bkroz

One thing that gives away that it's a diversion, to me is that the countdown, which is appropriately labeled with Roman numerals. VIII.XXI.MMXIV (8.21.2014) would be the day of announcement. Problem is that, in theory, 8.21.2014 is the day that the name / site will be released. So this supposedly accidentally-released web-page is counting down to its own release. You see what I mean? It will reach 0 right as its first seen by the public. That's nonsensical. Meh.

Too easy, I'd say. Which is a shame. That's a great name. Not a bad logo, either.

It's all just for jokes, people. Punch lines. Funny. Haha

Kings Island's got two. http://www.themeparktourist.com/features/20140809/19995/10-worst-rides-pop-question

A ride valleyed. Someone alert the press! Oh, wait...

Hm. That's not even a deep cobra roll. Had to be just the exact power of launch to get them over the first roll, but not over the second. Unless something else slowed the train. Very odd.

You've got to feel for the Cast Members. As rough as this transition is for guests, it's even worse for them. Imagine the crowds gathering around Soarin's entry plaza demanding information. FastPass+ provides guests with a list of all the park's E-tickets and says "choose one." If you choose Test Track (a perfectly fine choice), then you WON'T get on Soarin' without waiting in the stand-by line. Problem is, there IS no stand-by line anymore. Only return tickets. Planned to save it for the slower, evening hours? Too bad. Unbeknownst to you, Soarin's stand-by line has been replaced by paper return tickets (ironically, identical to the original FastPass), which "sold out" in the afternoon. There is no stand-by line to wait it! It is, to put it a certain way, FastPass+ or FastPass only. If you didn't prepare for that, you're out of luck. Now explain that to a chanting Brazilian tour group; a Chinese family; a traveling group of Japanese twenty-somethings. Although live Twitter updates the other day revealed that guests are literally revolting. The paper return tickets "sold out" at 5:00, and Cast Members began turning guests away, telling them that unfortunately, there was no stand-by line for them to wait in and that Soarin' had reached its capacity of guests for the day. "What's the wait time then?" people asked. "Well... there isn't one, really... There's no line to wait in. It's return-time only!" By 5:30 (30 minutes later), the stand-by line was back open. Cast Members were literally intimidated by a growing crowd into re-opening the line. I'm not saying it's right or funny or good. All I'm saying is that it shows the complete disconnect that Walt Disney World management must have if they didn't see that coming. And those poor Cast Members who were so overwhelmed by a confused, growing, and angry crowd that they opened the line back up.

Just a quick update. The "Stand-By Plus" paper return tickets are now used at the Be Our Guest restaurant and the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at the Studios park. http://blog.touringplans.com/2014/08/10/guest-restaurant-testing-new-standby-line-process/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter Only guests staying on-site have the option to pre-book a lunchtime slot at Be Our Guest Restaurant. If you aren't staying on-property, you would previously queue for the restaurant for 30 minutes or more. Now, your only choice is to walk to the restaurant and get a paper return time ticket that may be hours later, but still during the lunch service. Once return tickets are gone for the day, they're gone. There is no stand-by line to wait for a free table. Dinner continues to be a table-service, reservation-only situation, so it is not influenced by this.

Just a quick alteration and...

Depending on the size and structure of the company, a policy may be that certain policies are flexible. Now, do I expect all of Kings Island's employees to be given empowerment enough to make such decisions? No. That would be chaotic. Case-by-case isn't the way to handle this, either. But someone should be empowered enough to put an end to it and bring it to someone who can do something about it permanently. Unless that's already happened, and the permanent decision is that this is a policy worth fighting for, in which case c'est la vie. We'll see.

