Marc

I think we will have to agree to disagree - I wasnt dismissing anyone's point - a lot of points raised are valid concerns, I'm just sure these would have been thought of before the company decided to go ahead out-laying time money and resources to this project. I guess all we can do is wait and see for the trials to continue.

Of course they have. You can rest assured if some enthusiasts on a fan site have thought about a potential issue then the park have thought of that potential issue and a solution to it!

I guess after the amount of time down / work its had it will be almost like a new ride with all the teething problems which come along with it - hopefully what ever it is is minor and gets sorted soon!

Have heard similar, if the water drains it goes into the local rivers which is dangerous for the environment. They were told if they did this again they'd be in trouble. It happened again. They now will never put red dye in lake again because of it.

For all we know Stealth will be back on 2 trains tomorrow and we can all be happy and everything will be ok in the world again.. I'm sure only last week it was stated Slammer was down the foreseeable future? And as for this "typical merlin" how can they be expected to fix a problem which hasn't been a issue in the 8 seasons of the ride being in operation?

The thing is your right there certainly are arguments as to why this won't work - but if between us on a fan site can come up with them then you can be sure that people who run the park will have come up with the same and no doubt more arguments against the case. The majority of the trials seem to have gone wrong when the wifi at the park couldn't cope, I've seen more and more points pop up so I guess we can only wait and see. The park have said they are tweaking the system for another trial Friday - after looking today I've noticed it's a totally different system now where you choose when you want to ride or you can ride right away if available - I assume the choice will become limited thought out the day as people "queue" I've no doubt the park have massive hurdles to get over if it ever has a chance of working how they wish too, and I'm sure they are well aware of that too. It would be intresting to see if they could trial it on a day when they could provide more entertainment across the park to see how it worked then.

The 3rd train is in the workshop in the process being rebuilt, everyone on the tour saw it on Saturday.

I agree it would never be totally queue-less but if they can get it to work as they wish it could potentially make things a lot better - It worked well on The Swarm on some of the trails and admittedly it sometimes didnt and it went totally wrong - although it seems most of the time these problems were more caused by things like the Wi-Fi on park struggling to deal with the extra demand it causes, which I guess is why we are seeing more and more Cloud Wi-Fi hotspots pop up across the park. Surely its better is trailed on the scale they intend to use it? Its worked fine on Swarm for some (admittedly not all) trials and I think then this went onto Swarm and Stealth so I guess this is the next logical step. Your right they did - but times have some what changed give it another 5 years or so I bet you'll be hard pressed to find a park which don't offer fastrack in some form or another I'm not saying its wrong to criticise when they do things badly but comments suggesting hope that a system fails just because they don't like it are the ones I disagree with. Realistically we don't or wont ever know the actual %'s of fastack sold I agree in the past it has indeed been oversold and caused problems - with prices going up this year things have seemed better but we wont really know till the real busy times kick in. I don't personally see what free fastrack achieves, as a paid for system if anything those who pay extra are assured of a better service. I agree with this - the park lack things to do other than rides which would be essential for this to ever realistically work long term, but I expect that would be something they would be able to address when / if they decide they are happy with the concept going forwards. Again I agree although apart from a few of the rides I dont think thorpes queues are actually that bad in this respect, they are obviously not Disney like queues but there are much worse queues around IMO. I didn't quite mean it like that - I was more getting at the comments "hoping it fails".. Ive actually thought the same - the thing with trying it with the normal queue though is it just adds another level of complexity to the queues, unless they considered halting fastrack sales on that particular day on that particular ride, but then that would no doubt cause complaints that they are not offering fastrack and you risk the uptake being so small the trail isnt really a fair one to see if it can or cant work. Id like to point out I do agree with some points being made - for this to ever work the park does need to offer things to do other than rides to help soak up some of these people who would otherwise be in queues - whislt at the weekend they have live music throughout the day I still feel it needs more, and then the next problem they will have (and possibly the biggest hurdle) is actually educating the every day guests so they understand whats happening, how it works and how it will ultimatly ever benefit them.

The 3rd train is still fully there just at the moment mid way through it's yearly inspection process , once they are complete they will have 3 fully functional trains (once the one which isn't running at the moment is back up)

I wouldn't quite say they are impossible to fix, I personally think a key aspect of this working as they would like is to have a good mix of other things to do across the park , your right expecting these people to all go into the shops / food places is unrealistic and won't happen so some will end up in other ride queues which will make them longer which is why I think for it to work as the park would like they need something which is both good and worth doing but also high enough throughput to eat these people up. After that I think their second biggest problem will be getting the general public to understand the whole concept of the idea which is vital for this to work - when it was just swarm last season they had staff at the entrance, on the bridge in the dome and on the Swarm island its self trying to explain the system and how it works but of course doing it on all coasters is a whole new scale. That said ive no doubt they will take all feedback into consideration be it from here, Facebook, twitter and of course (arguably most importantly) those who use the system at the park whilst these trials are happening but saying they don't have the recourses and knowhow seems a bit harsh, this is after all their own idea to use it to this scale so they will have a understanding of whats needed to make it as successful as possible, as for no other parks doing it, well theres always got to be a first!

