (well, up to now) and no very low-price technic pins, and almost no printed pieces--- then you may compare ppp... This may then eventually make sense, especially because some little pieces (1x1 tiles for example) are curiously expensive on Bricklink.

I don't think that Lego indicates the ppp or promotes it in any way. Brickset does, because Brickset tries to help people and proposes this quantitative, but somehow misleading, measurement. It is also very easy to compute, which may explain its popularity.

About weight, Brickset also indicates the weight of a set (unfortunately, this includes cardbox and instructions I think, but both matter and both grow with the total bricks weight, so with the size of the set). So technically, one can compute or estimate price per gram. I've done that for some LotR first wave sets, and curiously, it was giving the same indication as ppp, which was strange...

As a conclusion, and as a collector and/or a MOCer, I do not pay attention to ppp when deciding to buy a set; I do not think a set with a low ppp is a good deal as I always search for special pieces that appear in a few sets.

Edited July 11, 201311 yr by Ambroise

Price per piece is probably used because it is easy to count, with the piece count being either on the box or computed from an inventory, and the price clearly visible in the store, the price per piece is estimated on a whim. The price per kilogram can only be guessed, or measured with a scale.

Also, 10 grams of tiny pieces is worth more than 10 grams of large pieces, in my opinion.

If one wants to be relaly precise, one should create a program that takes a set's inventory, asks Bricklink for all the prices of all pieces in the inventory, and computes the value that way. Then we have an interesting measure.

If one wants to be relaly precise, one should create a program that takes a set's inventory, asks Bricklink for all the prices of all pieces in the inventory, and computes the value that way. Then we have an interesting measure.

Bricklink already has this feature. Enter a set number and select 'part out' here.

Price per piece is probably used because it is easy to count, with the piece count being either on the box or computed from an inventory, and the price clearly visible in the store, the price per piece is estimated on a whim. The price per kilogram can only be guessed, or measured with a scale.

True. I see ppp as being also more intuitive factor than any other calculation. It's much easier to imagine a set with a given price of, say, 583 pieces than a set with a given price of, say, 871 grams.

And to give some scientific justification to ppp: weighing is a relative measuring method, i.e. comparing an unknown weight of an object to a known weight of another object, while counting gives an absolute and independent value in the end, only needing to define what is one single part. From this point of view ppp would be a more precise descriptor than ppw.

Hi

i undrstand why you all like the ppp value, but just have a look at the Robie House. I have read often that this is a parts pack and has a great value. It has a great value because it is a great source for dark red, but most of the many parts are very tiny.

In the past creator sets and city houses had a better bricks/plates ratio than today. Today my son can hardly build a MOC (with similar size) out of actual creator sets. There arejust few 1x4,6,8,10 bricks, but many small plates for detail.

I am aware that AFOLs like plates and detail, but again, it is hard to buid just simple things because there are so many detail releated small parts.

As contrast i would call the Sydney Opera (the creator expert) a parts pack while it has many plates AND bricks. Not mentioning the many slope bricks.

Dino

The reason price per piece is so frequently used is that generally speaking, as far as MOCing is concerned, more parts equals more opportunities. For instance, four 1x4 bricks can be put together in far more unique combinations than two 1x4 bricks. Larger parts do typically yield more unique combinations than smaller parts, due to having more connection points, but with that advantage comes a disadvantage: larger parts are rather ineffective at making detailed models without the assistance of a copious amount of smaller parts. This is one reason why AFOLs complain about large wall panels and other parts they consider examples of "juniorization" — they are more difficult to use to create unique models than smaller parts that take up a similar amount of space when combined.

Needless to say, price per piece is an abstraction of a set's real cost of production. But so is price per gram, to a great extent. Look at online Pick-A-Brick prices and you'll quickly see that their cost does not vary strictly according to size and weight. Printed parts are more costly than unprinted parts. Pre-assembled parts are more costly than single-piece ones. Complex molds are more costly than simple ones (as an example, headlight bricks cost two and a half times as much as regular 1x1 bricks, despite being lighter). Overall, what price per gram gives you is an estimate of the material cost and the shipping cost of a set, but there are so many other factors that define how costly production can be.

Really, the reason why people cling to price-per-piece is that for the end user, it is the most objective way of assessing a set's value in parts. A person buying a set generally doesn't care how much the set cost to produce, but rather how much use they will get out of the pieces and how much building goes into the final model. And for this purpose, price per gram is a poor measure: a two-kilogram model made of 1000 pieces would have the same apparent value by that measure as a two-kilogram block of ABS with no usable connection points. Even if AFOLs wanted a truly objective measure of a set's production cost (and I can't imagine why they would as far as their purchasing decisions are concerned), there is no such measure available to AFOLs, because a set's production cost depends on a number of esoteric factors which the end user has no way of knowing.

Edited July 17, 201311 yr by Aanchir