DirkFunk

Does the park close lines early, e.g. will they shut down an hour long Cyclone line when the park is open for 30 more minutes?

So, uhhh, people want IMMERSIVE, STORYTELLING EXPERIENCES so much that Cedar Point's almost sounds like it'll get abandoned for Western Cruise 3.0. LOL

https://rcdb.com/4578.htm :faints:

What I meant is that Cedar Point's passholder base is low, and that's because the two markets it draws most from are each at least an hour away.

There's the possibility that Cedar Fair is going to revamp doing passes so that Platinum Passes aren't the same price at Michigan's Adventure as they are Cedar Point or outright do away with "platinum passes" in favor of some new series of top tiers. Their passholder base there is pretty low, so I can't imagine its to add a membership model either. Wrong park to do it at.

They can name it "LegendLover is Banging DirkFunk's Mom" for all I care. A B&M hyper is gonna be fun.

You can get there from the front lot now that the "boardwalk" has been built, so nah, they won't let you back there if you aren't going to the water park.

Twizzlers are basically "edible" candles. Garbage tier everything.

13-14 years ago I'd have told you I was looking to slow down my park going, stop credit whoring, and I missed the camaraderie of the early days of the coaster scene. Last year I had one of the most prodigious years of coaster riding in my entire life. This year will probably beat that with me stepping foot in more than half the US states and traveling to Europe and Asia too. Most of it is with my wife and/or friends, but a good chunk is solo too. If I'm having fun with it, I'll do it. If it stops being fun, I'll do something else. There's no shortage of hobbies to participate in.

I wouldn't want to give Six Flags credit there since I think it probably loses Cedar Fair more money than they make with the uniform pricing of Platinum passes. Certainly though there's not much argument that Six Flags was ahead of the curve when it came to advance pricing things like meal/drink/photo plans and that everyone else has followed. Certainly you'd agree there.

To Cedar Fair's credit, they made the difficult decision years ago to double the price of those cheap season passes if you want to use them at all parks. Both chains have premium pass products now that are multiples that of the base pass most people likely buy. I don't know that I necessarily "credit" Cedar Fair for that decision given that it seems to exist solely to prevent Kings Island or Michigan's Adventure season pass holders from not paying for entry to Cedar Point (a park that saw an attendance decline last year in spite of building Steel Vengeance). If you ascribe to the idea that attendance is secondary to in park spending because you can't have them spend unless they come in the park first, then you're already behind the 8 ball with this.

Midway has one of the best looking roller rinks I've ever seen. Too bad it's been closed to the public for awhile. But yeah, there's only one Twister on the road with a small show in Indiana, so this ride being re-opened in NY is a great thing.

My point is that even they have to care about attendance targets. They're a publicly traded company. There's no long term gain from this drop of attendance to spin to shareholders. And we're seeing them throwing together parades and hustling Soarin Over California back into service as part of that service. The relevance here is that of course Cedar Fair's revenue, much like Six Flags, is heavily dependent on very cheap season passholder return visitation over the often vaunted/desired high per cap spending.

There are legitimate criticisms to levy at Cedar Point but at this point I wouldn't make food options one of them any more. There's enough choice there at this point that I think unless someone is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE, they will find something pleasing. Melt is outright good. IMO definitely the best sit down restaurant in a regional park and probably in the top 5-7 of any park in the nation. I willingly ate there this weekend when I stopped in the park for two hours knowing I could have gotten a much cheaper meal outside in Sandusky. Like, what am I gonna miss out on that's better in Sandusky than Melt?

In case you guys were wondering if Disney is freaking out about what appears to be lower attendance post Star Wars...here is your answer why they are probably not freaking out too much. Creating revenue inside (and outside if you own hotels) is what matters most. Ticket revenue isn't really a profit driver except for premium products like front of line and VIP tours. 10 years ago Cedar Fair was WAY behind on this, now they appear to have caught up! 1) Cedar Fair's share price is down from 72.10 in July 2017 to $48.56 today. Clearly Wall Street isn't nearly as impressed with the "replacement" in net revenue. 2) Disney only has three hotels in California. Their primary guest base are passholders, most of whom are blacked out of the park and not attending. I don't know what the occupancy rate is at Disney's hotels, but most classes of room are available this weekend when I search (suggesting it isn't in the 90s percentage wise). I wouldn't classify Disney as "panicking" but clearly they're throwing money at stuff or having discounts to try and get people to go now.

