Updated rules on LEGO Ideas

You forgot to mention the shot clock and change to the distance of the 3-point line.

Guess this isn't really going to mean much if so many amazing builds with great potential keep getting ignored by Lego...

I want more small and cheap sets, not bigger and more expensive!

I suspect the “minifig to part” ratio will lead to some unnecessarily large builds just to get more minifigs

That bit about the minifigure to part ratio seems, interestikg.

I was excited when it was announced they were making changes but these are pretty mild.

I would like to see more smaller models but some of the Ideas sets released already crossed 3,000 parts anyways so the change to 5,000 makes sense I suppose.

I thought the minifig limit might have done more to dissuade sets where it’s clearly just an excuse to get characters but that’s still pretty generous

The minifig-to-part ratio and minimum part quantity are both very welcome additions, at least for licensed projects - neatly sidesteps projects that exist mainly to just pump out minifigs for a Recognisable Thing™ rather than being actual LEGO set ideas first and foremost.

Maximum element count being raised is interesting too, though I can't see it having too much impact considering the design teams spruce up the actual end result sets enough for it to vary there.

UP THE VOTE COUNT. 10K TOO LOW

I think the biggest change needed is the vote count threshold. Lego Ideas has ballooned in popularity since the cuusoo days, and the 10k vote threshold hasn't budged an inch since then. A lot of ideas that would never make it back then now get into the 10k club, only to hit a brick wall during the review period, disappointing many. Reducing the number of ideas that make it into each review period would help minimize that feels-bad moment. Start with an even doubling to 20k and see how that changes things. I believe it would be much safer to make a change like this in steps than to drop a huge paradigm shift and then have to walk it back.

@Ridgeheart said:
"Okay - but let's up the vote-count to an even 50 million. If you can't get the entire population of Uganda on board with your idea, then maybe it was just a bad idea to begin with."

I had a similar idea except every project only requires a single vote from me, personally.

@KumataJDG said:
" @Ridgeheart said:
"Okay - but let's up the vote-count to an even 50 million. If you can't get the entire population of Uganda on board with your idea, then maybe it was just a bad idea to begin with."

I had a similar idea except every project only requires a single vote from me, personally."

Even better.

I don’t bother voting as getting selected doesn’t mean a set will be released.

I think a submission that doesn’t meet one or more of their rules should be pulled from the process as early as possible. The rules shouldn’t change once a submission has been made, so a new rule or rule change shouldn’t affect in progress submissions.

Don’t really care either way on any of this though. If I see a released Ideas set that I like I buy it. I don’t follow any sets through the process to avoid disappointment.

What Ideas really needs is to change the number of supporters required. If they take it from 10K to 15K, then it would narrow down a lot of the "fluff" that AFOL's don't actually want and allow only the most desired Ideas submissions to become eligible for review.

Neither of those first two changes are going to be good in practice. What Ideas needs is higher support required, not yet more potential for someone's random giant MOC to clog the reviews up. And what's wrong with small $10 set ideas!?

@Robot99 said:
"Neither of those first two changes are going to be good in practice. What Ideas needs is higher support required, not yet more potential for someone's random giant MOC to clog the reviews up. And what's wrong with small $10 set ideas!?"

How do you spell "profit"? - L-E-G-O

a minifigure to element ratio guide is going to be the next "price per piece" when it comes to arguments on expensive Lego sets.

so the new Jabbas Sail Barge has
3942pcs / 11 minifigures = 358pcs per minifigure????

someone needs to do the actual nerd math on if that's a good ratio.

Already said one the speculation thread that this was a bad idea. Now with the additional elements its even worse. Clearly its been done with profit motivations rather then improving submissions.

As mentioned above, they really should have upped the needed vote count to at least double, but I also thing that we needed bracketed divisions of parts counts to encourage more smaller and affordable builds.

I like the sound of the minifig-to-element ratio. I dislike the submissions that are basically "OK HERE'S EVERY CHARACTER FROM DOCTOR ZHIVAGO PLUS A SMALL TRAIN BUILD." And it's called like, "The Bleak World of Boris Pasternak" and it's rendered entirely digitally and it uses like 20 unique minifig elements.

Ok actually I have an Ideas submission...

@Robot99 said:
"Neither of those first two changes are going to be good in practice. What Ideas needs is higher support required, not yet more potential for someone's random giant MOC to clog the reviews up. And what's wrong with small $10 set ideas!?"

If people are voting for "random giant mocs", that means that they want "random giant mocs". That's the whole point of the website!

@b2_O said:
"If people are voting for "random giant mocs", that means that they want "random giant mocs". That's the whole point of the website!"
They aren't voting because they WANT it though, they're voting because they think it looks cool. There's so many random things that make it to the review "because they looked cool" (and would never actually make for a good product) that the entire system has become meaningless - 30-50 sets make it to review each time now, yet only one or two get approved. It's at a point now where the Ideas team might as well just select sets to be made without waiting for any votes to roll in.

