Baelfael

"The train is getting rehabbed" probably answers my question. I get that these things are deceptively complex machines but weather, repairs, and maintenance are all stuff that the park deals with all season. I don't really recall trains going offline for weekends at a time last year, but it's certainly possible I just missed it. At any rate, a rehab is a larger job that doesn't particularly scale well. Thanks for the answer!

Yeah, food service continues to be a bit of a bad joke at the park. I feel like they still haven't come close to reckoning with the fact that they've given massive numbers of visitors infinite supplies of soda. The only thing I noticed was that the PoS on the far right at Funnel Cakes was dedicated to soda refills (the only such station I noticed), and had a line of no more than 2-3 people the times I walked by it. And because it was a dedicated line, it turned over nice and quick. This is the model that should be mimicked at stations throughout the park, and they need to be clearly marked. If memory serves, I think one other station like this is set up in HH. They could also just bring in more self-service/Coke freestyle stations. They'd be messier, but they would dodge the marginal costs associated with extra line workers. None of this is to say nothing of the problems using actual dining credits thanks to massive lines. It took the person taking my order several minutes to figure out how to process the use of a snack credit. That should absolutely be faster than a cash transaction. Workers being left alone in a concession stand lead to very elongated waits for everything. Two workers would lead to tremendous gains in efficiency, and yet, I saw massive lines at small stands across the park. I guess I can't reckon with behind-the-scenes accounting, but...boy, waiting in line 20 minutes at that Pretzel stand hurts. Has anyone heard anything about Batman running one train for a chunk of Saturday? Stuff like BfM being buggy, I can sorta get; that's a ride system that's never experienced an off season. But Batman is a ~20 year old ride with 7 installations across the chain, with a manufacturer that's still around to buy parts and support from. There's probably about 80 collective years of experience of how this ride acts on opening day. So what's going on? I tend to be fairly apologetic for our little park, and the things that were running were doing so smoothly from what I could tell, but man, stuff like this leaves a bad taste. Waits for attractions that are running smoothly are fine and completely unavoidable in a successful park. But unforced errors like these are, to me, inexcusable when Six Flags so aggressively primes the pump with ticket promotions. A normal/dry-run/soft open weekend to iron out kinks before running a big promotional weekend with heavily discounted tickets might help.

Kotaku (I know, I know) just recently wrote a little op-ed about this, actually. tl;dr - it's really really hard to communicate how good VR experiences are. I don't think I've really heard much bad about the current-gen VR rigs except "that one time I played for 5 hours in a row I got a headache," and that includes games that have relative primitive graphics. HWfan has posted about off season improvements in the past few years, with a good portion talking about these sorts of updates. The car isn't going back in the Batman queue any time soon, but the park's been doing a fair bit of building refurb and paint jobs. You sorta answered your own question when you brought up Disney: a lot of people care. There's a ton of cultural baggage, obviously, but when people talk about the "Disney Magic" they're not just talking about how great its a small world is, they're talking about the experience of merely being in the park. Theming is why Disney can get away with attractions like "a big fake treehouse." Like, when people go to IoA, think about the number of people who say "I loved drinking butterbeer" compared to the people who say "I really loved Dragon Challenge." Done properly, theming can absolutely be its own reward. That being said, I think you're spot on, broadly speaking. Six Flags either doesn't have the willpower or the cash to create an incredibly immersive experience (which is a shame - lets put a pin in that for a second), so I think the focus should absolutely be on just making sure things don't look like they're falling apart so that spending a day in the park, even without rides, is a pleasant experience. Like underwhelming as Tsunami Soaker is, stuff like scrapping the Hanibarrels is a huge win for that column. Getting back to that pin, It's a bit of a shame that there's no will for it. DC isn't known for its iconic locales quite like Harry Potter is, but there's room to be creative there. A Superman queue that winds through the Daily Planet newsroom or a Batman queue that takes you through the Monarch Theatre or Crime Alley...it feels like there's meat on those bones. And I do think that this is partially a willpower thing. For The Dark Knight at GrAm last year, I got ushered through a completely functional pre-show room just to wait in another queue. Now, I'm sure part of this is local management, but if corporate wanted to push their parks as an experience, they wouldn't let it happen.

Also - I don't think this was mentioned - the blurb on the website changed and gives "late May" as the opening of The New Revolution.

In my mind, this is the reason the queue doesn't actually reach the wall to the right of the entrance. They did the math and realized if the queue had been extended another 10 feet there it would have taken 70 minutes and that just would not have been okay. ... Actually, do we have any idea why that gap is there? I guessed they wanted another theming installation but ran out of money.

This is the reason I'm interested. By all accounts, current generation VR is really convincing, but the massive cost of entry is off putting if you don't already own a Gear VR compatible phone. That being said, I worry about Gizmodo's description of this thing being a Next Level Vomit Factory may come uncomfortably close to reality. The FAQ on the webpage goes into the broad strokes of how this works. Prior to boarding you'll get a headset to fit to your face. It's secured with the usual headstrap as well as a chinstrap and an extra lanyard (those aren't standard on Gear headsets.) Then you board and actually put over your eyes. It's not like they lock it to your face, man-in-the-iron-mask style.

*coaster slams into brakes" "How it feels to chew 5 gum." I could get behind ridiculously obtrusive advertising for comedy's sake. "Boy, it's a good thing you were wearing Samsung Gear powered by Oculus Rift (tm.) If you were wearing some terrible HTC Vive , you'd be dead right now!" You and everyone else, but this is almost certainly a fraction of the cost sooo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is a hilarious amount of negativity. There are very few installations of this tech, and none at the "competitor" parks in the region. It's revitalizing a boring coaster with the most interesting coat of paint I can imagine right now. I guess people are sad that Ninja won't be knocked down, but the park isn't wanting for space. It's not like Corporate will be saying "oh man I wish we could spend $20m in St. Louis but we just don't want to knock down Tidal Wave." This, and honestly, there aren't a lot of other coasters you would have wanted it to go on. Most of the other coasters in the park gain too much from being able to see your surroundings. That being said, I think the fact that it's not going on Batman is really interesting. Obviously it would have bolstered lines at an already popular ride, but it would have allowed SF to continue moving in on the DC cross promotion, and they could have copied the work done here to the other installations of the ride. I'm very curious if it was a technical limitation or a creative decision.

The Roller Coaster Tycoon theory of ride development.

I was actually thinking the exact opposite. That if the StL installation of BfM cost $1m (number completely made up), the park would only get "charged" $800k for internal SF ledger purposes because of fixed costs. Good to hear that's sorta how it works. I understand if you can't answer as a park employee - I'm getting into the financial weeds here - but I'm still curious if we have any idea about the magnitude of that effect. Like, how much cheaper are the second two BfM installations than the first two? How much cheaper was Batman NOLA to build than Batman GrAm, 6 installations later?

I'm sure there's no way of knowing this for sure, but do we have any idea about the one-off costs vs the marginal costs of a new ride installation? There's a lot of talk about how BfM was a huge outlay of cash for our park, but some of those costs are amortized over the number of installations the ride is getting around the various properties. I'm not saying the ride vehicles and set pieces are free, but surely a significant chunk of the cost of a ride are fixed. Development in layout and ride technology, squashing bugs in the computer systems, paying to render and voice the animated sequences are all things that SF gets to pay for once then essentially get "for free" at every new installation. Similar dynamics have to play into roller coasters, right? Construction's expensive, but the one-off costs of development of a new layout must be significant (look, Batman is a good roller coaster but absent significant fixed costs I'm not sure it was good enough to deserve 7 installations.)