webslave

A few reasons; You need to allow time for the full extent of (and ongoing impact of) the injury to manifest itself. This can take at least a couple of months. You are likely to engage with the park either via counsel or directly to reach a settlement before having to go to the time and expense of going to court. The park will involve their insurer who will want to investigate, collect evidence and may wish to negotiate a settlement. You need to spend the time finding appropriate counsel, and then providing them with an appropriate summation and brief of evidence.

Completely shameless cash-grab. Ugh.

I can't imagine any of the centers that run stuff like league, etc would go for this. Edit: Jesus, bowling is done: https://brunswickbowling.com/bowling-centers/equipment-parts-supplies/center-environment/pinsetters/stringpin-pinsetter "Brunswick StringPin meets International Bowling Federation (IBF) specifications. This includes specifications related to kickback, kickback plates, pin deck, pins, gutter, and installation. The IBF announced in November 2021 that it has approved string pin technology for sport leagues and competitive tournament play worldwide. After careful study, the IBF concluded that string machines help proprietors address multiple business challenges, including keeping experienced maintenance technicians on staff, high equipment costs, and machine reliability concerns. The IBF also reported that bowling averages on string machines are very close to those bowled on freefall machines and that string machines do not give the bowler any significant scoring advantage."

Jesus, that's pretty dire. They'd only get away with that in tourist traps.

If you're talking about the four lanes inside the Timezone itself (as opposed to the purpose-built alley adjacent) then they are the same Highway 66 systems they had in the same spot (albeit rotated 90 degrees). They have always been pinspot-by-wire: https://www.qubicaamf.com/bowling-products/mini-bowling/highway-66 They are based on smaller balls, smaller pins, etc, and are targeted at young kids.

Don't be too upset; I'm a busy man so you'll still be able to maintain a monopoly on gatekeeping and crying every time someone criticizes VRTP.

Yeah, nah. Not so much. If you're talking domestic units then you expect to find them either; On the wrong input. Not turned on. Calibration miles out. Backlight burn-out. Poor (fine) image quality. What it doesn't change is what you're feeding them, and the vast majority of reports suggest bad sync, frozen image and low framerate; none of which are the issue of the display.

I dare say then that your experience may be right up there with "according to statistics I overheard in a dream last night". "Use Caution" is of no function unless the use of caution is a defined set of actions and/or criteria. How exactly do you think you would "cautiously" dispatch a roller coaster train with regard to wind influence? What additional precautions do you think would or should be taken? When engineering mechanical plant like this we tend not to use ambiguous and nebulous instructions such as "use caution" which put the onus back onto operators, particularly when there's no guidance for said operations on what that means. I think you need to keep in-mind that the ride is specified at empty because it's entirely foreseeable that there may be occasions where you would at the very least be dispatching a train with only one or two (potentially light) guests, not to mention that entirely routine practice of cycling the ride empty.

Generally in these types of setups the anemometer at the top of the lift hill is linked with the ride PLC and as such acts as an interlock which will prevent a dispatch if recorded winds exceed the design spec of the ride (which is based upon an empty train anyway). In fact, in most cases I've seen the PLC starts a one-shot 30-min timer if the wind speed goes above threshold and will prevent dispatch for the duration, with the timer resetting every time a new wind event is recorded. I'd be surprised if Rivals is any different, ergo it wouldn't even be possible for them to send a train if the wind was too strong.

Take Dreamworld and roller-coasters out of it for a second; if the Government today announced that money previously earmarked for a stand-alone Koala research facility had been re-allocated to helping restart Queensland's badly affected tourism industry post-Covid would you still have the low-tide brigade on social media bitching about it because "Koalas are cute"? I'd wager you would.

Pretty open-and-shut, really. Provided the park asked for a variation of the conditions on the money (and were granted it) their hands are clean. After all - if a Koala research center was of such primary importance would a theme park be your first port of call on who to give money to for it? If the Government had said no to the repurposing of money and then DW did it anyway, then fair enough - controversy. If DW hadn't asked in the first place and repurposed the money, then fair enough - controversy. This here ain't much of anything.

One of the things that turned us away from DW on our last visit is we knew we got access to a water park with the VRTP pass, whereas the WWW access was weekends only, and therefore was just going to mean bigger crowds which didn't interest us. We also felt the kids area has gotten a bit light-on, and one of our kids is really in to Paw Patrol.

