thrilladdict

I wasn't slamming them or being unduly negative, just pointing it out. I think they're there for capacity reasons mostly on the raptors anyways. You have to admit that it would be sad to see the big RMC's w/ that situation.

I'm glad to see that the new 2018 RMC trains still lack OTSR's... unlike their Raptor trains.

They made a big deal out of saying that the ride contains a new magnetically-controlled spinning system that won't let it go too crazy on the spins. On stage they called out the test on Blue Fire and said that the spinning there was deemed too intense so they got together w/ SDC and toned it down.

I cannot wait to get to Cedar Point in 2018. I feel like my thighs aren't ready for what RMC wants to put them through.

Ok, now I don't feel as bad for my Trump joke a few pages back. Don't want to step on Robb's toes. Anyways, the trims on Rocket really don't appear to be turned on. If you check youtube for any offride footage and sort by upload date you can see things are moving just as quickly through the non-inverting loop (or whatever they call it) as they used to. It's actually one of the weirder installations of trims I've ever seen given that they don't seem to be on even slightly.

It's not just Alabama, didn't the family of the guy that fell out of Superman SFNE try to sue the park even though he tried to ride w/ no legs? America's stupidity really should never be underestimated. See: the President.

For every complaint on here that I see about SFGAm's pathetic food service I hope everyone is stopping by guest services to (very politely) let them know. They're always very nice and take notes of where/when you had issues, which seems to be everywhere at all times in my personal experience. Are other Six Flags parks better than this? It appears that the season pass dining options + the refill cups create huge lines and cashier confusion. It shouldn't take an hour wait to get some crappy chicken fingers and soggy fries that cost $16.

I agree with you Robb, but Hulk's unprecedented retracking effort combined w/ the Dueling Dragons same age in the same park... it's really hard to imagine that reselling them is even an "option" at all. "Hey, do you want this pile of supports and trains that cover a huge layout over a specific terrain? Nevermind the actual coaster track, you get to buy that new." Just seems like a bit of a stretch, but I get people's passion for not seeing one of the park's real thrill rides leaving. Universal's Florida parks are not really adding anything that would make me want to visit again, as many have pointed out here. EDIT: The post from Robb I was referring to has been removed.

For Carowinds regulars, I'm curious because I plan on visiting soon, have they starting running the new flat rides with decent programs yet? When they opened the swings were barely spinning vs. the old ones they had removed, the Top Scan was crawling, and the Music Express wasn't going backwards. Did they fix things or is that just how it's going to be?

I'm not understanding why people think selling them would be an option. Hulk just had to be retracked because of it's age / life cycle... there are few B&M's that run year round like the ones @ IOA do. What park in their right mind would buy a ride that probably is due for an entire new re-tracking that also requires a huge area that also can no longer duel (the main goal of it's design) because American lawsuits are insane? They were both good coasters but let's be honest, they haven't been as impressive when you don't see the 3 carefully engineered dueling points in action. It probably also needs new track. These seem like good reasons for Universal to move on, but what do I know.

RMC doesn't make the magnets or launch control system but they are certainly responsible for making sure that they choose a supplier for such things that has their stuff together. If someone sells McD's a batch of mayo that gets a bunch of people sick guess who's going to be blamed? RMC's engineering might have been perfect but their choice of launch supplier clearly was not, that falls on them.

I'm confused, why would it matter if the rapids ride is in the theme park or water park side? Are there parks that won't let shirtless guys or bikini'd girls ride rapids rides? Carowinds always used to let us take our shirts / tops off so we could just ride in our bathing suits. It never seemed like a weird thing or an issue? We'd just put them back on before we left the wet rides. EDIT: after posting I realized that several parks (namely Disney or Universal ones) might have issues with this. But do Six Flags or CF parks care? That seems weird.

The GIB's are amazing pieces of engineering when they are working. It's hard to judge their quality knowing that Six Flags added all the extra emergency brakes and changed the ride programming before they opened... it probably wasn't all Vekoma's fault.

