Movie world Maintenance 2022

[Gazza]

I'm old school,

No more than 1 ride from any segment, and no more than 2 attractions closed at any given time.

[Naazon]

23 minutes ago, Gazza said:

I'm old school,

No more than 1 ride from any segment, and no more than 2 attractions closed at any given time.

1 for scheduled downtime and 1 of unexpected downtime.

[Rivals]

imo it depends with what rides are close, Superman and Rivals being closed alone would make a major impact to a guests experience, but say GL and Doomsday or Batwing and Justice League being closed would be a way less severe impact. But overall i’d say 1-2 coasters, a flat and a kids / family ride being closed would make it almost not worth the visit

[themagician]

I’d agree there shouldn’t be more than 1 ride from each category under maintenance at any one time. But for the most part, there shouldn’t be more than 2 rides closed. 

Last year when DW had a lot of rides out of action, they were handing out show bags as people left and food vouchers to people who were complaining.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

14 hours ago, themagician said:

Last year when DW had a lot of rides out of action, they were handing out show bags as people left and food vouchers to people who were complaining.

But movie world is world class. they don't need to do that.

[Guest 239]

20 hours ago, Slick said:

Just curious - how many rides do you think Movie World can have down at any one time before you consider it a major impact to the daily experience?

I find it hard to quantify because if you're having a bad day then it can't always be 100% justified, but forgoing the emotional element, lets make a little matrix to determine the expectation of a park day that's somewhat just based in logic. First, let's map out the attractions. 

There's must do attractions that drag people into the park. They're the sort that you get really excited about and seek the park out just for them such as:

• Wild West Falls
• Super Man Escape
• DC Rivals

Then there are the attractions that are good fun whilst you're there, but not exactly show stoppers:

• Green Lantern
• Scooby Doo Spooky Coaster
• Justice League
• Road Runner
• Batwing

Depending on whether you've seen it or are interested in it, this may also fall under good fun:

• Hollywood Stunt Driver

And then there's the rest. This would change person-to-person and group-to-group, but above is how I see it. 

Now we can do some 🌟M A T H S 🌟

Let's give the park an attraction score. To do this we map out the attractions and give them a number. Must do's are 3, Good Fun's are 2, and the rest are 1s. 

With my quick math's I got an overall attraction score of 32.  I know that seems low against the Movie World website but I've excluded any upcharges, land mentions, and I've marked all assorted main street shows and meet & greets as 1 point each. 

From let's try figure out the 'expectation' for the days quality which we can do by dividing the park attraction score by 5. When rounded out this gives us a 6. 

Now, using today as an example, let's add up the attractions which are currently down using the same numbers we gave them above which we will call the 'outage score'. This is what is down today:

• Wild West Falls
• Superman Escape
• Batwing

This gives us an 'outage score' of 8 against an 'expectation' of 6. Now it gets a bit subjective, but the distance from the 'expectation' should be a good determination of the day with the score itself being 'average', so today would be below average.

The reason I've mapped it out like this is because (I hope) that it can easily be applied to all other parks and creates an equal footing for the expectations of parks and future planning. For example, after the April school holidays the park is going to have a scheduled 'outage score' of 9. If anything goes down, especially any other 'must do', then it's going to create some really lackluster days at the park. 

I'm open to criticism against this or suggestions on how it can be improved as I know it's not perfect, but I try to keep things as objective as possible when figuring these things out. We've got a lot of stuff like this that factors into our review scores as well because whilst emotions are important, they can't always be trusted to provide valid recommendations and insights. 

 

[Rivals]

 WWF now has dates added to the unscheduled closure, my guess is whatever problem they have not allowing guests to sit in the front row will hopefully be fixed. Doomsday also has a new maintenance date which can be seen bellow (14th march - 15th april), im guessing because WWF had to be down they decided to reopen doomsday until WWF reopens so guests wouldn’t have to deal with too many closures during their visit. smart move tbh

Edited February 16, 2022 by Rivals

[Universalpilot]

Dose maintenance ever finish early I’ll be in the Gold Coast from 14th to the 29th of March I’m really hoping superman will be open and hope there’s no more unscheduled maintenance when I’m there especially DC rivals I have a 14 day pass but I want be leaving till I at least go on superman once  haha 

[Slick]

23 hours ago, Universalpilot said:

Dose maintenance ever finish early I’ll be in the Gold Coast from 14th to the 29th of March I’m really hoping superman will be open and hope there’s no more unscheduled maintenance when I’m there especially DC rivals I have a 14 day pass but I want be leaving till I at least go on superman once  haha 

It has happened in the past but with a few other rides having un-planned maintenance I wouldn't hedge my bets nor make the park wrong for not opening earlier than expected.

[Rivals]

On 17/2/2022 at 5:03 PM, Universalpilot said:

Dose maintenance ever finish early I’ll be in the Gold Coast from 14th to the 29th of March I’m really hoping superman will be open and hope there’s no more unscheduled maintenance when I’m there especially DC rivals I have a 14 day pass but I want be leaving till I at least go on superman once  haha 

DC Rivals did open around a month early last year so it isn’t impossible

[Levram__]

Loving the new closure signs! Much more fitting than the previous character cutouts that didn't always align with the attractions from a theme prospective.

