Coaster Game

Interesting. Did Cargo shorts find the loophole?!?

Also Bluestreaker- Re-read that paragraph.

Sorry, Chick-fil-A has declined to participate. We will have a Moe’s instead. Failing to yell “Welcome to Moe’s!” to arriving guests will not be tolerated.

All parking will be valet. Drop off and retrieve your car at the front gate; the parking lot exit is right next to the gate. No parking lot backups!

Will the kiddie coaster be called Miffed ZeRo5?

ROFL at Shane's post. That should go in the PointBuzz hall of fame.

djDaemon said:

And only one of those cracked the top 5 most popular coasters at CP in 2017, which demonstrates just how out of touch most enthusiasts are (or at least enthusiasts who played this game).

This game doesn't demonstrate that at all. You would have to play this game with the non-enthusiasts to see what ended up being their top 5.

I suspect the GP would end up with a very similar top 5 to this one.

^ DJ was referencing the ridership numbers from 2017. As top park brass often say... "people vote with their feet..."

5. Raptor with 1,151,349 riders

4. Valravn with 1,418,584 riders

3. Magnum XL-200 with 1,450,892 riders

2. GateKeeper with 1,588,646 riders

1. Millennium Force with 1,672,584 riders

https://www.cedarpoint.com/blog/fun-ride-information

I know what he was referring to. If you asked the general public to play this game I suspect that their results would be very similar to the results of the enthusiast poll.

The general public do play this game. With their feet. The results are the ridership numbers and they speak for themselves (to those who listen, anyway).

No need to self-flagellate. While the rides on the ridership top 5 are presumably better for the business interest of the parks, I'd say Maverick is a common favorite of the GP despite not having a huge ridership. Just because a guest likes a certain coaster better doesn't mean they'll skip over a B&M with a shorter, faster line. If you had a ride that provided Maverick or TTD's experience with the reliability and capacity of the B&Ms, it'd certainly perform very well in ridership.

That said, enthusiasts are much more emphatic about liking coasters more.

djDaemon said:

The general public do play this game. With their feet. The results are the ridership numbers and they speak for themselves (to those who listen, anyway).

This game has nothing to do with ridership.

Lets play The Car Game: Cruze, Camry, Tesla Model S

Which do you vote off? I bet Tesla wins. Funny how the Cruze and Camry both dust the Tesla in sales on an annual basis. But I guess in your logical world the public is wrong as clearly Tesla didn't win the game.

Or to keep this to CP, lets go back a few years when the train had the highest ridership of any ride at park. If you played this game with the park going guests do you really think the train would beat Blue Streak, Gemini, or whatever other coasters existed back at that time?

^ this!

GigaG said:

If you had a ride that provided Maverick or TTD's experience with the reliability and capacity of the B&Ms, it'd certainly perform very well in ridership.

And if my Grandmother had balls she'd be my Grandfather.

Shades said:

This game has nothing to do with ridership.

Right, that was my whole point. Enthusiasts, in my opinion, are in general poor judges of what makes a good coaster, from an investment/park management/business point of view.

But I guess in your logical world the public is wrong as clearly Tesla didn't win the game.

Again, to my original comment, which is the better product? Given that Tesla is hemorrhaging money and can't build a car at scale to save its life, I'd go with the Camry. You know, built by a company that didn't lose nearly a billion dollars last year, and instead profited more than $16 billion.

Or to keep this to CP, lets go back a few years when the train had the highest ridership of any ride at park. If you played this game with the park going guests do you really think the train would beat Blue Streak, Gemini, or whatever other coasters existed back at that time?

Since when is the train considered a coaster? It is one of the most popular rides at the park, however. And that makes sense - it can be ridden by pretty much anyone, from hand-held infants to wheelchair-bound seniors. And, again to my original point, it would likely not rank among enthusiasts' favorites, even though it is clearly a favorite among the dreaded "GP".

djDaemon said:
Since when is the train considered a coaster?

