Richard

Village doesn't own the Wet'n'Wild name in the US so that's a different set of circumstances. The Sydney local market directly impacts the Gold Coast tourism market unlike regional US water parks that have no bearing whatsoever on each other. Maintaining complete ownership of the Wet'n'Wild name in Australia would have been very important to Village in this deal. Not sure why anyone would feel disappointed about losing the WNW name in Sydney. VRTP did their very best to destroy the brand and associated goodwill with that park. It's just a name, logically it was always going to happen and it's in everyone's best interests. Village can restore faith in the WNW brand by investing at the Gold Coast (we're waiting...), Parques Reunidos can draw a line in the sand and operate Raging Waters without the baggage of six failed seasons (they get to disappoint people on their own terms).

OK joke's been done. Can we try and stick to commenting on current affairs?

It's worth pointing out that the coaster layout shown in the artist's rendering is not the final product. There were three iterations of the coaster layout by Martin & Vleminckx / Gravity Group. The finalised layout is the one depicted in the scale model: https://www.parkz.com.au/photo/19332-Leviathan_model/gallery/sort/newest/location/ride-4166-Leviathan/offset/0

@CaptainLazerGuns, you've come into this discussion with vague assertions and straw man fallacies. Responses have been made to you in a rational, respectful manner. I write articles like this to get people to think and react so I'm more than happy for respectful discussion/critiquing but as it stands all you've really offered is ad hominems about the community at large. Even that would probably be fine were you not claiming to be taking the high road while simultaneously goading members and dishing out bizarre pejoratives about lists and gifs (it's 2019?) that don't actually exist in this thread and rarely at all in these forums. By all means share your opinions, but expect replies. This attitude of taking your ball and going home because others disagree really has no place here.

Everything I said above applies here. Let's steer this one back on topic.

What you're calling a negative bias and an echo chamber is backed up by investors, market analysts, and finance publications like AFR. It's backed up by social media comments in the wider public. It's backed up by attendance patterns and corresponding performance of the respective park operators. At this point I don't think the onus is on this "echo chamber" to prove you wrong, when you've seemingly misinterpreted the article and then ignored every respectful rebuttal to your arguments.

At $15-plus million a piece these were never intended as band-aids. Investors are sceptical. Industry insiders are sceptical. Would-be guests are sceptical. There's plenty of justification for scepticism and in this case measured optimism about this latest development, and that's what this article is about. As for disappointment, I'm probably missing what you're getting at here. At a quick glance, I see commentary to the effect of "this is good" no less than six times throughout the article and nothing resembling disappointment.

In an effort to nip this in the bud before it becomes a thousand pages long... let's talk about 2020 wooden coasters (or whatever) in this thread, but 2019 domes (or whatever) over here:

Isn't that precisely the point? Non-students have more money and therefore can afford to visit at more appropriate times rather than on a Wednesday night.

Watch it again. They commenced talks prior to the accident. At the same time Brogent were also in talks with several other operators/locations and Dreamworld were also looking very closely at other attractions around this time. Even so, let's say the deal was signed prior. A deposit is normally paid to a manufacturer to secure an attraction. That doesn't mean it can't be put on hold or even cancelled by the operator if circumstances change. Simplifying the situation, it is entirely correct to state that they proceeded with the I-Ride to "save" Dreamworld.

Personally I would be taking this post at face value...

Despite the spate of fake accounts of late, we can confirm that @henryjones doesn't appear to match any recent troublemakers. Personally I would be taking this post at face value...

If you want to discuss the specific maintenance of a particular attraction, feel free to start a new topic.

Just to clarify our policy on mega-threads: We want people to start new threads to discuss new things, even if it's relatively minor. It's easier for everyone to find and follow what they're interested in this way and there's no harm in a thread with only a few replies discussing something small like park map changes. Construction threads are really the only exception to this as it's useful to keep this lumped together and in easy chronological order for future reference. In this case a new thread to show map changes is perfectly fine and preferable to adding it to the construction thread because it's different enough. We changed the title of this thread from "Dreamworld minor updates" early on to prevent it from becoming another mega-thread.

I really should have said only for word of mouth. Is an attraction that's notoriously difficult for even the likes of Disney to sell to the public the best possible use of ~$17 million for Dreamworld right now? Does Dreamworld need a sleeper hit that will bump their TripAdvisor rating from 4.0 to 4.1 over the next year or two, or do they need to dramatically change the narrative now? They've been back offering $79 annual pass renewals despite it being peak season and the launch of their first major attraction in years. That's a good indication that something is missing the mark.