themagician

Vortex is closed tomorrow (and at this stage is only for that one day). I did notice a large crane on site this morning. Could this be the begging of trident being lifted into place. Potentially they are lifting the base of the tower into place today? And considering vortex is closed tomorrow does that mean it will either all be installed or partially installed.

Interested to know if anything for the attraction has changed in the park with the update to the rides name on the website. On my last visit I didn’t notice any signage changes

When you compare photos of the train there are a few differences visible. Look at the front of the train for example where the wheels are. Colour order of the bikes are completely different too. The harness system is different and more restrictive now. And when I asked a head ride operator for the park about if the ride had got faster (when that info was circulating online) they confirmed it had because the trains were lighter now.

They got new trains late last year

They definitely could use the TOT station area, but the issue is the train. The train track divides the area and causes the level change. They could level it out however and have a crossing to access Tiger Island, so you don’t have that dark confines tunnel.

I really hope it’s for the abc kids area and they bring us a great family dark ride based around LEGO. Maybe a shooter ride like they have in Legoland. That entire area is so tired and old and needs to be completely demolished and started fresh. If needed they could potentially take the billabong restaurant as well and utilise that space. Dreamworks is still a great area and I don’t think it really needs any work done to it (unless the contract has come to an end)

And I can’t seem to find their comments anymore that we’re responding to the business either You can still post directly on the parks page, but unless my memory is failing me, it seems a few have been deleted that were complaints. This is the only one I could see.

But the parks not open today?

Does anyone know what this timber structure once was?

That reo seen in the images above was for a new pathway built alongside the current pathway under the GD. I’m assuming they old one will be closed off to allow for the refurbishment of the tower. I really do hope they use this time to fix the mess that this area of the park has become. With the shade sail over the MDMC now gone, it allows for a great vantage point for photos of the launch track from the GD exit. Unfortunately MDMC it’s scheduled to reopen next week when GD closes so anyone who wants to try get some good shots from this angle will have to wait until September.

Driving past MW this morning the carpark appeared to be much quieter than last weekend. DWs carpark wasn’t too full (WWW appeared to be very quiet) so most the crowd was in DW and it felt reasonably busy.

Hopefully these temporary closures don’t last too long as Rivals and WWF are closed from Tuesday

Not sure if this is in response to the chaos that there has been at the VRTP Easter school holidays, but they have published their parks operating hours for the rest of the year. And it is great to see they are extending the trading hours for the September and Summer holidays. Wet n Wild slightly reduces their hours for the winter, but it’s great to see they are already stating they will be open until 8 next Summer. Movie World is slightly extending the hours for September and a reasonable amount of time for Summer (wouldn’t expect anymore because of the houses nearby) And SW will extend their too

My concern with that queue (which hopefully they have thought of and will have a solution for) is people will just throw and leave rubbish in between all the timber structure of the coaster. I do hope there is some (nice) screening around the perimeter of the queue to stop this. Id image they would have some form of fence to stop people wandering through the ride structure anyways.

@Rivals in saying that, I remember pre Covid I saw a Chinese tour group at MW sat at tables seating sandwiches they brought in and security walked over and told them they couldn’t eat them in the park. Which I thought was really weird and is it actually necessary to enforce like that (I get the park want you to buy their food, but still). I did notice DW have a sign out the front of the park currently, which I presume is there while the food festival is on

It has indeed been a thing for as long as I can remember. The water parks I believe are the only exceptions to that rule. Another option is you pack lunch, leave it in an eski in your car and go have a lovely lunch in the carpark and then re-enter the park.

That fences has been like that for quite a while now, but I’m thinking they will indeed be fixing this area up. There is a bunch of reo underneath that sheeting you can see in the photo. I really hope it is indeed an end to spaghetti junction. This would require closing to corner of the park off, but considering you can access the wildlife through kids world, it wouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Queue times are insane again today (photo taken from someone’s comment on MWs FB post)

That is the shittest response ever. I feel like they are sick of seeing all these comments about how busy the park was and they’ve just had enough and written something like that. If I was in their position, I’d probably be pissed off too seeing so many people complain. But what do they expect, a four hour queue for one ride and minimum. 2 hours for the remaining headline attractions (whether it’s their fault or not) is insane and people are going to complain about it when they’ve spent so much to get in.

Very good points @DaptoFunlandGuy. If Australia was reporting that many incidents the industry would crash or we’ve have every ride have modifications made like we saw on RHLR or shockwave and we know how horrible those changes were. Continuing on the discussion about Rivals, could it also be something relating to the ride manufacturer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the trains for Steel Taipan and Rivals the same? We’ve seen with ST they’ve added this LED light that the ride operator has to scan before the train leave the station. Could it be Mack have updated their standards/practices for their coasters with the older train models, which therefore impact the loading and harness check procedures. Just stating random thoughts I’m having about the situation to try understand the reasoning behind these insane queue times.

Has anyone ridden rivals recently and noticed anything different with their load/unload procedures. Do they check harnesses differently or something? Surely there is a reason for why it’s such a long gap between trains arriving and leaving the station.

From the outside SE didn’t seem like it was operating 2 trains, but that’s good if they are. When I was there at 12pm the entire indoors area for the queue was full and was about to start heading outside. It was a 2 hour queue at that point

Following on from the recent discussions about the crowds over this Easter long weekend, I just visited MW again to see how the crowds/queues were today. The crowds definitely weren’t as intense as on Saturday, but still very busy and the queues were definitely an improvement. It was still the traditional school holiday wait times, but today Rivals was 2 hours. SE, Scooby and WWF were about 1.5 hours. WWF was being operated very efficiently today with boats being dispatched at the fastest I’ve seen them since the new boats were introduced. SE and Rivals still only had 1 train operating but they were sending them out a bit quicker (Surely the second trains are in maintenance and are waiting on parts for them to not be in use). Overall, queues were being managed much better and weren’t flowing onto the paths and blocking access through the park.

Bit of both I think. We’ve see the parks have slow operations for at least the past year (and for a while the Covid, uncertainty card could be played), but they should have been more prepared and have system in place to help organise crowds better (this is mostly for SW). MW had tape on the floor to organise the queues, and they were using all areas of each rides queue to accomodate the crowds. JL had a two hour wait and they were using the full external queue area. To my understanding (while it wasn’t operating when I was there), they are using the full extended queue for WWF that extends to the boat storage area. And for Rivals, the queue extended to the left of the entrance into the viewing/waiting area. But another form of evidence that Rivals operations are so poor right now, I have seen it’s queue extend towards JL before and it’s what was 2-2.5 hours. This queue was much shorter than that, but it’s wait was 4 hours. If they had both trains operating, then they could have almost halved that wait time. But if it’s in maintenance and waiting for parks (or whatever the reason may be), the turnover for the single train should be so much faster. Are they just understaffed, not wanting to pay for extra staff to be on, or have they not noticed this issue.

Sea World was also insanely busy yesterday, with over an hour wait for Storm and JR and about 40 minute for vortex. But again the operations were insanely slow. Vortex was up to 8 minutes between cycles and JR was 5 minutes. But, the worst part was Nickelodeon Land. That has got to be the worst designed area of any theme park when it’s busy. Every queue area is so small that the actual queues weren’t controlled and just went everywhere. Some queues overlapped each other so it make unclear what ride people were supposed to be lining up for.