Author:  Admin_Russell  Posted:  Jan 9, 2024 18:21  Subject:  Re: Important proposal regarding catalog variants  Viewed:  152 times  Topic:  Catalog Cancel Reply

BrickLink ID Card Admin_Russell Location:  USA, California Member Since Contact Type Status May 9, 2017 Admin BrickLink Administrator

In Catalog, rylie_aitch writes:    As a builder, these differences are often genuinely functionally and aesthetically relevant. I would hate to have to ask every time, or risk getting a random mix if I need a bunch of the same type. Any smooth slopes would stick out like a sore thumb in a roof full of the other type, for example, and I should be able to decide which I'm ordering without having to wait for several sellers to manually check their inventory and get back to me. And as a collector/reseller, it's hard enough as it is to get period-appropriate parts to complete vintage sets. The less BrickLink cares about differences, the more likely old sets in general are to contain parts that any collector could easily tell were made 30+ years later. I add grooveless tiles to orders whenever I can, and have specifically been building a collection of those. Removing that distinction would mean I spend less money on this platform (and, again, I'd hate to need the grooved version for an urgent MOC and end up with a mix of the two!) I appreciate your honesty about how this will affect the collector market. When it comes to smooth slopes, the main problem is that there is very little evidence there are actually 2 intended types. For some, there were smooth versions for special uses: [p=30474pb06] The only thing we'll do here ^^^ is remove "smooth" from the Item Name. [p=3684b] For these ^^^ , they were only in 8 sets out of 269, and they are alternates, meaning we are not sure these sets always had them. By all accounts, they are very rare, and you are probably going to have more issues with normal slopes that have a range of roughness to deal with. I look at this part as simply a quality control issue, similar to brittle Blue, cadmium Yellow, or the fragile Reddish Brown from a few years ago. You may not get 100% usable parts in every order, and smooth slopes is one of those reasons. For grooveless tiles, there will still be an entry for them, but the main entry will not say "with Groove". For your purposes, the "a" entries should be enough.

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Re: Important proposal regarding catalog variants - rylie_aitch (255)

As a builder, these differences are often genuinely functionally and aesthetically relevant. I would hate to have to ask every time, or risk getting a random mix if I need a [...] (5 months ago, Jan 9, 2024, to Catalog)

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Re: Important proposal regarding catalog variants - WOLKsite (13)

[...] Make that 9 sets :P I just checked my copy of (Set 7237-2) and now it's bothering me that the replacement part I got for it is not a smooth one unlike the other slopes [...] (5 months ago, Jan 10, 2024, to Catalog)

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