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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

Rick said:
If you don't want to click, let me hotlink to their aerial view of the park :rolleyes:

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wait, that's Chessington, not Thorpe!
 
Just experienced my first ever FrightNights , what pile of rubbish !
Even on a pass holder only evening with no queues I can't even imagine the disappointment if I ever attended this event on a normal day with hours and hours of queues.
Big Top : walk through a maze strobe lights and I think there may have been actors in there. Who knows 1/10
Cabin in the woods : I'm trying to think about this but it's just a blank. 0/10
Blair Witch : walk a bramble lined path a few people goin boo! 1/10
Platform 15 : see Blair Witch but no brambles 0/10
Saw Alive : a lot mor actors. More scares. Do like the saw films so 5/10

In conclusion this will be my last ever FrightNights. You would have thought after 15 years they could do something better.

As a p.s. DBGT ... still as bad as ever
 
I'll try not to focus on the bad points about yesterday, as I'm sure you'll all guess they involve queues, breakdowns and poor operations.
However Swarm was practically walk on in the dark by around 8pm, which was wonderful.
 
Visited Thorpe on Saturday and can't say as I was too impressed.

Park was rammed to the brim, resulting in all mazes reaching over two hour queues and as a result managed little in terms of rides.

Derren Brown's ghost train was in a right state for a new ride. Without giving much away to those who haven't been on, the bag room was shut, elements of the ride didn't work and the queue was moving very slowly.

Some mates who went on after I split off were evac'd twice as a result of problems and didn't manage to get a full experience.

On the positive note, Face it alone was quite good, although not as extreme as last year and Swarm was a good ride to end the day on, or season even assuming I don't get chance to return.
 
The park regularly reaches capacity during fright nights so why would they bother trying to do good mazes or operating more than 1 train on all the coasters?
 
Matt Creek said:
Visited Thorpe on Saturday and can't say as I was too impressed.
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I was there on Saturday and had a great day. Admittedly, we didn't have to queue for anything which inevitably made things slightly different than what you described. Ride availability was generally pretty good, (I think) everything running at maximum capacity.

It took two (and a half) goes on Ghost Train to get the full experience. It is what it is... it's a great idea, but I am not sure it has been fully executed yet, despite the best efforts of Thorpe and their partners. I'm not sure if enthusiasts realise how much blood, sweat and tears have gone into that thing (don't worry, it's been thoroughly sanitised with a wet wipe :cool:).

If you can't appreciate the 'stuff' that has gone into that ride, or something like SWARM, I don't think you'll ever be able to get on board with Merlin. Those rides are very much definitive examples of the direction that the chain is going in and I applaud it - if you step back and look at what has been produced there, it's golden. Ghost Train is very much an ongoing project, that's one of the best things about the technology.

Also, Slammer. I still love that ride. Long may they continue to keep patching it up. Again, hats off - they could have scrapped it like Six Flags did with theirs. It ran pretty consistently on Saturday.

Mazes - whatever. They're fine. We quickly sped round them, they are what they are - I can't get excited about them. Would I pay to access them? No chance. Would I wait for them? No chance. It amazes me how enthusiasts get all cerebral about them. You can dress it up all you want, it's still a bunch of drama students shouting boo. If I had to pick a favourite, it would probably be Big Top.

I wasn't going to mention this, but I will- we witnessed some enthusiasts during breakdown number 2 on Ghost Train who made me retreat back into my broken VR headset. We were being evacuated from the ride and the staff members (obviously frustrated with the situation) were trying to assist some cranky guests when two guys decked out in Alton merch accosted the host with questions about the breakdown, preventing her from doing her job.

"I think there's an issue with blah blah blah" one said, "I am going to write to Nick Varney about buying things from Intamin" said the other. Honestly, douche-baggery like that absolutely kills me. It's not cool, kids.
 
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I was there on Friday, as I don't have a VIP pass or dozens of priority passes and didn't want to pay extra for the privilege of being able to do all the rides and mazes I wanted to.

My problem with FN has always been the variability of the mazes. You could easily wait 2+ hrs in a barely moving queue and get a bad experience at the end of it. I didn't rate either maze I did, but only waited about 25 in total for them so it hardly matters.
 
They are probably waiting for some good secondhand spare parts to arrive to repair Loggers leap....

...which are currently waiting to be removed from Alton Towers old Mutiny Bay's Flume ;)
 
Whereas Towers have never given a definitive date for when the TLC rides will reopen, didn't Thorpe specifically state last year that Loggers would only be closed a year? Dreadful if they did.
 
I don't know Merlin's inner workings. I suspect it wasn't a conscious decision to lie. There are all kinds of things that could have happened behind the scenes. It's possible that when the ride had a fuller survey they realised it was going to cost a lot more than they originally anticipated. It's possible that Derren Brown's Ghost Train went overbudget and money got re-channeled. It's possible that there were changes in senior management and new management bought in different priorities. It's possible that the park simply had their budget cut from head office.

I doubt anyone made a deliberate decision to lie. Nonetheless it seems like a poor state of affairs. Regardless of where budgets have gone, you could argue that a company the size of Merlin should have been able to find the money for the project, or that as soon as they knew Loggers Leap wouldn't be coming back next season they could have communicated the decision. Although I also understand why they tried to keep quiet about it, and know that most marketing teams would have done the same thing in that position. And in fairness any messages Thorpe did send out appear to have been low key. Unless I'm mistaken, there weren't any signs at the ride indicating that it'd be back next year.
 
Went past Stealth the other day (At night) and they still had the lights on for the ride, after closed season you would of thought they would of turned the light of, you couldn't see any other ride. It's a bit of a waste of money and Towers are getting ride closures dues to the budget cuts.
 
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