Are Inversions That Good

By the way, the highest-ranking cloned steel coaster (where the clone is in the same country as the original) on this years GTA's was Six Flags America's Superman at #23.

Welcome back, red train, how was your ride?!

thecoasterguy said:
Since there are now 10 of them, the votes get divided up amongst them.

Luckily, we have Mitch's coaster poll where vote splitting isn't an issue. In a poll that actually attempts to measure coaster preference, instead of coaster *popularity* we actually get to see what coasters people truly like better than others no matter how many coasters one particular voter has or hasn't ridden.

I can assure you that if there were 4 or 5 clones of SFNE's Superman out there, every single one of them would be in the top 10. What I don't know is how Mitch would work it - in a situation like this you may be able to vote for every version seperately or Mitch may count it as a single vote - "Your favorite SFNE S:RoS clone here." Would probably depend on how different all the different one's were despite the identical layout.

I think I'm the one thinking way to hard about this now, haha.

Well perhaps Mitch will offer a poll of mulitple catagories and AT can pay Mitch a fair sum for doing it and use the results. That way everyone gets a vote worldwide and popularity or most visited is taken out of the equation.

Chuck

Acoustic Viscosity said:
^Exactly why I don't care much for steel loopers. Funny...

What about lap bar only loopers?

Charles Nungester said:
Well perhaps Mitch will offer a poll of mulitple catagories and AT can pay Mitch a fair sum for doing it and use the results. That way everyone gets a vote worldwide and popularity or most visited is taken out of the equation.
Chuck

There's no benefit for the publication. The awards are essentially a marketing tool, for the winners, and the publishers of AT itself. Having obscure coasters from around the world actually rank wouldn't serve their purposes, which - in the end - is to be a profitable business.

Oh, I love, love, LOVE the lapbar-only loopers! It makes all the difference. SFOG's Mind Bender and SFOT's Shock Wave are two of my top favorites, not to mention any Anton shuttle loop, Sooper Dooper Looper, the Mr. Freezes, and the Flights of Fear. :)

I wish B&M would lose the OTSR's and figure out a new lapbar restraint for the inverts/floorlesses.

AV Matt
Long live the Big Bad Wolf

^ That's my Matt, there.... ;)

Also loves INTENSE wooden coasters... :)

matt. said:
Charles Nungester said:
Well perhaps Mitch will offer a poll of mulitple catagories and AT can pay Mitch a fair sum for doing it and use the results. That way everyone gets a vote worldwide and popularity or most visited is taken out of the equation.
Chuck
There's no benefit for the publication. The awards are essentially a marketing tool, for the winners, and the publishers of AT itself. Having obscure coasters from around the world actually rank wouldn't serve their purposes, which - in the end - is to be a profitable business.

OK, take out the european and eastern coasters and parks making the poll with a astrix for them being tied with the next lowest american park, coaster, food ect.

The benifit for AB would be it would be more respected by everyone by having a totally fair polling and tabulation system.

Chuck

You're missing the point - Amusement Today is an industry magazine that generates revenue from industry ads. It's not like they're taking the time to run these polls just out of curiosity's sake, there's an end goal in mind.

In other words, there's little benefit to AT's bottom line having foreign coasters take up half of their top 10 coaster lists.

Then maybe the industry should vote on itself instead of having random ballots becomming a total popularity contest and not actual votes based on fact.

For what purpose? We already have Mitch's poll which does an excellent job of gauging popular opinion among enthusiasts independantly. I'm not sure why we need anything more than that.

Or perhaps people can begin to see *all* polls for what they are, popularity contests and marketing tools. Sure there is a consesus issue, and it's fun to see where your favorites rank. But I haven't met a poll yet that doesn't garner some initial interested, only to be tossed aside moments later as a footnote at best. For me it's become almost as meaningless as weekend box office totals. It's fun to talk about for about 5 minutes, but hardly ever represents my favorite films, which are usually the one's people aren't talking about.

YMMV. ;)

matt. said:
For what purpose? We already have Mitch's poll which does an excellent job of gauging popular opinion among enthusiasts independantly. I'm not sure why we need anything more than that.

So now your agreeing with me?????

I find I tend to enjoy the non-loopers to the looping coasters. When I took a trip to Flordia a few months ago, I rode the coasters at Busch Gardens and Universal. I felt that a lot of the B&Ms at these parks had lots of high G-forces, with little air time if any on the ride. High G-forces are fine, but I like bits of air to break it up.
Not to mention, I find I tend to get headaches after riding the loopers more so than the non-loopers.

Charles Nungester said:
Then maybe the industry should vote on itself instead of having random ballots becomming a total popularity contest and not actual votes based on fact.

I agree that this would probably be the best way to do it, although based on height and speed I bet that most of the coasters would be pretty similiar.

I think an interesting poll to take would be to find the average popularity of rides by taking the average wait that a park patron spends in line for a coaster at a certain park and then take the final wait time for each ride and give that a percentage based on it.

That sounds really confusing, so I'll try to explain it -- take a park, say Cedar Point, and figure out the average wait for a roller coaster. Lets say that it is one hour. Now, take the average waits for all of the coasters in the park and rank them based on the lines that they have. Lets say that it is an average of 3 hours that people will wait for TTD, 2 for MF, an hour and fifteen minutes for Magnum, fifteen minutes for Wildcat and ten for Corkscrew (Yes, I have made all this up.) Based on those ratings, TTD would have a popularity of 3.0, with MF filling in at 2.0, and so on. WildCat would have a popularity of
0.25.

This would basically pit all of the general public against each other in an actual ranking, although it would be tough in parks where there aren't much in the way of coasters. For instance, if the average wait at Holiday World with their beautiful trifecta and Holidog was an hour, Raven at an hour wouldn't be rated altogether that highly. It would only work in larger parks.

But anyway, I agree completely with what you said this ultimately is -- a tool to get people to purchase the magazine and to read it, and it works extremely good at that. But back to the original question -- inversions aren't overrated. They just don't rank highly in this particular pole.

I always considered Revolution, at Magic Mountain, the best looping coaster, until the addition of the shoulder harnesses.

Reason being, relies on the layout to impress you, rather than the amount of inversions that it puts you through.

Two tymez, my reptilian friend. ;)

If Revolution ran in its original form, I have no doubt it would be my favorite looper and only overshadowed by SROS as my favorite steel coaster. Revolution (before the mods) is basically my ideal kind of steel coaster--lots od drops, curves, makes wonderful use of the terrain, surrounded by trees, a good loop, lap bars only. I can only imagine it had some great airtime before all the trims were added. I'll never understand why parks didn't go for more rides like this one.

AV Matt
Long live the Big Bad Wolf

From my experience, inversions and airtime rarely go together, due to restraint restrictions.

The standard has become, because of either fact or myth, that lapbar-only coasters do not travel upside-down (there are a few exceptions).

On the other hand, airtime with OSTRs means gonad pudding, at least on Arrows and Vekomas. Take CP's Corkscrew, for example.