My first thought was that it was actually quite a flex to find an IP with less relevance to kids today than Looney Tunes, but here we are.

Yeah, that can work, but you have to balance that against human nature. If you incentivize your people based on dispatches, then dispatches become the focus of their employment. You'd hope it wouldn't happen, but the sad reality is you then run the risk that other things can fall by the wayside in pursuit of dispatches; namely safety. The nightmare scenario for management is that an incident occurs that comes down to human error (or shortcuts) and it comes out that management has been paying staff to speed up dispatches. Don't get me wrong; there's ways of being able to do this, but it requires a lot more oversight to make sure you aren't putting the guests or the business at risk.

Yeah, that's a very ordinary menu. Rick's used to be what made eating at the park tolerable.

That's... a bit naff.

Yeah, I also found Super Ripper to be very slow, to the point that you almost stop.

For a place struggling with staff numbers they always seem to have enough to push churros and so-cones...

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but you're not really getting a lot of support here for your point of view. The customers seem pretty upset about it too. Maybe - just maybe - you might be living your own reality on this one? I know you love to defend the VRTP properties but this one is a bit of a stretch.

Who was caught off-guard? Are you telling me now that the issue was not actually availability of staff but that instead the parks were just caught off-guard? That seems at odds with comments you made earlier. I don't for a moment believe that the park was caught off-guard. I think they knew what type of attendance to expect, and captain surly on MW's Facebook page would even have to agree. It's unfathomable that they did not know. And yeah, people know the last two years have sucked. That's been part of the marketing to get them to the parks; get a break from the last two years and have fun. What you don't get to do is engineer a situation where demand greatly exceeds supply, still charge those people full-whack, and then hand-waive it away as "well the last two years has sucked". Lots of us are struggling for staff. If we don't have enough staff then we have to forego the work - rather than me just taking the money, spreading the crew too thin, and screwing my customers.

Well, pretty easily given for the last six months the industry has been advertising for people to do just that. If you advertise for it to happen, and then you sell tickets that would suggest people are going to do what you advertised to get them to do then it probably isn't on the punters. After all, we do not tolerate a hotel selling rooms that they do not have, we do not tolerate restaurants taking bookings for tables they do not have and we do not tolerate cinemas selling more tickets to a film than there are seats in the theatre. The expectation from a consumer is that their tickets will be fit for the purpose they intend. No consumer intends to spend all day in line and be able to do two attractions. At some point you need to stop selling rather than blaming the customer.

I just can't imagine what would give the public the impression the parks were ready, willing and able to welcome back the public... I mean, the messaging has been all about "we can't wait to welcome you back" and "it's great to have our parks open and firing on all cylinders again", rather than "but not too many of you because we don't have enough staff to cope". If you know you're running thin and you don't have any levers to pull to increase capacity then you either choose to collect the cash and let people have a shitty day, or forego the cash and look after the customers. Being turned away at the gate for one reason or another (in this case because the park is full) is something that the park knows how to handle, and is a one-off disappointment to a customer (that, I might add, you could probably do something about in advance) compared to letting those customers in and having a full day of misery that you present as the genuine experience.

Take the lead from businesses that are already universally regarded as anti-consumer, money-grubbing pieces of trash? Yeah, good one. Well, yes, they probably should have. Otherwise at what point do you shut the gates? I mean, if you hit the number you can safely admit to the park you're having to say exactly that anyway, so it's not like you're never prepared to say that. Same outcome as shutting the park on days where the weather is unsuitable to operate ("sorry you paid, but we aren't opening today"). Contingencies exist for handling that situation - it's not like it's impossible. The notion that you just keep admitting as many guests as turn up no matter what it does to your brand is lunacy, and I'd think you'd be above seriously suggesting it as a viable option

I don't think that's what people are accusing them of. Instead they are variously accusing them of incompetence, laziness, and money-grubbing at the expense of the bigger picture. Can you really, honestly say any of our parks haven't ably demonstrated each of those in at least the recent past?

Tbf, if a restaurant churned out the trash I had at the VRTP parks a few weeks ago they wouldn't stay a restaurant for very long. You either play properly in the restaurant space and as such can make comparisons to what is and isn't allowed in restaurants, or you keep doing what you're doing now with abysmal offerings and turn a blind eye.