JoshC.

Big news about this, with some beautiful concept art released via the park's Twitter: Translation of the accompanying tweet: "The name of the new attraction is known: Baron 1898! The dive coaster gets a mining theme. # Baron1898 #divecoaster" So the ride is to be themed around a (gold) mine! A really nice theme idea I think. Also, here's a Dutch article about this all - http://www.looopings.nl/weblog/2953/Efteling-onthult-eerste-tekening-nieuwe-achtbaan-attractie-krijgt-duister-achtergrondverhaal.html One interesting thing from it: Ignoring the slightly odd Google translate, it seems to set up a really nice story. Looking forward to seeing this!

1) There is a 'standby queue' for the mazes, which is just normal queueing. They'll let a small number of people from the normal queue through, but priority is given more to those who have virtually waited with RnR. 2) If the park is busy enough, a straight reride is unlikely (ie, getting off and going straight back on), but there's nothing stopping you virtually queueing for the same maze twice in one night. 3) Yes and no. You may have to wait longer virtually in some cases, but that will also depend on when you do what. However, whilst you're waiting virtually with RnR, you can still do other rides. Once it's your time to ride, you can join the queue and it shouldn't take long before you're in the maze. 4) Not too sure when RnR stops allowing people to make bookings. However, there's nothing stopping you joining the standby queue just before the park closes.

I can do any date other than the 6th. Whilst I voted for all the other dates, would of choose prefer a Saturday because of travel reasons!

You won't be able to book a place in the virtual queue until the mazes open. You'll be easily and to get ask the mazes done. With the standby queues operating, you could quite possibly queue up for a maze before hand normally, at 3pm choose your first virtual slot and get 2 mazes done within 20-30mins I bet. If you're lucky, I reckon you could do the four mazes by 5-6pm, depending on how busy it is of course.

Looks like someone needs to chill out and fix their sarcasm detector!

I'm pretty sure the designers knew about the weather conditions... I dunno what the weather conditions have been like around the park recently, but I guess if there's been a fair amount of rain, it's always possible to end up with a leak / flooding. Given how many shipping containers Merlin have and how long they've been using them, it would suggest that this is just an unfortunate accident that's occurred, as opposed to a design flaw. If they can only use one side of MBV, that will reduce throughput a bit, and staff will still be new to the mazes. I'm not saying Thorpe should be wholly excused for the overly long queue, but cut them some slack. Seemingly they had one problem after another with MBV in particular...

Yeah, pretty sure Loggers simply closes early because of lighting issues. Last year, it was closing at around 5pm I think, especially when the clocks went forward.

Given that the name sounds like 'Misery' being said by a French person, I doubt one will be made any time soon...

X isn't really a 'dark ride' in the sense of it being an attraction that it has to be indoors to serve its purpose. X is just a roller coaster indoors with lights chucked on. If you were to take X outdoors, you've still got a (albeit tame) coaster. If you were to take Hex outdoors, you've got a spinning drum in the middle of a pathway. If you were to take Tomb Blaster outdoors, you've a boring car journey with guns. X may be an indoor ride, but it's certainly shouldn't be Thorpe's dark ride.

Coasters built by Merlin: -Saw -Th13teen -Raptor -Krake -Swarm -Polar X-plorer -Smiler -Flug der Daemon -Gardaland 2015 coaster Dark rides built by Merlin: -Nemesis: Sub Terra -Ghost - The Haunted House (at Legoland Billund) -Saw Alive and Krake Lebt (if you want to be pedantic) So, "knowing Merlin", the easiest thing that they'll do is build another coaster with an easy gimmick chucked onto it! It's been half-known that there was nothing big coming to Thorpe for 2015 for a couple of years now. And if there was, we would have seen planning permission a long time ago now, so it's no surprise nothing big is coming next year really. There's basically no indication at all what we're gonna see next year, but if it's anything of a medium size, I don't expect it will open for start of season now anyway!

You very much can. It depends on the Priority Pass, since there are different 'levels' of Priority Pass. Even seems like you can get away with using the 'wrong' one, like Ryan says.

