homestar92

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. Have fun on Orion next year guys. I think I'm gonna sit 2020 out. I'm not going to be dramatic and act like KI has lost me forever (they haven't; I'll be back) but it's going to be very difficult emotionally for me to go to Coney Mall for a while and I'm not ready to put myself through that right away.

Pretty much the only Six Flags park that consistently gets good new additions is Great America. Coincidentally, Six Flags Great America is my all-time favorite park, but it's also the only Six Flags park that even cracks my top ten... Because of that, though, I think announcing everything together is probably best for the way they do things. The announcement video for the Catwoman Whip which will likely be an upcharge would be about 20 seconds with no fanfare. Very different than, say, the Orion announcement which absolutely deserved to be raised on a pedestal by itself.

I feel like I saw the same at Six Flags St. Louis as well on their Larson Loop.

Six Flags already runs this risk by putting "Six Flags" in the name of (almost) every park they operate and also reusing ride names. Sure, they do have control over their parks in North America, but incidents do occasionally happen and I can only assume that guests at other parks get confused as to where the incidents occurred. I never quite understood that marketing tactic, honestly. The number of people who visit theme parks other than their "home" park or the major national destination parks is so minuscule that I'm not sure where the value is in having that kind of cohesive branding. I can see a whole lot of downsides (for example, an incident happens at "Six Flags" and everyone thinks it was their local park) with not too many upsides (since the only people who would ever appreciate the branding consistency are the sorts of people who will probably know that they are part of the same chain without them sharing a name).

I just hope someone else is funding this. If Six Flags is footing the bill, I fear this could be a blunder of pre-2009 Six Flags proportions.

Especially when considering that the parks in the UAE (which is a much friendlier destination for foreign tourists than Saudi Arabia) have consistently failed to pull the kinds of attendance numbers you'd like to see from a park with that much money being invested into it. It doesn't really make sense to build any record-smashing attractions in a park that will likely see fewer visitors than "nearby" year-round parks that pull a third to a quarter of the guests that the larger seasonal American parks pull.

Interesting how they offer us no stats other than that it's "the tallest, fastest, and longest". How tall? How fast? How long? Who actually agreed to make this? The video doesn't look like any ride announcement I've seen before. It doesn't look like an Intamin, the track actually reminds me of Premier track, but I'm just not sure they would build something of this scale. There are also a few spots in the video where it seems to defy physics with the speed at which it goes uphill in some of the segments of the ride, so it seems that it has multiple launches even though the video shows no launching mechanism on the track. The whole POV just seems really fishy to me like it's not quite completely finished yet. If this ever does get built (and that's a BIG if), I worry that its complexity is going to result in this thing almost never being open.

This will likely be a shock coming from me, but after riding Blue Hawk at SFoG, I think those trains would breathe a whole new life into Vortex as long as people manage their expectations appropriately. It will never be B&M smooth, but get rid of the headbanging and I think the ride experience will be more tolerable for a great many people. I myself, am more than happy to continue riding it as is, though.

Some would argue that's not a great comparison since that's a much larger and higher budget park, however, Holiday World and Kennywood also provide free lockers on the rides where you would need them, so we know that parks larger than KI and CP have done it and we also know that smaller parks have done it. I really wish they would provide free lockers because I think it would reduce the number of people trying to sneak phones onto the ride without being properly secured. Sure, you can just not bring your phone, but let's be realistic: 99.9% of the people in the park over the age of 13 have a phone with them.

They don't provide free lockers because then they can't charge you for lockers. I firmly believe that the no-phones policy is designed with safety in mind. I also firmly believe that Cedar Fair realizes there is money to be made off of that policy and considers it a nice bonus, and until they provide free lockers for rides without bins, I won't be convinced otherwise.

I don't have a source other than the fact that there's absolutely nothing to suggest that we will. I don't think the park has added any restrooms since WaterWorks opened (maybe in Picnic Grove if anywhere) so they don't exactly have a history of installing new ones when the park expands. They aren't going to put restrooms in an area with two rides and other restrooms not terribly far away. Especially when that area has had two rides in it for well over a decade and restrooms have never yet been added. Sure, it could happen if the area expands and a bunch more rides are added. But I can say with probably 90% confidence that it won't happen in 2020 or even 2021. There are restrooms inside of Brewhouse. That's pretty close to Potato Works. And unlike most of the restrooms in the park, they run the AC in there!