Maybe I'm just spoiled by Universal, but it seems to me that if you decide to make a locker mandatory, then make them free. I know the argument is "You could leave it with a non-rider" but c'mon. There isn't always a non-rider. The park knows we're captive and that if you want to ride Banshee, you have to leave carry-on items behind. I think that's fine, and fair, and a great choice! But then, make them free. Talk about a gesture of good will. Because as it is, making lockers mandatory doesn't come across as a rule put forth for safety and to keep the line moving quickly. To say, "You have to do this, and it just so happens we get money when you do, but I PROMISE that's not why we say you have to..." Conflict of interest there haha. If suddenly guests didn't have to pay $5.00 for lockers throughout the day, they would probably say, "Oh! Well since I don't have to pay for lockers, I might as well get some ice cream." People are so used to getting gouged for the old crappy food the park used to have, and for lockers, and for parking, and for drinks that if the park slowly backed that down to a reasonable level, they'd find that more people would be willing to pay more. I don't know anything about economics, but I even said years ago that if they charged half as much for a burger, three times as many people would buy them. Seems simple enough to me, and I know the profit would be there. *shrug* Same goes for lockers, but in a goodwill kind of way. +1.

Essentially, which seems pointless but it was a step-at-a-time. The park maps tell the story better than words. The tiny family park Geauga Lake was one of those that grew very organically over a century from a little picnic park to a family amusement park. SeaWorld Ohio moved in on the other side of the lake in the 1970s, and the two existed across from each other with no minimal relationship for 30 years. It was very odd. I can remember being at Geauga Lake as a kid and looking across the water at the Shamu stadium. Likewise, you'd be at SeaWorld and see roller coasters across the lake. Basically the water park ended up "moving across the lake" in a step-by-step plan to cover up the former SeaWorld, which for a year sat vacant across the lake and was making no fans for the "new" Geauga Lake. Obviously the history is very complicated, but expand below for my layman's timeline. I'm by no means an expert. I feel especially bad for the folks in charge of those brown attraction / entertainment road signs who found themselves changing the park's name every year or two. (Expand for timeline)

It's not that the thought is silly, it's that it's a bit too early. Five years from now, the industry could be going through a wave where 500 foot tall pre-fab wooden coasters are all the rage. Or maybe parks are back to building scenic railways. Or maybe a new model will pop up, the way that B&M's Wing Rider did in the last 5 years. Kings Island might not even be owned by Cedar Fair in five years! We just don't know. It's fun to speculate and imagine, sure... and there are already two threads for that in this same section of the board. An Intamin Strata or Giga coaster (the OP's suggestion) seems decidedly unlikely no matter which way the park goes or who owns it.

I think that the area can support a small, local-based, family park. Something that could eventually grow to be Kennywood-sized or so. Problem is that those parks rely heavily on history and nostalgia. You can't just "create" a park like that. They can't just appear. The other problem is that no one is as well-equipped to create that as Cedar Fair is, and they 1) seem unlikely to do so 2) would get a lot of push-back from the community. Locals who grew up at Geauga Lake have no reason to follow Cedar Fair's growth and change. To them, Cedar Fair will always be the corporation that closed their paradise - their Kings Island - after the season ended so no one could get last rides or say goodbye. If Cedar Fair put the park up for sale and Parques Reunidos bought it, maybe it would have a chance to grow in the way that it could. Herschend might also be able to do something with it. Cedar Fair definitely has the capability, but those two caveats are heavy ones. About half of the former SeaWorld is still vacant and undeveloped, as is the former Happy Harbor area. Like I said earlier, I don't know why they closed Happy Harbor to begin with. What was so damaging about having a giant three-story climbing net structure, three or four little family flat rides (Yo-Yo Swings, swinging ship, etc), a 4D movie theatre, a discovery garden, and a motion simulator? That alone would help the park qualify as a "family amusement park" rather than just a water park. Instead, they bulldozed that too! Scrapped it! Like, huh? Really? You can't just leave the motion simulator, garden, swinging ship, and climbing nets? Cost more to tear down than they would've cost to operate! It seems like their mindset was just to eradicate anything that was not water park. Anything! Because there's literally no other explanation for Happy Harbor being dismantled. If they were able to have kept that, and then maybe expand onto the rest of the currently-unoccupied-former-SeaWorld with a family wooden coaster, a couple thrilling flat rides, and maybe a flume ride, they'd have the start of a decent family park. Michigan's Adventure-sized in its wildest dreams, but a start. What's so disgustingly tragic is all of that infrastructure on the Wild Rides side, gone. If you'd never been, there's just no way to describe that this was, very simply, a really, really nice theme park with really wonderful little themed areas that had grown over the years and become very well-done. Coyote Creek, 50's Midway, Gotham City, Looney Tunes Boomtown, Hurricane Harbor... I mean, really an exemplary park, and even an exemplary Six Flags in terms of the era. To see that all leveled is heartbreaking, even today. So much waste. Yes the park over-expanded. Yes it was ill-prepared for the Pandora's Box that Six Flags opened. Yes it was too big, too fast. Yes it was probably doomed after those two years where 5 coasters were added. But that doesn't make it any less awful that it was leveled. So yeah, if Cedar Fair announced that they had plans to develop the remaining SeaWorld area into a family amusement park, I would be shocked and glad. But I wouldn't be "happy." Does that make sense? It would be artificial. To see so much lovely theming and history literally bulldozed... It's just horrific. Truly. Whether you were a fan of the park or not, regardless of who you blame, regardless of how things might be done differently today, it's truly horrific. Wow. God. Physically makes my stomach turn. I didn't expect to still have that reaction. The maps are oriented the same way. The building marked "78" in Happy Harbor at Six Flags Worlds of Adventure matches up to the upper-left-most building on the WildWater Kingdom map.

