The New Atlantis - Reviews & Reactions

[joz]

I don't mind the low mount angle, but on the subject of stuff that doesn't matter, the videos with the stabilised horizons drive me crazy.

[Tricoart]

Horizon-locked POV's are nice 2nd/3rd POV's if they're done right, but it's annoying when them & hypersmoothed POV's are done horribly & are the only existing POV's of a ride til it opens.

[Dean Barnett]

So I finally got on Levi today - 

• Brilliant package ride 
• Best in-station preshow on the planet 
• Operations ... slow. The train takes too slow long the FBR to the unload position - I feel like this is to protect the junction to the storage track. (still not as bad as Steel Curtain) 
• Lift hill audio is great addition
• The whole experience is ruined by ops shouting at you about the loading procedures. If I had it my way they should load one train in to the really well themed tunnel that you just wizz by and then add a themed video about putting loose articles in the bins. Make the doors from that section open as soon as the previous train dispatches then it al happens automagically.

Same thing happened at Rivals - ops just barking out orders at you.. they should just give them a mic like six flags / cedar point parks. I still don't know why they won't let people put their own seatbelts on.

Operations were very slow across the board and I can't imagine being in the parks during peak periods. 

Overall- money well spent. It feels like a smaller version of Ghost Rider (one of my top tiers) 

Edited March 5, 2023 by Dean Barnett

[REGIE]

For 20M it’s a great investment. All my friends like it more then SE.  What do you mean by themed tunnel though? I don’t remember there being one other then the station

[Tricoart]

1 hour ago, REGIE said:

For 20M it’s a great investment. All my friends like it more then SE.  What do you mean by themed tunnel though? I don’t remember there being one other then the station

I assume he means to put a loose article briefing video (a la Sky Voyager) in the hallway between the end of the queue & the beginning of the station (glass doors), and have that play while the train in the station is being loaded, as to not waste time having ride ops manually call out the briefing inside the station. May be wrong, though.

Also, why are the ride ops manually doing the briefing in the first place? There's already a themed voiceover for it in the station, why would they not be using that?

Edited March 5, 2023 by Tricoart

[Dean Barnett]

6 hours ago, Tricoart said:

I assume he means to put a loose article briefing video (a la Sky Voyager) in the hallway between the end of the queue & the beginning of the station (glass doors), and have that play while the train in the station is being loaded, as to not waste time having ride ops manually call out the briefing inside the station. May be wrong, though.

Correct. 
 

It seems a bit of a waste having such a well themed area that every rider wizzes through. 

6 hours ago, Tricoart said:

There's already a themed voiceover for it in the station, why would they not be using that?

I only could do it once but I can’t recall any themed ones. The ops might have been shouting over it tho. 

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

10 hours ago, Dean Barnett said:

I still don't know why they won't let people put their own seatbelts on.

Are you sure? I'm pretty sure this has been covered in detail. 

[REGIE]

I don’t remember noticing seat belts on leviathan 

[Naazon]

7 minutes ago, REGIE said:

I don’t remember noticing seat belts on leviathan 

Hes gone back to complaining about Rivals seatbelts in a Leviathan thread cause hes awesome.

[Dean Barnett]

Sorry didn’t want to bump two old threads for no reason but yeah most of the shouting on rivals was don’t do up your seatbelt 

[aaronm]

Most Six Flags and Cedar Fair parks have one ride op wearing a microphone headset so they don't have to yell, I guess that solution is too simple for the Aussie parks though!

[Gobbledok]

The employees on mic at Six Flags is just about one of the most annoying things ever to happen in a theme park

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

Many times, due to station noise, mic technique or something else, you can't understand the rapid-fire spiels put out by some operators anyway. 

Guests check their brains at the gate. No matter what you do, you're going to have idiots who do what they aren't supposed to. This is why things are the way they are - you can't rely on people to do the right thing.

[Naazon]

Pre-recorded messages are 100% ignored because they are put on repeat so much and always sound the same so people switch off when hearing them.

It could potentially work for Leviathan since its a closed environment with a captive audience, but honestly I don't think its worth the investment there.

