I remember working scooby during extremely busy 11k plus days. The very easiest way to keep up a continual load was to shout instructions the entttttire time.  Even with two loaders and a grouper, guests just never listened. 

59 minutes ago, aussienetman said:

I remember working scooby during extremely busy 11k plus days. The very easiest way to keep up a continual load was to shout instructions the entttttire time.  Even with two loaders and a grouper, guests just never listened. 

Can confirm this... worked better than anything else on Scooby haha

On 25/04/2023 at 8:50 AM, Dean Barnett said:

Also the cycles were taking so long to dispatch (over 5 minutes, sometimes up to 😎 that the whole preshow video ran out and the room fell into mostly silence.

I'm pretty sure their current ops plan sends you in as a group one cycle earlier than originally intended, so you do see the pre-show run twice. it is going to have a small gap in between show-runs which is going to seem a little jarring. I hope that once they've worked out the best way to operate this they can rejig the show elements to work better with it.

 

15 hours ago, aussienetman said:

I remember working scooby during extremely busy 11k plus days. The very easiest way to keep up a continual load was to shout instructions the entttttire time.  Even with two loaders and a grouper, guests just never listened. 

Yep. No matter how many load videos you have playing in the queue, no matter how many signs, or how many PA systems you use (most ops are muffled on the mic and you can't understand them anyway) there is nothing people in these queues will pay attention to more than an op shouting at them from 3 feet away.

Back to Atlantis. Was at SW yesterday, leviathan was running 2 trains and it was very fast operations. We joined the queue and the whole spiral section was full, wait time was about 15-20min.

The was the standard general queue grouper, a grouper at the door into the station and 2 on the platform.

What was the cycle time? 

Queue time isn't really relevent when you add queue skips into the equation 

Dunno, I was there to enjoy my day with my son not perform KPI measurements. I leave work for working.

3 hours ago, Dean Barnett said:

What was the cycle time? 

Queue time isn't really relevent when you add queue skips into the equation 

Why isnt it “relevent”?

Id say as a park guess I couldnt care less about a cycle time

Im only interested in how long my wait is to ride

 

Also I assume you meant Dispatch Interval as Cycle time is the time it takes the train to complete a l

Surely as big of a theme park world expert as you knows the difference

29 minutes ago, Gobbledok said:

Why isnt it “relevent”?

Id say as a park guess I couldnt care less about a cycle time

Because it's the one factor that actually maters with ride operation speed - the queue length is irrelevent because they have no control over that. 

17 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

Because it's the one factor that actually maters with ride operation speed - the queue length is irrelevent because they have no control over that. 

The only thing that matters to a guest is how long they have to wait. 

If a ride only cycles once an hour, I couldn't give a shit if its a walk on. 

So from a metrics perspective - working out how many people will get through per hour and how efficiently they're running, sure - dispatch intervals are important. 

But to 99% of the park-going public, the wait time is all that matters.

 

26 minutes ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

The only thing that matters to a guest is how long they have to wait. 

If a ride only cycles once an hour, I couldn't give a shit if its a walk on. 

Eh I respectfually disagree - every metric that crews get rewarded on is dispatches per hour/day - as everything else is determined by it.

• Queue time for "standby"
• Queue time for "fast passses" 
• Amount of fast passes you can sustainably sell without drastly impacting the total queue time 
• Amount of per cycle addons you can sell (backwards/spinny seats)

At 5 min cycles .. 12 cycles per hour.. opening for 6 hours a day - you can only sell 144 seats for the entire day.

When I was waiting for rivals this weekend there were 12 cycles worth of people waiting for the backwards seat.. that's a one hour wait after paying $60!

The dispatch cycles on both Rivals and Levi can easily be doubled .. with simple stuff like opening the airgates once the previous riders exit the train... but I go back to my previous claim - they're artificially restricting cycles per day to reduce maintenance costs.

The only time I can recommend anyone to visit the gold coast parks is midweek, outside of school holidays - but even then the chances of all the rides being operating are very rare.

Edited April 26, 20232 yr by Dean Barnett

Wow

The force is special in this one

10 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

I respectfually disagree

Mate, respectfully - fuck off.

You've quoted my reply "the only thing that matters to a guest is how long they have to wait. If a ride only cycles once an hour, I couldn't give a shit if its a walk on" - How the fuck can you disagree with that? If a guest walks onto a ride and is immediately dispatched, do you think they're going to care if the operators take 10 minutes between dispatches?

 

Nothing in your long, analytical rambling addresses my commentary. While the ultimate aim of your long-winded ramble is to show that improved and more efficient operations will reduce wait times (spoiler - we all fucking know this), the average guest isn't going to pay attention to (nor care about) the speed of operations if the wait time was short, or substantially less than advertised. 

And if you really want to be pedantic, it's 146 seats you can sell in a day, because there's two seats dispatched at minute zero.

17 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

The dispatch cycles on both Rivals and Levi can easily be doubled

I call bullshit. From Dispatch to station park, DC Rivals cycle time is 2:30. Can they do better than 5 minute dispatch intervals - you bet. Can they easily halve it to 2:30? No. That is 100% peak efficiency, with absolutely zero fuckups. Nobody with loose items, loose shoes, difficult harness lock, not even rotating crews between station positions (something necessary for safety to prevent fatigue) - absolutely nothing can go wrong. 

