Interesting, I definitely feel more optimistic after reading this. I’ve actually heard similar sentiments from others regarding mack extreme spinners
News Project 2027/Purple: Delayed “World Record Breaking Coaster" (Phantom Spire?)
- Thread starter Zachary
- Start date
As we get older we get more prone to motion sickness.
It actually really stinks but I think that’s why I’m personally disappointed in this selection of ride. Spinning is very niche. I’ve not seen many rollercoaster enthusiasts embrace the spinning concept with open arms. Niche appeal shouldn’t be the huge new attraction.
Who knows, maybe it’ll grow on us … or it’ll simply be a nice thing to look at from ground level while others enjoy it.
It actually really stinks but I think that’s why I’m personally disappointed in this selection of ride. Spinning is very niche. I’ve not seen many rollercoaster enthusiasts embrace the spinning concept with open arms. Niche appeal shouldn’t be the huge new attraction.
Who knows, maybe it’ll grow on us … or it’ll simply be a nice thing to look at from ground level while others enjoy it.
Rollercoaster enthusiasts haven't embraced anything about this coaster with open arms. That doesn't mean thoosies don't love extreme spinners through. The only two that exist are rated #6 and #51 overall in the world. That's an obvious endorsement of the model by the community.
Ride to Happiness • Plopsaland Belgium • Captain Coaster
captaincoaster.com
Time Traveler • Silver Dollar City • Captain Coaster
captaincoaster.com
Kingda Ka sits at #89, for context.
Kingda Ka • Six Flags Great Adventure • Captain Coaster
captaincoaster.com
This is such a good point. While I have not ridden Time Traveler nor Ride to Happiness, they seem very similar to me on paper. Do you know what it is about RTH that makes it rank so much higher than TT?Rollercoaster enthusiasts haven't embraced anything about this coaster with open arms. That doesn't mean thoosies don't love extreme spinners through. The only two that exist are rated #6 and #51 overall in the world. That's an obvious endorsement of the model by the community.
Ride to Happiness • Plopsaland Belgium • Captain Coaster
Time Traveler • Silver Dollar City • Captain Coaster
Kingda Ka sits at #89, for context.
Kingda Ka • Six Flags Great Adventure • Captain Coaster
With a slower rotation speed than other spinners, I think the Ka replacement will be able to be stomached by a larger amount of riders.
I still maintain that if this ride was going to ANY other park (or even Great Adventure with Ka still in the picture), enthusiasts would be collectively losing their shit at the 4th strata ever, not to mention a spinning one. Given Ka’s ridership in the last decade of its life, I think people liked the idea of Ka existing more than they actually cared to ride it. That’s not a slight towards it at all, it’s still my #26 and I don’t have a coaster I’d truly consider bad until #90, but it was long criticized for being a one trick pony.
As far as the spinning concern goes, ultimately not every ride is going to be for everyone. Ka certainly wasn’t and I don’t expect its successor to be either, and I still believe this will be a better ride shuttle or not. I don’t think capacity is really a concern at the moment either when the park’s attendance is so much lower, but I’d also be stunned if there wasn’t a turntable involved.
I wonder if Ka/Zumanjaro would have had better ridership later on in their lifetimes if there was more to the Golden Kingdom than just those two rides. It was quite the trek to get to them (especially Zumanjaro).
As for the new ride the only real negative I ever hear about it is about it being a shuttle coaster rather than full circuit.
Possibly, it certainly didn’t help their ridership that they were so far away. Zumanjaro was just never a worthwhile addition to me, it was fun but the reason Lex Luthor worked is because it was central to the park (and TTD excelled where Ka didn’t for the same reason).
That’s the only negative I hear as well that isn’t just “it sucks because it’s not Kingda Ka” which is one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever heard in this hobby, and even then, I imagine we’ll see a wide scale 180 on it once this thing opens and people actually ride it.
That’s the only negative I hear as well that isn’t just “it sucks because it’s not Kingda Ka” which is one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever heard in this hobby, and even then, I imagine we’ll see a wide scale 180 on it once this thing opens and people actually ride it.
