New Steel Vengeance Locker System for 2021

They shouldn't wait as long to let people in past the merge point. If you are one of the first ones in, they don't get through the lockers quick enough to fill the train.

And they need to have two people with the wands. When it was just metal detectors, the line moved quickly after the lockers. Now it stalls....especially when they are just using one line

The metal detectors don't even work anymore in my opinion. A kid in front of me went through and he set it off. He was wearing athletic clothes with no metal on him from what I could tell. The worker passed over him twice with the wand to make sure he was fine. This just adds time more to the whole process with less people getting up the stairs. Then if the ride host allowing people on the platform doesn't fill all the seats when there are people on the stairs, that makes it worse. Last Friday the host allowed a group to stand off to the side (which is fine it is nice to ride together with a big group), but never found people from the other set of stairs or behind that group to fill the empty seats. My cousin, myself and the single rider in front of us could have taken three of the empty six seats. Hopefully they can find a better solution to use for next season to send full trains.

Why wait until next season to figure out a solution? Do it now! We still have the month of October. It sounds like a lazy attendant. Doesn't want to get off his/her ass and figure out how many to let on the platform to fill a train.

Something must have happened for the park to choose to have someone wand for objects rather than rely on the metal detectors.

But yes, can confirm the line moves painfully slow when there's only one person wanding people. He was moving pretty quick but it still takes 5-10 seconds to do it per person. Even at 5 seconds per person, you're looking at 12 people per minute moving through and how quickly are they dispatching trains? It gets worse when he finds something and the person has to pull it out or show that their pocket is empty. I think that's where the trains start going half full.

This process remains a catastrophe. When I saw that 22 seats out of 24 empty train running the course while waiting in a full queue FLP line this July, I couldn't believe my eyes. 8 trains in a row with large amounts of empty seats during that particular wait. The merge point and detectors point both need to be operating quickly and smartly in order for the trains to stay full. Station ops were fast as hell all 4 days of our trip, so if you don't keep feeding them guests past the detectors, they'll be running with empty seats in no time. For a ride that can hold 2 hour standby lines and 50 minute FLP lines regularly, it's totally and completely unacceptable.

I haven't been then since they went down to one person with the wand but that wasn't the problem the times I went there. Both stairs had more than enough people to fill a train but the op just wasn't letting them in the station fast enough. They also don't pull people evenly, it's hit or miss. But either way that doesn't really matter if combined they don't let in enough to fill a train. Something definitely needs to change.

On the metal detectors by the way, I noticed that they were both going off every time anyone walked through. When he had to wand me he even stated, "they don't work, that's why we wand everyone." To which I replied, "well then why even bother with the detector, just wand everyone right away." His answer was that management wants everyone to go through the metal detectors separately anyway and still get wanded. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

Scott Cameron said:

His answer was that management wants everyone to go through the metal detectors separately anyway and still get wanded. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

Sounds right on par with how management handled things when I left the company. Glad to see not much has changed.

The solution to all of this seems simple; if you want to play "TSA" for one of your rides, do it before anyone enters the queue to begin with. Why in god's name would you have any of this setup so deep inside the queue itself, and not taken care of before anyone gets more than 50 feet into the entrance?

But what do I know?

Maybe airports should start screening passengers as they are boarding the airplane, and not 2 hours before they get to the gate.

The extensive wanding is new this season, right? I don’t remember it from past seasons (or even the beginning of this one).

Ultimately, I think that one employee wanding each and every guest on all four sides and thoroughly examining every detection/pocket bulge is going to create a bottleneck—regardless of where it happens in the queue.

I’m not sure what the solution is (although, two metal detection stations seemed to work fine on my recent trips), but I definitely don’t want the park to go back to flooding the lengthy post-merge line. That creates a terrible value for FLP guests.

The solution would seem to be metal detectors that actually work and proper training/supervision. Maybe some cheap security headsets/radios for the turnstile, merge, and metal detection people to communicate would help although it seems like a quick peak down the tunnel to see that it's nearing empty should trigger you to send more people in. At turnstile, it seems that as soon as the previous group boards, you should IMMEDIATELY begin filling the rows again, but what do I know?

I've seen it working quite well at times this season. I've also seen trains going half empty despite a full queue when you get the wrong employee at one or two of a few key positions.

If the simple act of riding a roller coaster REQUIRES all of what

I've been reading here...

Then I have to ask: Why not just TAER IT DOWN?!?!