I've seen an awesome crew work DCR, and dual train ops they could probably get it down, but your version of armchair theme park operations says everything is easy. 

You're wrong.

29 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

I go back to my previous claim - they're artificially restricting cycles per day to reduce maintenance costs.

I'd suggest that is a theory. You've nothing to support that except your own interpretation of operations that you've very clearly denigrated on many previous occasions.

Just now, Gobbledok said:

Wow

The force is special in this one

LOL.

6 minutes ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

If a guest walks onto a ride and is immediately dispatched, do you think they're going to care if the operators take 10 minutes between dispatches?

If a guest gets on a ride then it dispatches immediately - great.. but it's gonna suck when they have to wait 10 mins for a second go when there's no queue.

 

8 minutes ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

Can they easily halve it to 2:30? No. That is 100% peak efficiency,

The ride from the TPW POV is 1m55s (ish) from the start of the lift to clearing the brake run block. 40 seconds of that is spent on the lift, so you could theorteically run the chain slower til the previous train clear that block (like levi does). So by my math it's physically possible to dispatch a train every 90 seconds. Europa manage to dispatch Blue Fire trains every 30 seconds, with bins on the unload side of the station.

 

I just feel like every damn guest gets a really shit experience from the really slow operations and its bad for the whole industry. Just ask the European/US youtubers that just did the parks (Coaster Studios was complaning and they had the impossible to buy magical white wristband!) 

respectfully, I can tell this is going to turn into 3000 pages of you trying to prove you’re right by saying the same thing over and over again, even when no one agrees, but you wont stop due to your superiority complex. @Dean Barnettgive it a rest, we’re all tired of it.

Edited April 26, 20232 yr by Rivals

I'm happy to be proven wrong - but all the kickback i've gotten so far is just pretty poor personal insults - no logical discussion.

No one knows why Rivals has seatbelts (but Levi doesn't) and why they won't let anyone do their own seatbelts.

I don't think your comments are wrong with regards to measuring ride operations success as time between dispatches, but like others have said, joe shmoe simply won't care; parks will though like you've said, more dispatches+more maintenance+more cost. I don't think your theory is on the extreme side of the conspiracy theory spectrum, but unless someone from VTRP speaks out, or a previous employee breaks an NDA to confirm/deny this, it will only ever remain a theory, on both ends of the argument.

Edited April 26, 20232 yr by franky
I'm bad at maths

Quote

a guest walks onto a ride and is immediately dispatched, do you think they're going to care if the operators take 10 minutes between dispatches?

What if you are in the station and are sitting around for ages. I've experienced that too in some places. Or worse still waiting for a minimum number of guests to cycle.

41 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

I'm happy to be proven wrong - but all the kickback i've gotten so far is just pretty poor personal insults - no logical discussion.

No one knows why Rivals has seatbelts (but Levi doesn't) and why they won't let anyone do their own seatbelts.

Calm down precious, nobody is insulting you just petty personal insults. You said something silly and people are calling you out. 
You can write 17 pages of largely verbose information but that doesn’t change the fact that all a guest cares about is how long they have to wait for a ride. It’s pretty clear to see that’s what everyone is saying. 
You’re merely listing all the factors that contribute to what determines the length of that wait. 
 

WTF does Rivals Seatbelts have to do with this?

And your theories that they slow ops to save on maintenance are ridiculous. 

1 minute ago, rappa said:

Calm down precious, nobody is insulting you just petty personal insults.

 

1 hour ago, DaptoFunlandGuy said:

Mate, respectfully - fuck off.

 

1 minute ago, rappa said:

WTF does Rivals Seatbelts have to do with this?

Rivals doesn't need seatbelts. 

Rivals certaintly doesn't need operators to put the seatbelts on.

2 minutes ago, rappa said:

And your theories that they slow ops to save on maintenance are ridiculous. 

I'm happy to hear other reasons why their operations are so slow.

4 hours ago, Dean Barnett said:

every metric that crews get rewarded on is dispatches per hour/day

The GP don’t give a flying f what crews are rewarded on. 
 

they care about the queue line wait time. 
 

that is all. 
 

you choose the stupidest hills to die on (seatbelts, counters, turnstiles) 

Don't you guys understand that the queue line wait time is directly related to the cycle time?

53 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

Don't you guys understand that the queue line wait time is directly related to the cycle time?

FFS 

of course it does, but Joe Public doesn’t give a shit in the world whether his 40min wait encompasses 7 cycles or 17. 
 

 

Look I think asking how long between dispatches is totally a valid question. Saying thatthe length of the queue is irrelevant, is also kind of stupid.

Edited April 26, 20232 yr by joz

You should probably go back to the original reply.. saying the "whole spiral section was full" was full doesn't really give a great indication on how quickly the ride was cycling.  What's our defintion of the sprial section being full? 

 

17 minutes ago, Brad2912 said:

Joe Public doesn’t give a shit in the world whether his 40min wait encompasses 7 cycles or 17. 

Joe Public really appreciates a queue that moves ... especially at over twice the speed!

4 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

What's our defintion of the sprial section being full?

People queuing up, and filling up the spiral section, without extending past into the ride entry.

 

Standard queue. No covid gaps, no one sitting with a picnic lunch. just people in groups standing and talking.