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Comment by bleepblop | Hacker News Reader

I have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set.

I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add insult to injury; I have noticed their quality control slipping over the years. For example: in the past 40 years or so, I might get a kit with a piece missing once a decade? Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing. As a long time lego enthusiast; they have been slowly losing my trust.

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How many sets do you buy per year, out of curiosity? I got into Lego during the pandemic and bought around 50 sets in the past three years. Over that sample, the number of missing pieces was precisely zero.

I go on some wild stints. But if I had to average it out; somewhere around 10-20 kits a year.

My experience is in fact the opposite. I usually buy the larger sets, and have nearly always had left over smaller pieces. It made me worried the first time it happened and I spent the time tracing back through the model only to find I didn't miss anything.

I wish I could say the same. The extra little guys is to be expected. I am talking about key pieces to the puzzle.

They do precise weighing of bags as a quality control measure. The tiny 1x1 type pieces are more likely to get missed by the weighing so they often add an extra of those pieces to offset a potential loss that might not get noticed when weighing them.

That is why you always get two helmet visors for example when you buy a speed champion. The machine is actually just designed to give you two, because that way if it breaks and misses one, you still have one that you need and it costs them almost nothing to do that. But a missing helmet visor is easy to get missed by the quality control scale. So if you ever buy a speed champion and only get one helmet visor, it is because you lost one or the machine broke. But that's why there's an extra. They do that by design. That's just one example. You see it with magic wands in Harry Potter sets, you always get two, and a lot of sets with 1x1 pieces will always have 1-2 extras just because they are cheap to add in and more likely to get missed in their QA process which weighs the bags.

Every tiny 1x1 piece always comes with an extra. That must be by design.

I think that’s calculated in their cost of doing business. Add one extra of each 1x1 probably eliminated most of the missing parts issue at a fraction of the cost.

> and have nearly always had left over smaller pieces

Almost every Lego set I've ever owned (going back 30+ years to when I used to get Lego) and now my son's Lego recently have all had at least one leftover piece.

you and bleepblop should probably just correspond more often

I've also always questioned this. I have purchased about 60 sets in the past 4 years. I have a friend who has purchased well over 100 (he runs a Lego YouTube channel - he spends > $6,000 a year on Lego by his estimation).

I have never had a missing piece. There have been two times when I thought I was missing a piece and then found it stuck in a bag or hidden under another piece. I've never had to write to Lego to get a replacement (which I've heard they are really easy to work with if it does happen).

Out of curiosity, I just texted my friend to get another sample from him and he said it happened to him one time, but also admitted his kids might have been to blame.

So when people claim that every other set they buy has missing pieces, I always feel like I am either the luckiest person to ever live, or maybe the pieces are there and certain people are just more likely to misplace or lose them in the building process.

Perhaps set size is a contributing factor? I've bought two sets over the last few years, and both of them have had a piece missing. One was 1969 pieces (no prizes for guessing which set that is!) and the other 1222 pieces.

Both occasions the pieces weren't structurally important, and were small decorative elements.

The Saturn V was a fun build :)

I have opened and built hundreds of lego sets over the years, and the only missing pieces I’ve ever had were in the Saturn V set. I think they had a QC issue on that set specifically.

I've put together probably 50 sets over the past 5-6 years. I pretty much only buy the largest sets they make, especially Technic. I doubt I have many sets under 1500 pieces.

I've yet to find a single missing piece so far. Many times we thought a piece would be missing, only to find it trying to escape somewhere. The plastic bags carry a pretty heavy static charge in dry winter conditions, and the tiny pieces love to stick inside those in the corners where they somehow turn damn near invisible.

To be honest the quality control is pretty unbelievable. If someone tells me they had 6 sets with missing pieces over the past 5 years my initial reaction would simply be to not believe them as it's so easy to misplace a piece during a 2,000+ piece week-long build. I've misplaced dozens to the point of having to order replacements from ebay or whatnot - only to find the pieces lurking around my house before the new parts even arrive. The joke of the household is you need to order a replacement part and then you'll find what you're missing a few hours later by complete accident.