Between wanding and metal detectors and FL and FLP, I guess I'm

pretty happy my last visit was 2003. Back when an amusement park

was an amusement park and not a gauge of social or financial status

or who had what in their pockets. Or this pass or that pass or another

pass (did I forget one, maybe two??). Everybody paid gate price and

was on equal ground and waited in ONE LINE per ride.

This is NOT "progress".

And if it IS "progress", explain it to me like I am in kindergarten.

Kevinj said:

The solution to all of this seems simple; if you want to play "TSA" for one of your rides, do it before anyone enters the queue to begin with. Why in god's name would you have any of this setup so deep inside the queue itself, and not taken care of before anyone gets more than 50 feet into the entrance?

All this time, I guess I didn't really appreciate that this was the case (strong reading on my part, right?). As completely ridiculous as it seems on Rip Ride Rockit at Universal Orlando, they don't want you bringing stuff on. So they have the lockers outside of the entrance and the magnetometers at the entrance. You stash your crap, get in line, people are forced to talk to each other without their phones, and eventually you ride. I imagine the problem that they're trying to solve for is really loose change, since the vertical lift will empty loose pockets. As unnecessary as it all seems, they're not sending empty seats.

Loose Change > Rip Ride Rocket.

Oops....wrong Buzz ;)

That's how it used to be on Steel Vengeance when the only lockers were outside of the ride. But those cost $2 and enough people complained they couldn't bring phones into the line and we are where we are.

All they need to do is do it like Velocicoaster at IoA and constantly stream guests in and out of the locker area so they can then constantly stream guests through the magnometers and back into the final portion of the queue. The set up is fine. They are just too conservative when sending groups to the lockers.

DaveDzRochNY said:

This is NOT "progress".

We'll leave that up to John to decide.

Cartwright said:

All they need to do is do it like Velocicoaster at IoA and constantly stream guests in and out of the locker area so they can then constantly stream guests through the magnometers and back into the final portion of the queue.

99% of people posting here (including myself) have no idea what you are talking about, even if it's an awesome idea.

Feel free to elaborate on that setup, though.

It's an indoor queue but the setup is virtually the same as Steel Vengeance. Banks of lockers that are double sided so you pass one side in the queue and the other side on the exit.

But it's really just a constant stream of guests into the locker area. They only pause the line when it really gets backed up. Whereas Steel Vengeance may only send 20-25 guests into the locker bank every few minutes, you may have 60-70 guests in the Velocicoaster locker bank, ensuring the line never runs out up in the station.

The difference at Steel Vengeance is you have the Fastlane merge all the way back in the main queue, so you don't want Fastlane guests to then be trapped in the long corridor to the lockers for a long time (which, I believe, was an issue on Opening Weekend as they worked out the kinks). But you can easily double the number of guests admitted into the locker bank at a time to ensure there is always a steady stream of guests through the magnometers and up the queue steps to fill trains.

Even as a Fastlane guest, I'd rather wait 10 minutes for a ride knowing they are filling all the trains rather than walk on and see 8-10 empty rows going out on each train knowing there's two hours worth of guests in the main queue.

Kevinj said:

The solution to all of this seems simple; if you want to play "TSA" for one of your rides, do it before anyone enters the queue to begin with.

Yes, but the limiting factor in any case is going to be the throughput of the metal detectors. Even if you locate them outside the queue, if the process can only supply a warm body every ~7.5 seconds (based on the anecdotal observations above), that means the ride will be limited to a capacity of 480 people per hour, a mere 40% of design capacity, which is roughly the equivalent of leaving 14 of the 24 seats empty every dispatch if they were hitting interval.

But let's say they realistically could hit 75% capacity without the limitation of having to scan everyone. In that case the queue needs a body every 4 seconds, so they need to roughly double the capacity their scanning currently provides.

In any case it seems like the root cause here is that their equipment is not up to the task of reliably scanning folks quickly enough. Maybe a more reliable magnetometer outside the queue that everyone passes through, and anyone who triggers it is pulled aside to be wanded.

Unless the capacity of the detectors is increased, wouldn't putting the detectors at the beginning of the queue make things even worse in regards to filling trains? I would be afraid that people wouldn't walk fast enough through the empty queue to even run at the 1/2 capacity that the current detectors allow for. Everyone would be taking selfies as to how empty the queue is. Or they would stop and take a drink, or they would tie their shoe.