Once upon a time, when Ideas was still new and less popular, reviews used to only contain like 5 items at a time, yet it was the same "one or two sets approved" ratio it is nowadays. It was actually meaningful to support an idea, because there was a good chance it was going to be made real if it gained enough support. That has not been the case anymore for a few years now.

@b2_O said:
"If people are voting for "random giant mocs", that means that they want "random giant mocs". That's the whole point of the website!"

And in that you're kinda missing the point that people are voting for the 'random giant moc' because they think its cool, not because they want to buy it.

The point of Ideas was to develope sets and properties that fans actually wanted to buy and own that weren't already made. Not 'Lets see who can make the coolest set!' which is what its become, and all upping the part count will encourage.

edit: @Robot99 Funny we both post essentially the same thing at the same time.

@GrizBe said:
"edit: Robot99 Funny we both post essentially the same thing at the same time."
We even both used the same "they think it looks cool" phraseology lmao

@b2_O said:
"Aye, I getcha, although I don't really see why people will vote for sets that they have no intent of purchasing..."
People use the site now in the way you might use Likes on Youtube or Upvotes on Reddit. They aren't supporting it because they intend to buy it, they just think that the creator shared a neat build. Ideas is essentially a "show off your MOC" site now that Lego sometimes picks out products to be made from on a whim.

Okay, so the minifigure guideline starts at 3 for 400, with another 1 per 200 until you hit 1000 pc, then it shifts to 1 per 500, to the maximum of 14 minifigures in a 4501-5000 piece set. That is more generous than I would think of yet hopefully it'll thin out the gratuitous sitcom submissions we used to go through. Even so, I think in most cases a successful licensed idea doesn't need more than 8 minifigs, which would be the 1501-2000 range, and most could make do with six, which is the 801-1000 range. They did say it would be flexible on a case by case basis and exceptions can be made within the context of accurately depicting a specific scene.

On one hand I want to be frustrated at Lego for cheaping out on minifigures with the guidelines, but honestly they're not that bad unless you reach those absurd price points, especially when Lego themselves doesn't follow this pattern at all (the amount of $100+ LSW sets I can list with 1-4 minifigures...) so it's a wash, though I agree that I'll see it as ammo to use in discussions of non-Ideas sets.

Anyone else remember the Star Wars army bucket submissions back in the day?

My issue with restricting the proportion of minifigures is that I can easily see it having the opposite extreme effect of cutting down on important characters in a licensed set that will almost certainly be a one-off partnership--i.e., The Office set with its full cast would probably cut out several characters who weren't Michael, Dwight, Jim and Pam under these new rules. I can see a lot of future licensed projects feeling like they have notable absences in the cast, and these absences have little to no hope of being filled in the future since almost every Ideas license is a single-set agreement.

@Robot99 said:
" @b2_O said:
"If people are voting for "random giant mocs", that means that they want "random giant mocs". That's the whole point of the website!"
They aren't voting because they WANT it though, they're voting because they think it looks cool. There's so many random things that make it to the review "because they looked cool" (and would never actually make for a good product) that the entire system has become meaningless - 30-50 sets make it to review each time now, yet only one or two get approved. It's at a point now where the Ideas team might as well just select sets to be made without waiting for any votes to roll in.

Once upon a time, when Ideas was still new and less popular, reviews used to only contain like 5 items at a time, yet it was the same "one or two sets approved" ratio it is nowadays. It was actually meaningful to support an idea, because there was a good chance it was going to be made real if it gained enough support. That has not been the case anymore for a few years now."

Yeah, a lot of people seem to ignore this when it comes to votes. I suspect a very small percentage of people voting on a set are actually wanting, or willing, to buy it. It’s become a design contest and less of a viable set contest. This is why so many big, pretty, yet poor sets make it to the review stages. Sure, it’s sad when a design you like didn’t get approved, but were you really going to buy that Thunderbirds vehicle that you know would cost $200 +?

I was SO going to buy that Thunderbirds vehicle! It would have been a day one purchase for me.

Oh joy! This would have disqualified 21339 BTS Dynamite, currently warming the shelves at 30%–45% off. Ordinarily I would not care about the flop of a Lego set which was nothing but a minifig pack of a boy band. But this particular one came to affect me personally when I received it for free. Alas, its potential resale value is nil, and it is taking up valuable space. Better Lego sets in general mean I am less likely to get saddled with Lego I don't want.