[Tricoart]

39 minutes ago, Naazon said:

It could potentially work for Leviathan since its a closed environment with a captive audience, but honestly I don't think its worth the investment there.

Again, they already have a pre-recorded message, but it seems the ride ops choose to shout the same things stated in the message both before, during, and after it plays for no inherent reason. Guess I only know of its existence ‘cause the ops chose not to do so one of the times I rode. Timestamp is when the message plays, but rewinding a bit you’ll hear ‘em shouting the exact same instructions beforehand: 

 

Edited March 6, 2023 by Tricoart

[Baconjack]

49 minutes ago, Naazon said:

Pre-recorded messages are 100% ignored because they are put on repeat so much and always sound the same so people switch off when hearing them.

It could potentially work for Leviathan since its a closed environment with a captive audience, but honestly I don't think its worth the investment there.

Unsure about this claim because it seems to work outside of Village Roadshow. Luna Park has one for Big Dipper and it seems to get the message across with few operational issues.

Sea World even had one for Corkscrew back in the day. Superman's video works well too, but all your stuff is meant to be put in a locker before lining up so I suppose that doesn't count.

I know i'm being picky and complaining about nothing but what's the point of spending money on rockwork and AV presentations when the ride ops in generic Village uniform just shout over it and break the immersion? Adding a mic for ops would only make things worse and break the immersion further. This isn't cedar point where every coaster is boarded inside an open air shed.

Also there is already pre recorded messages when entering and exiting the station area which ops just yell over anyway. Just keep them and let them do their job. Make them play a bit louder, even.

If that point on people not listening to pre recorded audio is true and I'm wrong, then staff on Rise of the Resistance deliver the appropriate message to riders and act like they were always meant to be there. Food for thought.

Edited March 6, 2023 by Baconjack

[Gobbledok]

Is it half a case at Leviathan that operators just like the sound of their own voice and want to boss guests around?

Maybe they are trying to hurry people to try and makeup for the horribly slow speed the design of the ride creates?

[jhunt2]

6 hours ago, Baconjack said:

Luna Park has one for Big Dipper and it seems to get the message across with few operational issues.

From an efficiency standpoint, Dipper's pre-recorded spiels are actually not very effective. I say this having worked on BD for almost a year now. The entry spiel in particular is rather long-winded and wastes its time on the world-first claims before getting to any important information. Guests are often seated before the actually important stuff starts.

Also, both the entry and exit spiels miss several of the most important aspects such as glasses not being permitted, asking guests not to do their own lapbars, direction of exit, and the whole "crossing your arms" thing. All of those have been causes of frustrating delays in my experiences at Dipper, and the pre-recorded spiels don't even mention them. It's probably the product of the spiels being recorded before the ride was complete or open to the public, meaning those issues weren't foreseen.

The saving graces that make Dipper so efficient in my experience are the low capacity, meaning the attendants can basically address those issues face-to-face since they have so few riders to worry about per train, and the microphone. Some operators do their own spiels and don't ever use the pre-recorded ones, and even many of the operators who do use the recorded ones will still have to resort to either using the microphone or asking their attendants to address a particular guest issue.

Ultimately, the pre-recorded spiels do very little for Dipper's actual efficiency and are often all but ignored by most riders. Especially with such a short ride time meaning the spiels are on repeat almost every 90 seconds, they basically become background noise to anyone who is within earshot of the station for more than 3 cycles.

I'm personally a microphone spiel kind of guy, but I'd give more credit for efficiency to the attendants who proactively tackle the issue head-on. You can say "put your phone in the locker" a million times to someone over a speaker, but guests will be having their own conversations and generally not paying attention. Or just being idiots in some cases. Nothing quite works as effectively as a staff member telling them what to do to their face, which unfortunately is just not realistic on any ride with a capacity higher than the abnormally (and ironically) small Dipper.