And I've been to their trials too (admittedly one of the later ones) and it seemed to work just as intended, we joined the virtual queue which was around a hour, did other things at the park, went to the Swarm once the hour was up and was on the ride in 5 minutes. Now I know there have been times during the trail where this has not been the case and it has caused chaos be it the system crashed or to many people were allocated at the same time but thats what these trials are for, the park don't sit there thinking up ways to spoil peoples days, they have an idea which they (being people who run the park and know a lot more than we do on its operations) obviously have confidence in it to continue trying it and tweaking it. If it works great, if it don't then they have at least tried. Also I believe they opened up points across the park in the end not just the dome.

Smiler does not hit 1300- you can tell that by standing in its queue, id be surprised if its much over 1000. The amount of negativity here is pretty ridiculous, the park are trying a new system which has never been tried before which, if (and admittedly its a big if) it works will improve every ones visit to the resort in years to come - people are quite happy to sit here moaning about queue times at the park and suggest things like scrapping fastrack (which sorry being a realist is quite frankly ridiculous) and then moan when the park come up with an idea to improve things. Sure its not perfect, the park will of course be aware of that but people who claim to be "fans" of the park wishing for projects like this to fail because it don't suit them personally is nothing short of quite selfish IMO.

No it hasn't - the 3rd train is the the process of being re-assembled, which I presume will run later in the season when they will start work on another train.

To be fair Thorpe said slammer will be down for the foreseeable future a week or so ago - I'm sure they don't want it on one train any more than we do and they will get it fixed as soon a possible!

I get the impression this is the case - the 3rd one is usually going together by the summer and ready to come onto the tracks to run where they will then take off another one to start their maintenance.

Interesting arguing against fastrack because it slows down queues but want a system which could slow down queues just as much also... ? (Although admittedly it was more down to how the system was abused!) Its interesting but I guess its the way things have evolved across the world and not just for theme parks, id put money on if you stopped fastrack sales you would get more complaints and unhappy guests who want to pay for the faster service than you do now.

You could enjoy the park without fastrack of course (even portaventuta) but you would IMO struggle to get on everything. The way I see it is if I'm traveling / paying a lot of money on a trip, if the park offers fastrack to ensure I will 100% get on everything I want to then there's no doubt I'll take up the offer. It's easy to blame fastrack for queues, id be intrested to see how much difference it actually made, the queues may feel faster as you would move more but I'm not convinced it makes queue times as much longer as is made out.

Thing is it's easy to say that when your a regular and know the park inside out, Thorpe is getting to the stage where on a reasonably busy day it's difficult to do it all in just one day - so you either buy fastrack or stay over. I can totally understand why a non regular uses it, as a regular I rarely use it unless there's somthing I really want to go on - but when I go to parks I don't visit often / new parks I'll always choose to buy fastrack

No thanks - fastrack is very useful in certian situations!

Yep everything in there has been replaced! All the affects are new in the building too, before they only had water from the ceiling the rest was in the seats, now theres a bunch of other effects around the building too

I think this is important for this to work well. They have Thorpe Live over the weekends in Summer (some of the artists have actually been pretty good!) which does attract a fair crowd at times, but a show along with that will help even more. I guess theres now also Angry Birds 4D to help too.

Don't see why you would want it to fail - if, and its a big if, it ultimately works how the park would like it to standing in long coaster queues at the park (and id assume all other merlin parks too) will be a thing of the past (in theory!). I was there for one of the trails, can't remember which one, we logged on and registered and joined Swarms "virtual" queue, at our time went over and was on the ride within 5 minutes, that said they did seem to struggle with the backwards queue and that was forming a lengthy wait in the actual queue its self. I said this at the time that it might actually work better if they bit the bullet and put it on all coasters for a trial - I've no doubt it will cause some confusion, but I think being on all coasters people will have no choice but to understand how it all works and to use the system. The biggest problem the park will have is people come to theme parks and expect to stand in line, get on the ride, they are totally changing the concept of visiting a theme park for the majority of guests, but if they are able to overcome that can see this being pretty cool. When they were doing this when I was there I think it was a 7PM close and they were giving out time slots up till around 8 it seemed, to give people who would join the queue at closing time the same kind of thing I guess.

I know it was rumoured it would get a bird on top but I'm not too sure where this rumour came from - They would of needed planning permission for such a thing. They could retheme the cage to a nest although not to sure how practical that would be with engineers needing to go up each day!

Ha - lets just hope this is the last of the major work it needs and from here on it has a few good seasons!

And in all them years only once has it opened in March and closed in November (and even then it had a couple months down) - theres a reason that only 2 were ever sold and that the other ones now been removed. I do commend thorpe for the amount of effort they have put into keeping Slammer running, they deserve a lot of praise for that IMO, and am very much looking forward to getting back onto it but I suspect if any major work is required in the near future they will cut their losses and remove t unfortunately.