It seems like some kind of reaction about "screens" since this doesn't have them. Oddly enough, from the same people who say "screens are OK". It isn't Harry Potter, so it doesn't count I guess. Isn't Gringott's on RCDB too? Sure was last I checked. I've been asking people who actually have been to more than 5 parks what they thought if they went and there's a lot of "This isn't a top 50 coaster", "I'd rather ride Mako", "It's Verbolten with Universal level theming and that's it". This doesn't sound *bad* but it also sounds like it's kinda forceless and meandering with a bunch of pauses to look at animatronics briefly.

Let's talk about stuff that matters. How do you think Universal Creative is going to get 3D glasses and water sprayers to work with a Blitz coaster? Their innovation in spraying me with water makes me think many of them were classically trained clowns.

Oh, it absoultely 100% did. I can tell you that one of my close friends worked on that opening and they ran all four theaters on Flight of Passage and full capacity on boats for River Journey. I've heard drastically different things about how it performed opening year (and that they've had issues with theaters being down well past that) but ultimately having separate theaters means the attraction can only fully go down if all 4 theaters are non-functional. Hagrid's only has one track. Two months ago? I just don't get the indignation about all this. No one is gonna care soon. No one cares about any of the attractions that have a tough time opening over the long run so long as they work consistently. It's when they don't like Dragster or Kingda Ka (or when they still existed, Hypersonic or Shoot The Rapids) where we all relitigate these decisions. Universal is maybe a little less good than Disney at opening stuff. Big whoop. If you don't run a blog as a business that supports you, don't go opening day. And if you do, shouldn't you be getting into the media event anyhow?

The whole thing is a virtual queue there. Kinda tough to replicate the same system if you have 5000 people waiting unless you have a spare Orange County Convention Center to have them fiddle around at....especially since the ride kept faulting out. Fallon's just a simulator, after all. Maybe I'll go in February or something? I haven't gone in 2015 and have an exceptionally hard time caring about going to a park where I'm gonna go through TSA style security each time I want to ride Hulk.

Not to mention a ride that had it's date moved forward when Disney announced that Star Wars would be opening early. From what I've heard the ride was supposed to open much later, but Universal changed that date, and some people working on the project only found out from what they read on Twitter. I personally would have rather they spent a bit more time testing the ride and opening it later when it was working better, but there's shareholders, right? Didn't this same thing happen with Gringotts... Volcano Bay... there is a pattern here... Avatar, IIRC, didn't run at full capacity for several months after opening. No one is gonna care in 3 months, much less a year unless the ride is dog s#it (which apparently it isn't by all accounts). We could just as easily look at the supplier for Gringotts too, since (allegedly) they had to refabricate a bunch of track that didn't fit S&S Sansei style.

Are they doing that and not just passholders? People bitch about any and everything. Would a bunch of buy in events have been better? I guess it would be if it worked consistently, otherwise you would have spent $XXX for nothing. It's a new complex ride - from Intamin, no less - why expect Day 1 perfection? Isn't this TPR where we all call people morons for planning to go to opening day and then getting mad there's a big line and the ride doesn't work right (or gets pushed back a month because of technical issues)?

Legitimate question: If most people don't remember that Test Track had a pile of disasterous delays, why would anyone recall that this motorbike coaster had some downtime opening day?

IIRC Diagon Alley's entire budget was $253 million. I seriously doubt this one ride 5 years later was bigger than that. People are just making up numbers. I was once on Twitter by some Disney stan told that Luigis Flying Tires cost over $100 million, LOL.

They designed a lot of stuff and up until that kid got killed, no one (including most people here - I was in the definite minority) were ready to throw them under the bus. Then the stories started to dribble out one by one. Jeff Henry still hasn't been taken out of the Waterpark Hall of Fame or banished from IAAPA, where he was such a "legend" they commissioned a short biography of him for a book released while he was on trial! If you went on a Master Blaster, especially any built before they sold to Whitewater, you rode one of their rides.

Not sure if intentional, but it certainly paints a mental picture. And yeah. I've only really been getting back into waterparks over the past year or so after a long absence... but basically everything I've ever heard about the entire situation in KC has left me with zero desire to visit one of those parks. If all their slides with built by the same team with the same care and loving attention to detail that went into Verruckt, then frankly, I don't intend to visit regardless of who currently owns the park. Crush N Gusher at Disney's Typhoon Lagoon was built by them too. You're gonna have a tough time totally avoiding their attractions. Just how it is.