First off, I don't think Fastrack is necessarily the main problem - Priority Passes are a bit contributor to it all. They can be used as Fastracks whenever guests want, and it doesn't come out of Fastrack allocation for the day, automatically making it a lot more difficult. Since the Fastrack queue is meant to be 1/3 of the normal waiting time, putting more people in then there should be pressurises the system. To say Thorpe oversell Fastrack however is, in my opinion, silly.. Fastrack also has the issue that if a ride is not running at its best (say, the staff are a bit slow, there were troubles getting guests on, a slight delay, whatever), the Fastrack system doesn't take that into account, causing a backlog (and that's something that can affect many Fastrack systems, not just Thorpe's). With RnR, they can adjust the through allocation depending on how well the mazes are doing, I believe. So if people are being a bit slow, there's a closure or whatever, then the RnR allocation can hopefully adjust. Thorpe aren't going to purposefully allocate more people than a maze can cope with, as it literally does no one any favours..

Samurai just worked itself too hard and still wasn't appreciated by the public enough. So it threw a hissy fit and decided not to open. Y'know, like all of Thorpe's sentient rides...

They can reach capacity and turn people away, in theory, and make it strictly prebooked tickets only, but assuming you arrive early enough (which presumably you will be if you're planning to do the full 12 hours), then you'll be fine.

That's the thing, people can't know the limit! There's too many factors (time of day, temperature, how hydrated you are, how much you've had to eat, when you last ate...) to know exactly "Well, after x number of rides of this coaster, I've had enough", especially when they're sat down all the time. Personally, I think a blanket no reride policy is a tad over the top (limit it to 2 or 3 say), but I can see why parks do it. When I last went to Towers on a dead day in May (in the pouring rain too), I still got a brilliant ride count and the having to go round the queues again didn't affect any of our days in the slightest.

Seems like people are fishing for likes.

Looks like you saw a good opportunaity there. I think you sauce needs to be Heinz though... Yes; beginning of January.

Busy day all round for birthdays - happy birthday to Tommy (Coasterdude), James (kinnaird) and Olilzzy!

Why not just put a new ride in the Fungle spot?

I've been Stalin for some time about who my favourite is. I can tell that Kim Jong is not the Un, if you get what I'm Husseining. I don't have Adolf to say about Breznhev, Mugabe because I don't know a lot about him? Anyways, I've decided to vote for Other, as he's always an option in every poll ever. Seems like he just wants to run everything whilst giving us the illusion of vote - seems quite dictatorial to me! I'll stop talking now, though someone might want to pass some Gaddafi tape to wrap round my mouth.

[scratches] Slim Shady

Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge paying for a TV license. However, in the case of us as students, where we've not fine any wrong doing (in the sense of we have a license and use it accordingly), things like this are annoying. In my experience, I (nor any student I know) have never had any form of inspection out anything similar to what the letter suggests. And there's no reason to suggest I've been breaking the law (indeed, the only TV I watch is Doctor Who in our lounge!). I know that this is a serious thing, but I've never known it to be any more than just sending it to every student as a way to seemingly scare people.

Letters like these annoy me: I live in a house with 23 people, and each of our rooms has separate contracts. However, those contracts include a communal TV license (so, in theory, we're not allowed to watch live TV in our own room, just in places like the lounge, kitchen, etc.) Every one of us got sent this automated letter (which is seemingly sent to every student address ever..), despite never receiving the original 'warning' letter. And they never do any form of investigation, inspection or follow up from this. It's just pure scaremongering and trying to scare more gullible students into buying a TV license, which they may not even want or need. It's just annoying to see this sorta junk when, as a student, you have enough things to worry and pointless scare-junk mail is just not something you want to deal with... I just hope that these sorta things don't actually scare people...

Usually the rides have shorter queue times during Fright Nights, simply because there's more attractions and many people are wanting to do the mazes. This is more so the case in the first couple of weekends. If there's no standby queue for the mazes, then in theory, the rest of the park is going to be no worse than a busy summer day, at least that's how I see it. If this trial doesn't use standby queues, then that'll be great test of the system in a way closer to how it has been designed to work. The park itself isn't ridiculously busy and all guests are redistributed amongst the usual line up. It allows the system to be trialled properly, get appropriate feedback and hopefully build the system into something that works and can be understood.

Trying out RnR on just the mazes is a great idea I think. One of the issues people have with the system is that if you're not queueing for attractions, what are you going to do? It's a fair point to raise and, at this point in time, Thorpe do not have enough other things to do. However, if you try it out on just the mazes, there's a whole park still to do! It's no worse than a usual day at Thorpe, except that the ride queues will be a bit shorter as you'll have people doing the mazes as well. Yes, Fright Nights will be busy, but no busier than say a day in summer, for example. It allows people to do the mazes, without having to do an unnecessarily long queue, and they still get to do night ride and so forth. So long as the system works (and, based on previous trials, the system itself is working well), then this is just a great idea all round for Fright Nights dates.