From a zoomed out, "thoosie culture" standpoint, this is going to be super fascinating to watch. Right when TT2 opened, the "they're ruining TTD!" crowd seemed to evaporate into thin air. Per Captain Coaster numbers, TT2 is #52 while TTD sits at #57. So while the numbers do say TT2 is technically better, they're, for all intends and purposes, essentially equally ranked by the community.
Meanwhile, Kingda Ka, which again, sits at #89, is being replaced with an attraction that, to me, on paper, looks better than TT2. Both existing Extreme Spinners rank above both TTD and TT2 and my estimation is that, 5 years post opening, Ka's replacement is likely to rank better than TTD and TT2 as well—making it NOTABLY stronger than Kingda Ka.
That said, my "5 year" hedge there is the result of what I perceive as much more vitriol for this project than ever existed when TTD was converted. People (reasonably) feel far more wronged with Ka's demolition than they did with TTD's closure in the wake of a near-fatal incident. I think there's a solid chance that this knee jerk distain for the project will end up reflected in the ride's initial reception by the community and, hence, in its Captain Coaster numbers.
On the flip side, I would honestly be very surprised to not see Ka's replacement immediately outrank Ka in the standings. With especially bad press, poor word of mouth, and a surprisingly tame ride cycle, I can imagine a fringe case where it underperforms in comparison to both of its Extreme Spinner cousins (again, fringe case, this is not what I expect baring immediate brigading or the like), but even that would still almost certainly elevate it ahead of Ka.
Assuming I'm correct (that Ka's replacement is almost certainly set to outrank Ka), it will be FASCINATING to see if the general thoosie sentiment around the ride matches that data. Will the critiques vanish immediately like with TT2 (when TT2 only very marginally surpassed TTD) or will the Ka replacement detractors hold on to the negative narratives longer?
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Couldn’t have said it better myself. Truthfully, I’m almost more interested in the public perception of the ride than I am in the ride itself at the moment, though I’m sure that’ll change once we get closer to actually seeing this monster open.
I really feel for the park right now. They’re only one coaster short of the count they had last year (two if you count Nitro having been down for the past few months), which was their highest count ever, and yet given the discussion online, anyone who didn’t know better would think they had like 4 coasters left. It’s been crazy to see the discourse around Ka go from “it’s good but not the best coaster in the park” to “what’s the point of going there without it?”
The flats are another story, but that’s been a weak point of the park for most of my life, and they really only removed two that were operating, Twister and DDD. Cyborg and Skyride didn’t operate at all last season, Zumanjaro hadn’t since May(?), and we knew Parachuter’s Perch was done quite a while ago.
It’s a bit funny how Green Lantern has barely been a footnote in this whole saga. I absolutely hated it and loved seeing it go, but it probably had higher ridership than Ka did lol.
I really feel for the park right now. They’re only one coaster short of the count they had last year (two if you count Nitro having been down for the past few months), which was their highest count ever, and yet given the discussion online, anyone who didn’t know better would think they had like 4 coasters left. It’s been crazy to see the discourse around Ka go from “it’s good but not the best coaster in the park” to “what’s the point of going there without it?”
The flats are another story, but that’s been a weak point of the park for most of my life, and they really only removed two that were operating, Twister and DDD. Cyborg and Skyride didn’t operate at all last season, Zumanjaro hadn’t since May(?), and we knew Parachuter’s Perch was done quite a while ago.
It’s a bit funny how Green Lantern has barely been a footnote in this whole saga. I absolutely hated it and loved seeing it go, but it probably had higher ridership than Ka did lol.
Ka was an extremely mid coaster. It had an awesome launch, but that was the entire ride. The tophat and following "airtime hill" (that the train braked aggressively on right as it was cresting) provided absolutely zero forces to speak of. It was a relic of the tail end of the coaster wars, a gimmick in coaster form to claim the height and speed records in as economically feasible a way as possible. It definitely should have been given a proper send-off, and maybe the company regrets now that they they went about things in the way that they did, especially given that they had to delay its replacement, but I have no doubt that this new coaster will be several times more enjoyable than Ka for me at least. The negativity around it and postmortum adulation of Ka has been been quite irritating, not to mention how people acted as if the removal of Green Lantern (one of my all-time least favorite coasters) and a few other forgettable rides was some great tragedy.