Slippery slope, apologizing. It means more than it says. Theoretical step A] Park apologizes. Theoretical step B] Public and recorded apology denotes guilt and wrong-doing; media-happy mother who has the emotional backing of the community sues; plaintiff cites child's suddenly-stunted growth as proof of hormonal imbalance issue set-off by the park's relentless and abusive search for profit; plaintiff reports that son can no longer visit the park with his peers; family psychologist reports that the child has since experienced stunted emotional growth and is not responding to social cues in an age-appropriate way; lasting damage suspected, possibly a side effect of social isolation thanks to Kings Island; plaintiff has lost sleep in this traumatic ordeal, leading to poor work performance and her eventual dismissal; plaintiff can't maintain steady employment and must stay at home to care for traumatized son who was emotionally unprepared to face the realities of adulthood, thrust upon him by Cedar Fair's arbitrary height cut-off; plaintiff claims she's been victimized by Cedar Fair Entertainment Company and was misled by the park's deceptively simple pass tiers into believing her child would be provided with admission for a full season - "Is that too much to ask?" she begs to reporters; plaintiff adds pain and suffering and lost wages to the respectable couple-hundred-thousand she feels she's owed. In some alternate universe, this is already unfolding to various degrees. GYK, who does not practice law in Ohio, Virginia, California, or any of the 50 states, nor in any parallel dimension he's aware of. There is no legal advice contained herein. In fact, I have no idea what half of that stuff means. I just watch a lot of Judge Judy. If you think you have a legal issue, consult with a competent attorney... or take your case to Judge Judy. "Real people, real cases, Judge Judy." P.S. I obviously believe that the park ought to re-evaluate its policy. I haven't seen, heard, or read anything from the mother in question whatsoever and I don't expect that she's that kind of person. I'm just having fun. So local news, do NOT quote this post or use it in any way. It's full of nonsense. In terms of the actual problem here: How much financial loss are we really talking about if the park were to examine this and say, "The height when you purchase the ticket is what matters?" Meanwhile, the goodwill that'll be lost from this... worth it?

WOW. We half-jokingly anticipated this. I'm actually stunned that things are as bad as we joked, though. From a thread a month ago on the topic of that very same, mysterious drink offer. A month ago, people were being told "if the food stands say they've never heard of this, tell them to call up to Guest Services." Now, silver2005 says it was the lady at Guest Services who didn't know they existed! And worse, that employees "weren't supposed to be selling them?" Clearly she was mistaken, but what kind of system does the computer use that employees can sell things they're not supposed to?

You don't. When a topic is duplicated or started needlessly, a moderator will quietly dust it under the rug, or it will slowly disappear into the archives as it goes un-replied to. Step 1) Relax. Step 2) Don't reply to this.

Even when the park says it officially, you can't be too sure! Like Drop Zone. Not the first one. Or the third one. The one in between that never materialized.