It has wheels and has a track. It’s obviously a roller coaster! ;)

What's ideal for business isn't necessarily what *should* happen, especially when the business isn't desperate to stay afloat. (See... ah, you know what article I'm gonna bring up... Online Enthusiast Morals :P)

So I know and recognize the company names: B&M, Intamin, Vekoma, etc. (mostly from lurking around here and hearing them mentioned on the Discovery and Travel Channel shows) and I recognize most coasters by name (at least the more popular ones), regardless of which park they are in - many of which I had never ridden. But if you quizzed me on all the CP coasters without any prep or outside materials, I'd be mostly guessing on which company built which coaster.

I know what I do and don't like when it comes to rides, but I will never be a coaster-nerd... (no offense intended). Does that disqualify me from being considered an enthusiast? I'm trying to figure out if I belong in the GP seats or the enthusiast seats or if there is a middle ground. (Wherever I land, quite honestly, I am okay with).

I don't belong to any of the coaster clubs and I have never been to any special sponsored events - other than those that a season pass will get me into and that Millennium Mania event or whatever it was called nearly 20 years ago. I would like to attend a Winter Chill Out or some other behind the scenes tour - it just has never worked out for me timing-wise and/or I had other things that my dollar needed to be spent on.

When it's all said and done, I suppose I am enthusiastic about coasters, but not necessarily an enthusiast. (So I just may need to edit my forum signature a bit there). I am just as enthusiastic about catching a show or spending some quality CP time with my definitely non-enthusiast wife. So as I see the labels being tossed back and forth I still wonder where the line is crossed from GP to enthusiast. Is it black and white or a sliding scale with many shades of gray?

Either way, I do enjoy reading the pissing contests that crop up from time to time! Buzz on!

<self-flagellating>

Ahhhh....

Back to the Dog and Pony Show:

(or the 2018 version: The Dawg and Poni Show)

Ridership numbers alone don't tell the whole story in my opinion. It's sort of a supply and demand equation just like in economics.

One could argue that Millenium Force's numbers would be much higher if the lines were shorter. Similarly, Magnum's would be lower if lines were longer. Maverick would certainly rank higher if only it had the available capacity to do so.

A better metric would be, what are the ridership numbers across all rides with equal lines between them. Impossible to measure, of course.

On edit: When I say "Millenium Force's numbers" I'm referring to ride popularity. Not ridership. To rank popularity you'd need equality across all rides both in terms of capacity (supply) to measure demand absent external factors like lines.

MaverickLaunch said:

One could argue that Millenium Force's numbers would be much higher if the lines were shorter. Similarly, Magnum's would be lower if lines were longer. Maverick would certainly rank higher if only it had the available capacity to do so.

This, to me, is no different than saying "Mean Streak's numbers would have been higher if the ride were more exciting and less painful."

Capacity is a ride characteristic in the same way ride elements are. That is, ride elements (like a record-breaking first drop) attract guests, and so too do short lines/waits. So again, would Maverick have higher ridership numbers if it had higher capacity? Of course! But that's no different than saying Maverick's ridership numbers would be lower if the ride were less exciting. In either case the ride's appeal and thus popularity would change.

So would it be fair if all the rides had the exact same capacity?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "fair." But if the rides all had the same capacity, the resulting ridership numbers would likely be different. And who knows? Perhaps those ridership numbers would more closely resemble the results of this game.

But they don't share the same capacity, obviously. Which probably explains why the 30 or so participants in this game (who inexplicably seem to ignore capacity as a relevant characteristic) didn't rank Valravn in the top 9, while the millions of guests who "voted" with their feet ranked it fourth, narrowly behind third place Magnum. A sampling of millions of paying guests is a far more relevant metric than 30 or so people typing on keyboards.

Again, this game has nothing to do with ridership. It is simply a question that asks you to give a +1 to one ride and a -1 to a different ride. It is impossible to draw any comparisons between the results of the game and the number of riders for any ride. Picture a venn diagram in which the two circles do not intersect.

Why do you insist on comparing the results and saying that the enthusiasts are stupid because the results of this game are not in line with ridership?

If you want to do a comparison why don't you take a survey of enthusiasts that asks them how many times they rode each ride? That result could be compared to the general ridership numbers. Or ask the general public to play the +1/-1 game. Then you could compare those results with the enthusiast game results.

Comparing the type of fruit that enthusiasts vote up or down to the most used letters of the alphabet that the general public uses makes no sense.