I've found pieces in the strangest places. If you accidentally sit on one they will basically become one with your flesh, and I've found random pieces floating in the tub completely unexpectedly.

Knocking on wood my luck (and Legos QC) continues.

> If you accidentally sit on one they will basically become one with your flesh

But in the dark they become savage. Stand on one or even worse, kneel on one when trying to find the tv remote. I might have cried.

I have the exact same experience as you. I have build 50+ sets, 10 of them 1500+ piece sets and a few over 3000. I have never had a missing piece. I have had small pieces that was hiding or I dropped on the floor, but never missing. There is always some additional pieces in the set, and I assume it's because they err on the side of being sure.

I don't have children and I do all sorts of kits besides lego; with even smaller pieces. Either I have bad luck or I am careless. But you'd think with multiple decades under my belt I'd eventually find the "missing" pieces. When it's like a 4x12 left wing, or a 2x1 it starts to get suss.

The only time I ever had a large piece like that missing, it was pretty clear (on afterthought) that the box had been opened in the store before I bought it.

And I've had to return a set or two to Amazon because they'd clearly been opened and returned (and usually all the minifigs stripped out).

Understandable. I am pretty selective when it comes to a kit. Dare I say autistic? Box condition is a consideration, along with down to how I open them. It's noticeable.

I bet it's more likely that a given Lego set that is missing pieces was produced, packaged, shipped, and sold, nearby other piece-missing sets.

In other words, I would not expect the distribution of Lego sets that are missing pieces to be evenly or randomly distributed.

Yes I was thinking the same thing. Certain factories may have worse quality control, and those sets end up in different regions from sets that come from better production facilities

Are they really producing the same sets in different factories? It would surprise me.

One thing they do on the big sets is give you extras of the small stuff. Like if you need 10 of a 1x1 tile of a certain color, maybe they give you 11, or even 12.

The biggest limitation to that is that the selection of extra pieces is probably not as random as the set of missing pieces, especially since they focus on smaller pieces - presumably to accommodate the ones you lose after buying a full set.

Probably not, but it seems I tuitive that the smaller pieces are the most likely to be lost.

Same. I keep pictures of each box I get for the family. About 130 now in the last 10 years. Zero missing pieces.

For me, 100 percent of the sets with over a thousand pieces have been missing at least one, during the pandemic. Now that’s only 4 sets, admittedly.

The smaller sets have all been fine, tho.

I wonder how many pets/kids they have because my experience mirrors yours. No missing parts over maybe 15 sets (between my wife and I).

I've probably spent £3000+ on Lego over the last decade. Mostly fairly large sets. Mostly Technic, Creator Expert, and Star Wars. Zero missing pieces.

(Also zero shelf space left to display any more Lego...)

> I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure.

It's a "keep bricks interchangeable" measure. Every LEGO set designer gets a budget of a few new piece suggestions per year. This includes color and paint schemes.

From a Verge article on how a new set happens: https://www.theverge.com/c/23991049/lego-ideas-polaroid-ones...

> And those teams came up with one simple idea to stem the tide of complexity: “frames.”

> Want a part in a different color? That costs designers a frame. A new piece? Spend some frames. Bring back an old out-of-print piece? That’s a frame, too. Every year, design leads like Scott are given a limited number of frames that they can spend on their entire portfolio for physical pieces that aren’t readily at hand. “If I have five products or 10 products coming out, I need to allocate where those frames go,” says Scott.

> How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high.

I know I'm going against the grain here, but I love stickers. Many of the sets my kids got were "sticker infested" but as they only re-bricked it, we just did not put the stickers on some of them and got just more fun out of it.

> Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing

I never had it. Also if you do, Lego will send you any piece (that is not a minifig) no questions asked. My kid threw my glob down and one of the parts got a bad indentation and looked ugly. I got a replacement part in the mail no questions asked.