The Ka postmortem is a mixed bag of people chasing clout/nostalgia of the ride, and those of us who genuinely enjoyed what the ride had to offer. The launch was everything yes, but you had to do something with all that speed for it to matter (Formula Rossa is a perfect example). That was the purpose of the top hat: a physical spectacle to draw people in along with a killer paint job. Maybe it felt forceless compared to the launch, but the pull up out of the launch pulled plenty of g’s, and I happened to enjoy the ejector airtime hill as well (although I always complained about it getting cut short with where the brakes were placed, but space was a physical limitation).
If the postmortem of Ka is irritating to you, then let’s call it even: brushing off Ka as being mid while also giving unbridled praise for a ride that doesn’t even exist yet is irritating to me.
Just to set the record straight, Ka wasn't, objectively, "extremely mid"—per thoosies, it was a top 100 coaster in the world—that's a REALLY good coaster. People are free to hold whatever personal opinions of coasters they want of course, but don't declare a truth claim based on your own opinion and preferences.
Meanwhile, on the flip side, no one is giving "unbridled praise" for a ride that doesn't exist yet. I'm just saying we have really good reason to believe that most thoosies will end up liking Ka's replacement more than they liked Ka. The notable underperformance of Ka relative to all four comps raised previously—TTD, TT2, Time Traveler, and Ride to Happiness—in thoosie rankings suggests that if you shove elements of these coasters together to form a Ka replacement, the resulting coaster is unlikely to end up below #89.
Maybe my hypothesis is wrong though—it's all just a fun, meaningless, mental exercise. Look forward to having it tested!
Meanwhile, on the flip side, no one is giving "unbridled praise" for a ride that doesn't exist yet. I'm just saying we have really good reason to believe that most thoosies will end up liking Ka's replacement more than they liked Ka. The notable underperformance of Ka relative to all four comps raised previously—TTD, TT2, Time Traveler, and Ride to Happiness—in thoosie rankings suggests that if you shove elements of these coasters together to form a Ka replacement, the resulting coaster is unlikely to end up below #89.
Maybe my hypothesis is wrong though—it's all just a fun, meaningless, mental exercise. Look forward to having it tested!
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In a sense you are correct about Ka being "mid" but not for the reasons you state. Every second of the ride was amazing, starting with the anticipation. The rise up the top hat and over was freaky, and the drop off of it was almost as good as the launch. The negatives were the wait, the downtime, the short ride, and the hangover. I really think the concussion from its insane vibration is underrated in the likely reasons for closure, combined with the other obvious risks. That there was almost no overlap between the people that would sue them and the people that jump back on the back for a reride may be the only reason it lasted as long as it did. My trips to the park often took 3 weeks to recover.
I also don't see that making the closure public would have been a more "proper" send off than what happened. People were denied a chance to wait hours, maybe with multiple shutdowns, to experience something not as good as they remembered. Instead some of the people that really cared rode their asses off.
I really do think the sendoff it received was likely better than anything the park would’ve wanted to put together. The last ride to receive a MAJOR farewell (and, as far as I can recall, the only one) was GASM, and that was 15 years ago. That has always stood out to me as having gone above and beyond, and not just because it was my #1 for 17 years lol. Like you said, rather than the longest wait times it would’ve had in at least a decade, it got the final night that enthusiasts wanted it to have.
I’d rather it not be themed to Ka at all even if people weren’t pissed about its removal. Let the ride stand on its own.
Isn't it sorta looking like it's going to be in Boardwalk, not Golden Kingdom?
There's probably a chance they're going to do some comprehensive area retheme so maybe the Boardwalk location doesn't really matter as much, but
There's probably a chance they're going to do some comprehensive area retheme so maybe the Boardwalk location doesn't really matter as much, but
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There was a video out recently that suggested a lighthouse theme for the new coaster. That would be cool. While we can only speculate, I definitely believe there will be a comprehensive boardwalk retheme to go along with the new coaster.Isn't it sorta looking like it's going to be in Boardwalk, no Golden Kingdom?
There's probably a chance they're going to do some comprehensive area retheme so maybe the Boardwalk location doesn't really matter as much, but
