And a 20 year history of the exact same thing with B&M. The parallels between the two companies are nearly spot on.
Funny you’d mention that. I was about to mention B&M stand-ups specifically in my post above, as those rides in particular drive the widest gulf in rider testimonials of any, ever, in my personal experience.
I have never ridden a B&M stand-up I didn’t either like or love. For me they are a joy, easily re-ridable. (Riddler’s Revenge in particular is incredible.) No issues at all with leg fatigue, etc. And some of my friends feel precisely the way I do about stand-ups, solidifying in my mind that this opinion is not exactly unheard of.
Many others in this nerd-o-sphere can’t tolerate B&M stand-ups at all, though, citing discomfort horror stories of various kinds. I would find their tales almost impossible to believe, given my experience… yet the alternative to believing them would be to conclude that these people are all unreliable narrators of one kind or another. I’d rather stick to reality and simply acknowledge that for reasons physical, physiological, psychological, whatever, there are just huge person-to-person swings in the reaction of mind and body to the B&M stand-up experience. Their stories are largely as legit as mine.
What I don’t do is toss around reassurances that “you just have to do thing x, aka
just know how to ride it.” That’s an untrue and often counterproductive oversimplification for a great many people, dismissing their issues as solvable
if only they did what I do, and at this point in my life I understand that. They’ve probably tried all the tricks to riding, many of these folks. The tricks just didn’t work, because in the end they aren’t wide ranging cure-alls to be spouted repeatedly in response to criticisms of rides we respectively like. It’s frustrating to read so many accounts of rides I enjoy being put down, but that’s the reality of the thing for many.
I also wouldn’t limit it to Arrow or B&M,
at all. To a significant degree, this is true for every manufacturer of higher-speed rides. Intamin, Premier, RMC… there are a couple of Good Things To Know about riding each of their ride systems, but they only go so far. Even Zierer seems to be able to achieve moderate discomfort for some critical mass of riders at barely 50mph.
I do personally reserve a special tier for Arrow, admittedly. You can just watch some of those janky ride systems operate from off-ride, and both see and hear how approximately they were designed and built. Dragon Mountain at Marineland is one of my favorites for this, hunting and left-right shuffling on straight and level track so badly that you can clearly spot it from a ground level walkway dozens of feet away. And Dragon Mountain is just one among many. Little wonder that the Arrow looper ride systems do such a good job of setting the scene for widely varying ride experiences.
Anyway.