Last Friday, Oliver had already announced it in New LEGO Ideas No. 44, now it’s official: LEGO Ideas is raising the part limit for fan designs to 5,000 elements and introducing a few other innovations. The changes, communicated yesterday as a post on the LEGO Ideas Blog, will take effect immediately. We summarize the essential points for you in German.
Let’s start with what’s happening not has changed: 10,000 supporters still have to be reached in order for a design to become part of the LEGO Ideas Review and therefore have a chance of being published as an official set. The raising of this threshold, which is repeatedly discussed among fans and supported by many, in order to reduce the sometimes confusing multitude of designs in the reviews and at the same time increase the chance of each of these designs being implemented, is a topic that the LEGO Ideas team at least not yet addressed.
Instead, three changes were introduced, each of which sets new limits for the design and thus the creativity of the fan designers, at least that’s what it reads Original messageto steer them into “more regulated channels” or to give them a little more leeway and more security in their designs.
New limit of 5,000 pieces
While previously submissions to LEGO Ideas were not supposed to contain more than 3,000 elements, this limit has now been increased to 5,000. The Ideas team justifies this by saying that it could sometimes have been problematic for the fan designers to suddenly realize, when fine-tuning the model and especially its decoration, that the threshold of 3,000 elements was exceeded. The aim is to give designers greater creative freedom with the new limit so that they can implement the absolute best version of their vision.
It is not explained why the above-mentioned problem should not also occur in models that are designed for around 5,000 parts. Some users also note in the comments under the post that a smaller number of parts sometimes challenges creativity more and therefore leads to better designs. There is also a risk that smaller designs will now have an even harder time being noticed on social media, etc. compared to the larger models. Other users, however, welcome the change because the old limit actually limited them in the past.
New minimum quantity of 200 pieces
The second change to the Ideas rules starts “at the other end”, so to speak, because the minimum number of parts has also been increased or set for the first time. Every new draft must now contain at least 200 parts. LEGO argues as follows (translation by StoneWars):
Our aim is to push the boundaries of creativity and uniqueness of each model and ensure our community receives the best submissions to support.
Important: All changes, including the minimum number of parts, only apply to new designs from the time they are announced. Designs that have already been submitted and activated at Ideas are therefore not affected and will still be treated according to the old rules, i.e. they may have fewer than 200 parts. Conversely, however, this also means that, for example, drafts that were previously rejected because there were too many parts will now not be automatically activated – these would then have to be resubmitted if you wanted to try again.
Guide to the number of minifigures included
The third change calls LEGO Ideas a guide, not a hard-and-fast rule. It’s about the “recommended” number of minifigures depending on the number of parts of a design, which the team has visualized in the form of the following table:
Although this is not explicitly formulated this way anywhere, logically the minifigure numbers are of course to be understood as upper limits – after all, you are not obliged to include the corresponding number of minifigures in every design. However, the team reserves the right to allow justified exceptions in individual cases, i.e. to exceed the specified numbers. Translated it says:
Each submission will be evaluated in its own context, meaning if there is a compelling or narrative reason for including these minifigures, approval will be at our discretion. This is a guide and is not intended to prevent builders from including all the minifigures necessary to accurately recreate a scene, nor to limit their imagination.
The advantage of the change for the fan designers is that for the first time ever there is an official “thumb value” for how many minifigures LEGO will most likely allow in a design, so that you can use that as a guide when creating. Previously, there was a risk of unknowingly exceeding the limits and the submission would be rejected outright.
Assessment and conclusion
It remains exciting to see whether the higher part limit will automatically lead to a trend towards ever larger (and therefore more expensive) LEGO Ideas sets. Even before the changes, some fans complained that they would like more small sets in this series. And in fact: as things stand today, the average price of the last 20 Ideas sets was around 161 euros, with only four sets costing less than 99.99 euros. The increase in the parts limit suggests that LEGO Ideas certainly welcomes this.
The new minimum volume of 200 pieces can be understood, somewhat less flowerily than in the report, to mean that from LEGO Ideas’ perspective, the vast majority of submissions under 200 pieces were so bad in the past that they had no chance of getting 10,000 supporters (and thus represented a wasted effort for the moderator team). This assessment is entirely understandable. The minimum scope and, above all, the last change, a guideline for how many minifigures LEGO generally finds acceptable, are therefore to be unreservedly welcomed in my opinion.
In short: The last two changes make Ideas better for designers and users, but the higher part limit can certainly be viewed critically. We’ll definitely see a lot of great, impressive MOCs on Ideas in the future that wouldn’t have been possible with 3,000 pieces – but do we really need (more) larger sets at LEGO?
What do you think about the innovations at LEGO Ideas? Do the changes make sense or are you critical of them? What do you think the impact of the new parts limit will be? Is it really, as some users fear, becoming increasingly difficult for small designs to assert themselves (in the public eye)? Feel free to discuss this in the comments.
