Greetings, everyone! This is Jim from ElloCoaster and I want to thank everyone who voted in this year's poll. I realize that the results were a bit surprising - I see several comments about El Toro ranking as low as it did, as well as a few who were surprised at Wildfire.
There were 115 voters (yay!) and quite a few were from the eastern USA - people who get to ride El Toro a lot. When you're in that group, you have a different relationship with the coaster than you might if you only got a few rides on it years ago whilst on some trip. There is such a thing as "remote bias" in many people's rankings - you know, where that far away coaster that you'd been dying to ride ranks a bit higher than it might if it were at your home park, just because you were so happy to finally get there and ride it... and that can't be helped. The solution to that is to have a nice mix of voters from all over the place, which we did. You can read the breakdown on the results page that was linked to earlier in this thread.
What I notice when looking at the individual ballots is that the people who live nearest El Toro were more likely to vote it lower - and I'm Facebook friends with quite a few of them and I've heard some pretty nasty rants about how the ride ops at SFGAd have been stapling riders into the trains with such force that the ride has become quite painful, even before leaving the station. I've also heard a few reports that the coaster has developed some roughness as well, especially in the back of the train. That could've led to it dropping in the ranks like it did. Perhaps it will rise again.
Speaking of rising again, Voyage is getting a *lot* of new track right now. It got killed in the rankings by the people who rode it this year - apparently, the park was combating roughness by nearly stopping the train on the midcourse. Yes, right before the underground triple-drop. You can imagine, then, that the drop was neutered by that move and the whole back half of the ride suffered as well. It will be interesting to see if those people who canned it last year will ride it again and push it back up the list.
As for Wildfire, the 23 people who rode it *loved it*. Nearly everyone put it in their top five and most of them put it at #1. The only real contender was Lightning Rod, which only lost to Wildfire in a head-to-head by one vote. That's really close!
Going forward, I thank those of you who pointed out typos and such. They've been noted and fixed for the 2018 ballot. It's true, though, that you shouldn't correct them on the ballot you send in - the tabulation program will toss out your ballot as an error. I had to go back and manually "correct" a few ballots back to the misspelled versions in order for them to be counted, lol.
And YES, we're seriously considering a steel poll this year. The issue at this point is how to present a ballot that won't be overwhelming. There were 198 woodies. There are more than 4000 steelies. With the woodies, there were 39,006 possible head-to-head pairings to look at. On a steel ballot, that number is in the tens of millions.
I remember that Mitch used to do clone grouping, so rather than rank each wacky worm separately, you'd just rank "fave wacky worm" - that is mostly a good idea, but it has flaws. For example, every Batman clone I've been on would outrank every wacky worm, but if I list them just once per group, the wacky worm would look like it ranks at #2, while in reality it ranks much lower, behind the dozen or so Batmen. Also, not all clones are equal enough to be grouped. I'd rank the worst Vekoma boomerang I've been on near the bottom of my list, as I would with most of the others.... but that one at Prater with the lap-bar-only trains and the tunnel? I love that one! If I rank just my "fave boomerang" at the point where the Prater one would go, it looks like I really like boomerangs. And I don't.
So we're tossing around ideas now about how to make a steel ballot manageable. If you folks have any suggestions, I'm all ears.
We're also going to try to work up a web-based drag/drop ballot. Stay tuned on that one. The reason for the text ballot was because [1] it was familiar with anyone who'd filled out a Hawker ballot before [2] I had to teach myself to code in order to tabulate the ballots (remember the 39,006 pairings? I'm not doing that mess by hand!) and I wasn't about to attempt to add a web ballot into the mix on the first year. I've got some help now, however, so fingers crossed that we can pull it off this year.
Again, thanks to everyone who sent in a ballot this year. If you'd like to be reminded when this year's poll goes live, drop me an email at
[email protected] and I'll make sure that a fresh ballot hits your inbox on Nov 1.
Jim