I almost want to have the vote count go down. I don't know where folks get this idea that raising it from 10k would reduce the disappointment. It would just shift the disappointment to the front of the process, rather than right at the end. It would also turn Ideas into even more of a popularity contest rather than gaining genuine support for genuine set concepts. Taylor Swift, BTS, whatever other hot new thing can *definitely* do 20k if they can do 10k. Same goes for all the bloated, max-piece-count digital builds that get votes because they look cool, not because they'd be good set ideas. So we don't reduce any of the issues, and it would just make it harder for actual good projects to get through.

Somebody said that there's more fluff getting through, more things hitting 10k that don't have a shot at approval. What's the issue with fluff hitting 10k? Is that a problem to be solved, or can we not just wade around the things that clearly can't/won't make it? What's the point of having a voting threshold, if you only want successful projects to hit it?

Ideas has picked 4 projects some rounds. They've picked 0 projects some rounds. They frequently postpone decisions on things that could be up in the air. They will pick the sets that have a shot, no matter what the batch size is. I don't think you can make the case that the 'number of projects that should be made into sets' is directly related to the 'number of projects in a review period.' The fact that 40-50 things are in a batch doesn't automatically mean that 4-5 of them should be made.

@fakespacesquid said:
"I almost want to have the vote count go down. I don't know where folks get this idea that raising it from 10k would reduce the disappointment. It would just shift the disappointment to the front of the process, rather than right at the end. It would also turn Ideas into even more of a popularity contest rather than gaining genuine support for genuine set concepts. Taylor Swift, BTS, whatever other hot new thing can *definitely* do 20k if they can do 10k. Same goes for all the bloated, max-piece-count digital builds that get votes because they look cool, not because they'd be good set ideas."

A good compromise would be to have sliding scales. Require 100,000 votes for anything licensed, 30,000 for non-licensed over a certain piece count, and keep 10,000 for everything else.

Anything to prevent me from owning the next Adventure Time and BTS Dynamite—both of which I have, neither of which I wanted or bought.

Strike that. I'm feeling dyspeptic looking at all 533 cubic inches of this boy band. Anything licensed should have a 1,000,000-vote threshold.

Definitely feel the vote count needs to be increased like some have been saying. Or at least a change to the voting system so that 50 projects aren’t hitting the review in 5 milliseconds only for most of them to not get picked.

@AllenSmith said:
"A good compromise would be to have sliding scales. Require 100,000 votes for anything licensed, 30,000 for non-licensed over a certain piece count, and keep 10,000 for everything else."

This doesn’t seem like a bad idea honestly. I wonder if 2 seperate review types (Non-IP and IPs) could also be a solution?

I was hoping they'd add a rule saying they would not accept any more Taylor Swift submissions.

Nothing against Taylor Swift fans, generally, but maybe something against Taylor Swift fans who all submit the same basic thing to Lego Ideas, specifically.

I'm really disappointed at the number of people calling for an increase to the vote count. I do agree the number of projects hitting review is getting absurd, but if you look at trends I don't think the vote threshold is part of it.

Just pulling up the first review results of 2024, there are multiple users with multiple projects at 10K in one review, and many names I recognize from past reviews.

It really seems once you hit a critical mass of followers, getting to 10K is just much much easier.

Not trying to say those people's models are bad, but I do think many of those models if submitted by a random person would not hit 10K.

To solve this they should limit users to one project at a time, only allowing another once the user's current project is archived, rejected, or retired. This would ALSO help declutter Ideas and force users to focus on putting up their single best projects.

An increase to 10K would be okay for licensed sets, or maybe up the requirement by 1K for each time that user has hit 10K. However upping the threshold sitewide would just reduce the variety of projects that hit 10K and make it even more focused around projects from the same users and IP based sets.

@AllenSmith said:
" @fakespacesquid said:
"I almost want to have the vote count go down. I don't know where folks get this idea that raising it from 10k would reduce the disappointment. It would just shift the disappointment to the front of the process, rather than right at the end. It would also turn Ideas into even more of a popularity contest rather than gaining genuine support for genuine set concepts. Taylor Swift, BTS, whatever other hot new thing can *definitely* do 20k if they can do 10k. Same goes for all the bloated, max-piece-count digital builds that get votes because they look cool, not because they'd be good set ideas."

A good compromise would be to have sliding scales. Require 100,000 votes for anything licensed, 30,000 for non-licensed over a certain piece count, and keep 10,000 for everything else.

Anything to prevent me from owning the next Adventure Time and BTS Dynamite—both of which I have, neither of which I wanted or bought.

Strike that. I'm feeling dyspeptic looking at all 533 cubic inches of this boy band. Anything licensed should have a 1,000,000-vote threshold."

If one does not like a set one can either get rid of said set or part said set out and use the parts for other things. I honestly don't understand why someone would complain about getting free LEGO.