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2015: General Discussion

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I have commented on Nemesis dye problem before. a little bit of work and a overflow tank added to the fluid system to turn it into a closed system.
 
The park's picking up, though I assume this is down to the start of half term for most of the country.

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It was very busy today. Nemesis was using the top queue part.

Although when in the pro over the last two days the ride times were completely wrong.

Was saying 20 mins for nemesis and was about an hour.
 
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Tom.B said:
The park's picking up, though I assume this is down to the start of half term for most of the country.
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Since I started logging the data from Ridetimes, it was indeed the busiest day on park since the 16th of July.

Using the measure I use to score the busyness of days, today was a 27. Last Saturday was a 23. Typical Saturday's this summer scored around 10-12. By comparison, the school trips day on 16th of July scores a 43 making it far and away the busiest day by a mile (60-100m queues for every major coaster for the entire day).

Even though the data can sometimes be inaccurate for the odd ride, it gives a fair overall picture of the busyness of the park, when you can see a consistent trend.
 
Sku said:
Since I started logging the data from Ridetimes, it was indeed the busiest day on park since the 16th of July.

Using the measure I use to score the busyness of days, today was a 27. Last Saturday was a 23. Typical Saturday's this summer scored around 10-12. By comparison, the school trips day on 16th of July scores a 43 making it far and away the busiest day by a mile (60-100m queues for every major coaster for the entire day).

Even though the data can sometimes be inaccurate for the odd ride, it gives a fair overall picture of the busyness of the park, when you can see a consistent trend.
Click to expand...
I am interested to know how you score and measure a park day.
 
Tom.B said:
I am interested to know how you score and measure a park day.
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There are various ways of measuring and I have tried a few different ways to try and get the best results.

The best way has consistently been by only using the queue times of the 6 main rollercoasters. They are high capacity attractions on the hit list for most thrill seeking visitors, and the vast majority will aim to enjoy all of them at least once each. The family rides, especially those in Cbeebies land show a clear separate trend to the thrill rides, as they have a different audience. What is a busy day for the thrill rides is not always the same for the family rides.

So for instance although the school trip day scored very highly on my thrill index, it was pretty much just a regular school day in Cbeebies (quiet). So it does depend somewhat on the type of attractions you plan to visit, as busyness is subjective based on where you spend time in the park. The busiest day in Cbeebies was the Saturday of August Bank Holiday Weekend, but this is only the 4th busiest day according to the thrill index. This makes sense, as the 3 busier days are the school trip day, and 2 Scarefest days, which are packed full of people who mostly walk past Cbeebies land, whereas Bank Holiday Saturday was more broadly busy across all park areas.

For the majority of people here, the roller coaster queues are going to be of more interest. At the end of the season I plan to post a full break down of the trends and information I have discovered, including separate mapping of thrill rides vs family rides.

My current scoring is based on the average queue time for the 6 main rollercoasters, between the hours of 10am and 4pm. As the website updates every 30m this is always 13 data points for each ride for each day of the season. 10 until 4 is chosen as they are the core hours of the day, and the park is always open at this time.

So for each day we have 78 queue time data points, which we add together and divide again by 78 to get an average queue time for that day. That number is my current "score" for each day.

One flaw I'm aware of is that guest traffic flow will likely be different at Scarefest due to no ERT in the morning, and longer hours in the evening. Indeed the morning peak occurs slightly later on Scarefest days. I have been considering using 11am to 5pm for just the Scarefest days as a fairer comparison. The problem with using data too late in the evening from Scarefest is that so far the park starts getting very quiet from the late afternoon onwards, and including that in any averages makes the Scarefest days appear much quieter than they were. Even today where we saw a 60m queue for Nemesis and Rita during peak hours, this had dropped to just 10m and 20m respectively by 6:30pm.
 
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Been on park for two days and I've noticed just how bare the shops are in terms of merchandise. There's not a whole lot of it... and there's a lot of Alton Towers Resort merch on sale.

I usually buy a lot of merch but this year I've bought bugger all, it's a poor show for the time of year where there are more guests around. I suppose I can't complain in a way since I've saved money on buying tat. Lost money for Merlin/Towers!

Gotta laugh at the 5p bag charge too (doesn't actually apply to venues like Towers). There's some signs in the shops that state Merlin have taken the decision to apply a charge for their carrier bags and that profits will go to charity. The signs state you can buy bags for life in the shops but we didn't see these anywhere...
 
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