Before starting a new topic, always use the "search" feature for key words to make sure a topic about it doesn't already exist. Even simpler, you posted this in the "Coming Attractions" section of the board. That's exactly the right place to put it, but you'll notice it's one of 6 topics there. Two of the others are "Next New Ride?" and "Will Diamondback Always Be The Tallest Ride at KI?" This kind of discussion – what's next? what kind of coaster? will it be big? what does the park need in its lineup? etc – is implicit in both of those topics, so discussion about this kind of thing fits perfectly there, no new topic needed. Welcome to KIC. We're glad you're here! My advice for new folks is to treat this like a new school. We want to get to know you! But starting a new school, you'd probably lay low for a little while and listen more than you say. Don't be scared, but explore the forums and reply to some topics before starting new ones. It'll serve you well in the long run!

Ideally I'd bundle them together. But Waldameer is closed Monday, Conneaut closed Tuesday. And my friend (who is not a park enthusiast, and not a big coaster person at all) is only available Tuesday. So just that fast, it looks like this became a trip to Waldameer! Which is fine, but man would I have loved a trip to Conneaut. I'd love to see their two dark rides. Though to be fair, a lot of what I'm seeing is that both are rarely open at the same time anyway. Yikes. This feels like a bad decision and like maybe I should just suck it up and go to Conneaut alone on Monday. I know it won't even be worth the drive necessarily, but I'd like to see it... just in case.

Huh? Disney ticket pricing is 0 - 3 (free, of course); 3 - 9; 10+. This is worth bringing back to the foreground because it's, in many ways, an "honor system." "Is your child 9, or do you get to pay more because they're 10?" No ID to check. No height to measure. No tell-tale sign. And thus, this never happens. You can bet, though, that if a child celebrated a milestone birthday in the middle of an annual pass window, they'd get a "10th Birthday" pin, greetings from every cast member they saw, special meet-and-greets, and a few complimentary snacks during the day. Being hounded for an upgrade fee wouldn't be among the first 100 things that would happen to them. Consequently, it wouldn't something their parents would have to worry about. Should the woman have run to the media? Eh, we don't know her story. She might be a barker. But it IS good that this kind of policy is brought to the forefront where it can be amended (or not). The media catching wind of abuse of Disney's disability access program led to its complete renovation. It's something that needed to happen, but murmurs and occasional complaints weren't lighting that fire under management's butts. Hopefully this will force their hand in at least taking another look at this policy and standardizing their response across the chain. It seems to me like a silly fight to pick. Now that it's been picked, I would think the smart thing to do is to admit fault and drop it. The parent probably wasn't cajoling her child into growing just to pull a fast one on the system. "Pick your battles," as they say. Might be time for the park to bow gracefully to this one.

Hmm... I'd love to go check this park out. Google Maps tells me I'm not two hours from it, which I never took the time to notice. They're only open Thursday through Monday, though, so my options are tomorrow (Sunday), Monday, or Thursday. I'm relocating for work on Friday. So wow, three days to try to convince someone to go with me. This should be fun... EDIT: I have a friend free Tuesday. Conneaut's closed. I'm guessing you folks would recommend Waldameer, too? If only both were open on Tuesdays we could do a double-feature... Man.

And that 14 pound baby born the other day is a Son of Beast - like proportions. EDIT: Wow, it still works!

We've got one. I can't talk about the Falcon's Fury drop t0wer without a zero.

Dippin' Dots, LLC would no doubt be more worried about their product becoming a generic description of ice cream (let me google that on Yahoo dot com) than about it being presented without an apostrophe. They're smart enough to have prepared for the apostrophe situation. http://www.trademarkia.com/dippin-dots-73767437.html The idea is: trademarks are important. The Interpreter is right to defend them. A lesson learned early on here is that intellectual property must be accurately represented. If we use Google to search for something, Google and their lawyers appreciate for it to be presented as such. I don't know a whole lot about it, but it seems to me that the way a name is stylized in a logo does not detract from its legal standing. If you're a fan of Disney Parks, you'll notice that "it's a small world" and "a bug's land" are always presented in quotation marks when using lower-case. I don't know what - if anything - that has to do with legal trademark, but I bet it's got something to do with it! EDITED for kindness.