I am fully aware of the customer service side of lego. That's why I still use their stuff. But I suppose that is where our agreement will lie. Knowing what they are capable of and where they are now is noticeable.

I don't know. It very much depends on what you are into. I feel like a lot of the stuff that Lego does got way better in recent years. For instance the manuals in the app are a step above and beyond of where they were, and the build together element means that my kids are playing together and rebuilding old sets.

I am totally on the same page with you. It definitely boils down to what are you doing. There are a ton of cool pieces these days that would've been a pipe dream when we were kids. And lego's MO has always been imagination and creativity. I feel like the addition of stickers in essence sort of rules out the variable, but forces the builder to use it if they are following the kit by the book. Where as with a printed brick the person gets to choose whether they use it or not.

It's really splitting hairs at that point, but ascetically speaking it doesn't fit their ethos.

LEGO needs to pull a KIA.

First, they need the LLM instructions AI thingy to look at your pieces and instantly come up with inspiration. Gamify that.

But they need to pull a KIA in that they hired the young designers away from GM and gave them some room.

There needs to be a revolution in LEGO with the following:

A device which is communally owned - at a Library or an Elementary School.

Throw in plastic bottles and plastic waste.

It molds LEGO bricks.

And you can program different sets.

And kids can create sets and have the device spit out the bricks for that set they designed.

In grad school I knew a guy who was reeeeally into the idea of building benches out of reused plastic and cob. The basic design was plastic bottles stuffed with plastic bags acting as bricks, which are then cemented together with cob.

Cleaning the bottles and bags was incredibly difficult, even at the scale needed for a single bench. Just a massive amount of effort... The difficulty was that any residual bacteria would multiply and off-gas, eventually causing structural problems.

Likewise, I expect the biggest problem for a home-LEGO-recycler would be dealing with the many random impurities in the input stream.

LEGO is mostly ABS so its mechanical properties are a LOT better than the cheap stuff used for bottles.

Strongly disagree on your mold idea. LEGO’s stringent quality control is one of the things that makes it great. My childhood legos are all at my parents house, and my kids love to play with them when we visit. They still work perfectly 30 years later.

That level of quality is impossible with your local library mold idea. It would inevitably churn out low quality bricks due to (1) bad inputs and (2) molds not being replaced regularly for wear and tear, which would be accelerated due to (1).

You can’t just throw whatever plastic trash you have into a machine and expect it to produce good or even useable bricks.

"First, they need the LLM instructions AI thingy to look at your pieces and instantly come up with inspiration. Gamify that."

That exists, though it's not from Lego: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brickit-app/id1477221636 https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2021/07/03/got-a-b...

I can't help but think back to my childhood in the 1980s... there were always stickers included. In the Lego idea books they always showed those same stickers in use, making the association and relevance clear. So how many is too many? I mean, I'd say the more the merrier if that gives the set another dimension of play.

I just wish the stickers were high quality plastic ones, so you'd have a chance in hell of removing and replacing them immediately if you mess up.

I've never had a confirmed piece missing (the few cases had obvious open boxes, etc), but then again I've not bought as many in the last ten years.

It's kind of funny, I got into buying random Lego knockoffs from alibaba, and they get around not missing pieces by putting a totally random amount of extra pieces in instead. I can usually make a small random person or statue with the random pieces left over from the actual model.

I've only had one missing piece and that was in a 3696 piece set. Luckily it was non-structural so we could finish building it. Then we went on the Lego website - you can report missing pieces and they will send you a new piece in the post - it took about a week to arrive. Which was fine... I guess if it had been a structural piece we may have been less impressed.

I was stoked to find the new Eldorado fortress to be an improvement on the original and free from stickers. I got plenty of extra pieces too.

Every set I have bought for my kids comes with extra pieces. And we have bought enough over 100 sets over the past 5 or so years.

In my experience they tend to add extras for the smallest pieces and have never missed a piece.

I envy that you have never experienced missing "key" pieces.

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