For the last 6 years I've only gone to the private "gay night" event that our park does and I've always had a great time so I wanted to see a real day of operations at our park for once... Holy. Crap. It is so unbelievably bad that I couldn't even fathom it before we got there. If you did get suckered into buying the $16 refillable drink cup good luck getting it refilled with less than a 30 minute wait anywhere between 11am and 2pm. I've never seen employees move so slowly at any park in my life, and the "supervisors" that I could pick out from their name tags weren't speeding anything up. Ride op supervisors kept walking up the exits of rides and talking to all of the ride ops for 3-5+ minutes at a time totally halting the loading process of said rides. One positive shout out goes to the Raging Bull crew that actually announced "please sit down quickly" and were running 2 trains with zero stacking. Food service speed, quality, and price is enough to make me never want to attend our park again. It's completely insane all around even compared to some of the biggest music festivals in the world. I'm not opposed to paying a higher price for a beer or some food at a giant event or tourist location like a theme park but damn, Six Flags is doing it so wrong.

After finally getting a ride in on Friday I'm happy to report that the Joker's green side (didn't get a purple side ride) was surprisingly intense. I noticed the ride was making some pretty gnarly metal on metal screeching noises every time a car went up the lift and kept going down repeatedly w/ maint. guys wandering around down below it, but we finally got a ride in! We both agreed though that we probably wouldn't wait more than 30 mins for it in the future due to the really short length. It's like a less satisfying, shorter ride on a Zipper but still very unique. I hear all of the Free Spins are currently down for some sort of sensor issue so hopefully they'll get the reliability issues worked out soon. On another happy note, Goliath was running as perfectly as always if you ignore the painfully slow loading procedure. Maybe this is because of the Texas Giant death but employees on each side of the train can't progress to checking the next row until they both check the same row at the same time, a process that is massively delayed when one of them gets distracted and starts talking to someone. I never saw them get through checking a full train without at least one distraction that would cause the progress down the train to halt entirely. Shockingly my restraint wasn't even checked because both people got distracted then resumed checking restraints on the row behind mine after audibly saying "uh I don't remember which row we were on." Seriously. Lawsuit waiting to happen right there... I really don't understand how operations can be this bad after a few years of operation... but oof it's painful to watch. In summary I had a very fun day at the park that was justifiably marred by some amazingly bad operations and I'm really starting to wonder if Six Flags is even capable of fixing the long standing issues. --- Food: I waited an hour (1pm-2pm to try and avoid noon rush) in an unshaded line to get a crappy slice of pizza, cold fries, and a soda for $17 (!!!!) after which there were no shaded tables to sit at. (Pizza location in front of Superman) HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? Employees seemed confused by every aspect of the season pass meal system and 3 of them stood around staring at a wall while the whole line just stared back at them. This was after we skipped 3 other food stands because lines weren't moving at all. Are there no managers walking around to supervise these things? Also, a Miller Light is now $12. A pretzel is now $7. Who is paying these prices? I've never seen a more disgusting looking chicken tender in my life and that's a product that a large corporation can buy in bulk and toss in a fryer with zero effort. If you're charging $14 for a chicken finger basket at least purchase a better frozen chicken finger offering than local public middle schools? Refrigerator-cold packets of basic Heinz bbq sauce (where do they even find these?!?) also serve to wreck whatever warmth the chicken might have had to begin with. --- Security at park opening: We pulled into the lot at opening and found ourselves converging with 1000 other people at the security gates where everyone was sort of herded into a large security queue that was horribly unorganized. Security guards weren't guiding anyone, half of the groups were skipping and pushing forward aggressively, total pandemonium. Not the best start to the day after paying $25 (!!!!) for parking. --- Single Rider Line craziness / empty seats - I know this is a common complaint with Six Flags but again I don't understand how things can be THIS bad. Despite groupers being on most rides we witnessed 3, 4, 5, 6, and even 7 seats going out empty on train after train on every ride in the park all day. Goliath's single rider line was closed totally. Superman had it's single rider sign out front so we walked all the way back to the station only to be told that whoops, line was closed, "the sign wasn't supposed to be there." After walking all the way back (and watching at least 5 single seats go empty flying over us during our sad walk back) we went to guest services to nicely let them know what sorts of nonsense we were experiencing and they were actually unaware that Superman ever used a single rider line, telling us that that was discontinued last year despite the sign. While the in-park guest service people were very nice and logged our observations in their complaint binder I can't help but feel like there should be some sort of corporate over-arching customer service line that could be notified of these issues since they seem to be systemic across all of the Six Flags properties. Bad food service quality and single rider efficiency issues aren't new but the chain seems to just be unable / unwilling to fix them. Does anyone else know of a better way to escalate these sorts of issues w/ Six Flags? It's astonishing that such a huge corporation could be run so poorly. A few dedicated managers could clean up every stupid issue that thousands of their guests are experiencing on a daily basis.