 

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

An A-frame with some mass-printed generic corflute signage is not an improvement on hand-painted individually tailored artworks. (I mean, its been a long time since they were individually tailored, but still...)

The problem with black and white signage is a lot of people tend to walk straight past them - especially in a village park where A-frame signs are literally everywhere.

Give me a 3-dimensional moose you can punch any day.

[Gazza]

I dunno, I thought it was quite jarring having foghorn leghorn in front of a Wild West or Superman themed ride.

[Park Addict 93]

58 minutes ago, Gazza said:

I dunno, I thought it was quite jarring having foghorn leghorn in front of a Wild West or Superman themed ride.

 

I reckon he fits in fine… 

Dreamworld have moved to individual ride themed maintenance signs (a-frames) I would like to see the same at minimum.

I did like the DC/Tunes themed signs and I also felt that their size helped with a-frame fatigue.

Edited February 20, 2022 by Park Addict 93

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

When I went to Magic Mountain in 1996, all their ride closure\maintenance\excuse our mess signage was all LT themed characters. 

Yosemite Sam is in the Movie World parking lot remindin' varmints to turn off their headlights.

I don't see an inherent problem with using the park's licenced cartoons broadly across their signage, but I did actually say 'tailored' signage, so if there were a move to re-introduce the life-size cutout characters, i'd be keen to see them have a proper, suitable board for each ride - or at the very least a Justice League theme for the DC rides, LT characters for WB Kids, & Scooby (no brainer).

Then you've only got Roxy (Either go with the current resident film star - or Marvin is perfectly fine given his long residency) and West (for which Foghorn is perfectly fine IMO, but if you wanted to,  I'd probably go with a bunch of vultures atop the signboard to fit in with the ride's bridge.

Other than the time for a painter to produce this (heck, let's face it, their digital sign printer can knock it up and they can just nail it to a piece of plywood), what's the big deal in this little attention to detail?

 

[Levithian]

The big deal is the printing looks terrible.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

15 hours ago, Levithian said:

The big deal is the printing looks terrible.

Honestly, I'd take that over cookie cutter corflute anyday.

[joz]

I'm late to this, but I wanted to add a thing that I think got missed to the 'how many rides closed chat; Arkham still there affects how many rides they can have closed before it impacts guests. In the minds of guests if you close one ride at MW, they see two. That's probably not a huge problem with 1 closed ride, but when 3 are out at once that 4th closed ride is huge!

 

Same thing at SW with Flume (SW is worse with the Monorail and Leviathan).

 

The point is that even if everything on paper is open, that isn't what the guests experience.

[Guest 239]

I went over to peep through some of the construction fencing near Arkham and whilst I was there I noticed a lot of people walking over to be disappointed by the closed attraction with no real indication as to what was happening. Whilst it's hidden from the entrance, the coaster is still super obvious when heading towards Superman.

Considering how important it was to the parks history, a lot of people would have had experiences on that coaster and be disappointed to see it just hanging out with absolutely no word on what's happening. 

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

55 minutes ago, joz said:

I'm late to this, but I wanted to add a thing that I think got missed to the 'how many rides closed chat; Arkham still there affects how many rides they can have closed before it impacts guests. In the minds of guests if you close one ride at MW, they see two. That's probably not a huge problem with 1 closed ride, but when 3 are out at once that 4th closed ride is huge!

 

Same thing at SW with Flume (SW is worse with the Monorail and Leviathan).

 

The point is that even if everything on paper is open, that isn't what the guests experience.

I don't think i've ever agreed with you more.

[themagician]

In regards to AA, it doesn’t help they haven’t removed all the signage either. There is still the sign on the wall next to Scooby to say access to the ride is left (despite the gate being closed)

[webslave]

What's concerning to me (literally, me, because I'm in town then and weighing up where to take the family) is that come mid-March Movie World will have the following rides down (not accounting for unscheds):

- Superman Escape
- Batwing Spaceshot
- Wild West Falls
- Doomsday Destroyer

Additionally, we know that Justice League is in very poor condition, and Scooby is similarly not in great nick and GL has hardly been a paragon of reliability of late.  I think I remember reading here that Rivals is pretty rough at the moment and running at reduced capacity, too.

Elsewhere a third of the kids area at Sea World will be out.

Over at DW it looks like only the Motocoaster down during the same period.

Makes it very hard to pick VRTP.

[Naazon]

Rivals being rough is a little harsh. Sure, its not silky smooth but its not rough.
Mechanically scooby is in a normal scooby state but thematically its a bit crap.

Thats all.

[Rivals]

i wouldn’t say rivals is rough it just has a bit of a vibration, but that is probably resolved anyways as they have a new train on the track now so hopefully that’s all good now

[webslave]

4 hours ago, Naazon said:

Rivals being rough is a little harsh. Sure, its not silky smooth but its not rough.
Mechanically scooby is in a normal scooby state but thematically its a bit crap.

Thats all.

It's good to hear from yourself and @Rivals that the reporting on it being rough was likely overstated and no longer current!

For me, Scooby was always quite reliant on theme as without it it's just an uncomfortable, jerky coaster.