I expanded my post after you replied, but the ROI could only really exist if the lack of restrooms is causing people to not go to that area and lowering the ridership of the rides in that area. The WindSeeker and Adventure Express restrooms are a walk, but not bad enough to keep people out of the area. Now imagine a hypothetical world where the WindSeeker restrooms were the only ones in the park. In this extreme example, I could definitely see people avoiding Rivertown or Action Zone and adding restrooms in those areas would probably yield an ROI. But the closest restrooms to X-Base today aren't far enough away that anyone would avoid that area, so there's no good reason to add them.

Well, I was referencing Mean Girls. I realize that it is basically high school algebra, I just tried to use the correct verbiage to match the film as closely as possible. And on that note... Stop trying to make Area 72 restrooms happen. It's not going to happen. You need plumbing and sanitary sewer access in that area to install a restroom, which it doesn't have and would actually be much more expensive to add than you might think. It's not that the park couldn't afford it, just that it's not a big enough pain point for guests that they could realistically expect a decent ROI. Adding restrooms is only really worthwhile if the lack of them is causing people to not ride the rides in Area 72, which is definitely not the case due to X-Base's former nickname of Line Base.

Banshee was exactly 100 pieces of track at 4124 feet in length. At 5,321 feet of track, Orion will be around 129 or 130 track pieces. To (almost) quote one of my favorite movies: 100 over 4124 equals x over 5321 and then you cross-multiply and get the value of X.

Banshee loading more quickly is a combination of factors. In part, it's the slightly higher capacity. But also, part of it is the lack of bins, and part of it is due to the trains being half as long, which means less walking for the ride ops to check restraints.

They are advertising it as a brand new ride. However, it does stand to reason that it could just be a relocation within the park, as the Big Dipper would seem to be an extremely similar ride to what we've seen in the artist's rendering of the new area.

Random abandoned items (especially bags) lying on the ground are viewed by park security (and virtually all law enforcement bodies) as possible security threats. I would highly advise that you NOT do this.

It definitely does. Nickelodeon and Hannah-Barbera coexisted for several years. I think it's very interesting that MiA is one of only two parks in the chain to get a new coaster this year. That's a first. In fact, this is the first coaster addition to that park since Cedar Fair purchased it that isn't a relocation...

Georgia Scorcher is barely over 100 feet tall which probably helps. It's quite a lot smaller and slower than Chang or Mantis. Riddler's Revenge, however, is very similar to those two that BoddaH1994 mentioned.

There are very few claims I'm willing to proclaim with the utmost confidence regarding future installations at parks, but I can tell you this: standup coasters are not coming back. Realistically, I think an RMC is the most likely next coaster, but I don't know where you would put it. I can't think of any rides that are large enough and either unpopular enough or difficult enough to maintain that it would be worth removing them for an RMC. I know some point to Vortex, but it still pulls nearly a million riders a year, putting it way up there on the list of popular rides. I think Invertigo is the most likely next coaster to go, but I don't know what you'd put in its spot besides maybe a Larson Loop. Which would actually be a trade I'd be just fine with as long as the park doesn't try to advertise it as a coaster like the chain that numbers its flags...

At the software company where I work, product support representatives get a talking-to from management if they use the word "bug". I think the problem is that KI gives ride ops a lot of freedom with their spieling (which isn't inherently a bad thing as a fun and energetic ride op can make time standing in line more interesting) but some don't really know how far is too far. And that's a tough thing to train since I'm not sure you can really draw a clear and exact line. The longer I am a follower of the industry, the more I find myself agreeing with Terpy that auto-spiels are probably the way to go. Just as long as they aren't like Verbolten...

This is 100% false. There is only one group of people who cares about the difference between a 300 foot height and a 300 foot drop, and that group of people is buying Platinum Passes anyway even if they build nothing at all. If neither stat was over 300, then yes, it would maybe be a harder sell. But all they have to do is mention the 300 foot drop, and as far as the general public is concerned, it's a 300 foot coaster.

I feel that this is relevant again. Don't need to provide a link as it's my photo and my meme. Maybe they'll add a bathroom one day. They can put 300 stalls in it so we can have a real Giga in that area. (Joking, BTW. Orion is a real Giga and anyone who disagrees is extremely pedantic and probably a blast at parties)

They did have heat before Winterfest. On Banshee's Media Day it was 36 degrees when the event started (I remember this quite well because I was a stupid idiot and wore shorts) and I and a few others were standing in the bathrooms to keep warm as they were the only heated buildings that were open during that event. Also, they had done Winterfest before so the bathrooms would have needed heat back then too. Pretty much all of the restrooms in the park today were there when Winterfest had its first run. Kings Island doesn't add bathrooms very often - a truth that is very sadly apparent when you take one look in X-Base. Er, sorry... Area 72.

If you Google "Millennium Force Drop" that's what comes up. Not sure where they're pulling that figure from, though, as Wikipedia and RCDB both list it as being 300.