Comeagain?

How are they actually enforcing this new policy? Not that I'd ever advocate for knowingly breaking park rules but unless you go full Universal or TSA, but there's pretty much no alternative to actually ensure someone doesn't have a phone in their pocket. To me it seems like more of a scare tactic to try and keep as many phones off it as possible and to give a good reason to remove people from the ride who are known to have their phone out while about to get on the ride.

You'd be surprised at how much you can get done in a few hours before the park opens. And the 100 cycles don't have to be continuous.

Should be coming back soon. Thanks for letting us know.

We've found that when we did bonuses and when did didn't do bonuses, we saw no change. It wasn't something that made people any more likely to want to stay or go.

No. That's not how rides should be run. You DO NOT run rides or attractions without safety components functioning and in place. Period. End of Story. If a raft has velcro straps that are about to fail, it should be removed from service, and the others that have been inspected and found okay can continue to run, sure. But brakes that are required to keep rafts running at a safe speed are not optional. Even for the rest of the afternoon. If you can't make that repair while the park is open, sucks to suck. Get ready to hand out comp tickets or something, but you don't try and limp through the rest of the day like that.

Or slow the lift hill to get a longer cycle time out of the station, so you aren't spending time in the brake run, you're spending time on the lift where most people'd barely notice a change. And they wouldn't care. And if you're running one or two trains, run full speed to get trains back as fast as possible.

Many many rides aren't ever aware of the actual state of the lap bar, only whether the mechanism itself is locked/unlocked. Previous generation RMC trains did require the restraint to be at or below a certain angle (IIRC), but I don't know about the newer ones.

Yes, that's what happens. And if we try to apply more/less weight based on ridership it becomes heavily US or heavily non-US biased, depending on the direction.

Yes. Your rankings won't go anywhere. It'll still require you to go click "I'm done", but the idea is that you can adjust it whenever you like, as you visit parks, and then next year won't take any significant amount of effort to submit.

Different weight (and sometimes more importantly weight distribution) has a significantly and incredibly frustrating effect on how rides behave. Especially when running for the first time, or after making significant changes. Twisted Timbers is a slightly different situation, but I wouldn't start worrying about Steel Vengeance because of it. Yet.

Sounds like Dollywood is having a hard time getting started this season, but unfortunately that is the reality of a seasonal theme park. New staff learning things, limited returning staff to do the training. If moving trams somewhere else would really make your day that much better, they could have probably done that. But then they'd have a tram driver (or two) not actually helping anything. Ticket lines are long, but many people can buy online. Ticket sales (and season pass processing) and hawking soda bottles are vastly different tasks, even if both use the same POS system. I can pretty much guarantee there are members of management who saw those inefficiencies and wanted to do something about it, but that doesn't mean they had anything that they could do. And simply starting the season sooner so spring break isn't the first major operating week is likely not an option. If the park found it financially viable to be open earlier (or even all year) they would. But realistically that doesn't work given the enormous cost of staffing an empty park. Plus the added strain on maintenance and upkeep schedules being shortened even more. For now, an unfortunate reality of running a season park is the first few weeks sucks.

I am not seeing duplicate entries for T3 and Pulsar on our end, so there shouldn't be an issue with your ranking. Thanks for taking the time! As this year's poll is still in "beta", things may be a little different next year, but we're sticking with what we have for now. That looks like the ranking got added twice somehow. I don't know how (creating a record for a user and coaster that already exists just updates it), but I've removed the duplicates from your ballot.

In virtually every restraint system there is no difference between the first click and the last as far as strength and safety is concerned. If the harness is locked properly, it's staying locked.

It's very similar to Mitch's methods. We're specifically trying to avoid heavy bias towards popular coasters. I'll have a more detailed write up of exactly how it works when we release the results.

Nope, that'll work just fine.

I’m working on a better way, but until then you can go to your profile (click on your name in the upper right), clicking “view entire ranking”, and then there’s a share link you can copy/paste.

Considering the entire ride is built by cutting into steal plate, doing so to add trims isn't a particularly daunting or difficult task. Although the engineering teams put a lot of thought and effort into what the final product will be, and I'm sure that they know whether they'll need any kind of speed control or not.

I can't see anything here.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that S&S will still supply Arrow parts. So parts availability isn't necessarily a limiting factor, only cost.

Okay, so I fixed the issue causing the 500 errors on the ranking page. It turns out you can't find information on a coaster if it's been deleted...

Okay. So the people who were getting errors when trying to rank shouldn't be having issues any more. You may want to scroll through your rankings and make sure everything how they should be. Since we've removed some coasters (mostly duplicates) they won't appear in your rankings anymore.

Huh. Send me a PM with your email address and I’ll take a look. Is it only the ranking page that doesn’t work?

An Update: You can now rank using the previous drag and drop, or you can use a new "spreadsheet" view, that's not javascript based, that allows you to sort in a few different ways, and then save everything at once. Alse: Filtering and custom sorting on the massive list of coasters. Automatically scrolls up when dragging. Doesn't renumber to #1 when dragging a second time. Can now view and share other users entire rankings. Fixed.

I'll include it. But if you say you've ridden it, you're probably lying. And it'll be a good reason to remove your account.

Yes. And then next year you’re already set when we do the poll again.