[Dean Barnett]

16 hours ago, Gobbledok said:

The employees on mic at Six Flags is just about one of the most annoying things ever to happen in a theme park

But they pump out trains - safely and very quickly

 

15 hours ago, Tricoart said:

Timestamp is when the message plays, but rewinding a bit you’ll hear ‘em shouting the exact same instructions beforehand: 

That video is insane - the train is just sitting there for minutes doing nothing.. why aren't the airgates opened before the guests get there? Why are staff shouting orders at guests just to have a nicer-prerecorded message play moments later? Also most of the riders will be repeat riders in the back half of the day - but still have to be put up with shouted at. Can't say I've ever seen that before on any other coaster's ive done

 

15 hours ago, Baconjack said:

This isn't cedar point where every coaster is boarded inside an open air shed.

It feels like they're in a middle ground between Disney parks and Cedar Fair parks .. Both have excellent operations but just go different ways around it. I'm happy with what ever direction they go - I would love rivals to meet the 30 second dispatches that Blue Fire gets at Europa. 

 

15 hours ago, Baconjack said:

Also there is already pre recorded messages when entering and exiting the station area which ops just yell over anyway. Just keep them and let them do their job. Make them play a bit louder, even.

Maybe the announcements could be combined with visuals on the screens too.. since the entire station is a LED wall.

 

8 hours ago, Gobbledok said:

Is it half a case at Leviathan that operators just like the sound of their own voice and want to boss guests around?

Maybe they are trying to hurry people to try and makeup for the horribly slow speed the design of the ride creates?

They could easily do the speil in the time the ride takes to go from the FBR to the unload spot.. close to 30 seconds by my count.. the the train isn't just sitting there doing nothing. 

 

8 hours ago, jhunt2 said:

Nothing quite works as effectively as a staff member telling them what to do to their face, which unfortunately is just not realistic on any ride with a capacity higher than the abnormally (and ironically) small Dipper.

You should see how they load the RMC single rails.. the trains don't stop.. the lapbars open one by one as they pass a point in the station, former riders get out, new riders get in, pull their lapbar down or the op does then secures the car, one at a time - then if all the cars are secure it continues on to the lift hill. Magical stuff. Free lockers below the station.

[jhunt2]

2 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

You should see how they load the RMC single rails.. the trains don't stop.. the lapbars open one by one as they pass a point in the station, former riders get out, new riders get in, pull their lapbar down or the op does then secures the car, one at a time - then if all the cars are secure it continues on to the lift hill. Magical stuff. Free lockers below the station.

Sounds like a similar thing then, they basically work so well because each rider is actually boarding one at a time, and therefore attendants can just address issues to their face instead of hoping they listened to a general announcement.

Obviously you're still going to have riders who struggle to board due to size, stature, mobility, nervousness, etc etc. It happens a lot. Did you happen to witness what the procedure is in this case? From an operator's perspective, that would be my only worry with a constantly moving load station and loading one by one - that my efficiency for the entire train gets derailed the moment someone needs a little extra help through no fault of their own. At least when you're loading all 7 seats on Dipper, if someone needs a bit of extra attention, you can let the other 6 riders sit themselves down while your attendants assist, and in theory you don't lose as much time.

[Dean Barnett]

6 minutes ago, jhunt2 said:

Did you happen to witness what the procedure is in this case?

If the train reaches a certain spot on the platform and there is a unsecure harness the train just stops. From memory I think they can multimove trains from the section after the end block brake to the end of the station. 

I did see a few riders that were too large for the ride, they tried to secure them but couldn't.. then they just walked off - while the train was still moving. 

 

Hagride at Universal is even more impressive - the trains get so close to each other in the station (next to a walkway that moves at the same speed as the trains) that you can't tell what car you're in (order of the train) until you either read the numberplate infront of you, or until it reaches the end of the station. The ride attendants have two RFID touch points (like ST but useful). One marks the car as secure, the other re-opens the restraint. 

 

[REGIE]

Staff could give you the safety speech when you line up in-front of the mirror door out side and once they are done push the button and you can then go through. Then they could use the prerecorded message in the station. 🤷🏼‍♂️ 

Edited March 7, 2023 by REGIE

[Dean Barnett]

Is that what that button does?

[REGIE]

Yeah I was lining up and almost leaned on it and the staff said “don’t touch that!” So I asked the staff what it did and he said it just opens the sliding door. 

[New display name]

People press it all the time and the staff have to call people back out of the tunnel.