Magic Mountain toutes 3 new coasters for the upcoming season...AGAIN. Just 10 years later.

But that's not really the point. If 17 people rode this, and rode Phantom or El Toro, and thought this was better, within the confines of this being a niche group anywho, I have no problems taking that opinion as 'valid' within the context of the poll.

Statistically irrelevant or not, Coaster Enthusiast polls still tend to rate coasters that are good near the top. Looking at the Golden Tickets, Your Poll, Mitch's poll, the same coasters are always in the top, and the rest in the bottom. The difference in Mitch's poll is that it tends to have a broader base of coasters to test because a lot of enthusiasts still don't get to these small parks. When 17 people go and ride this and think it's great, seeing as how polls show that most enthusiasts seem to be able to come to a semi-agreement across the board about what makes a coaster good, I'm inclined to agree that this could be a well liked coaster, regardless of if 17 out of 400 rank it high, or 100 out of 400 rank it high.

The public is going to go absoultely ape **** over this ride, meaning very, very long waits.

If SFMM was looking for a ride to take some of the focus off X2 (which I'm pretty sure they were), I think they finally found it (Scream just didn't work). Smart idea to place the ride on the opposite side of the park, which will split the "running of the bulls" between the left and right sides of the park, instead of everyone running to X2 and Tatsu.

Superman:EFK is not a coaster. It is a reverse reverse free fall.

^You seriously going to start that ridiculous debate again?

I am not trying to debate. I think it's awesome that SFMM is building the world's tallest reverse reverse free fall.

"Is building"? It has been there for 13 years.

It is classified as a coaster. Think what you want.

Tekwardo said:
If 17 people rode this, and rode Phantom or El Toro, and thought this was better, within the confines of this being a niche group anywho, I have no problems taking that opinion as 'valid' within the context of the poll.

That's been my argument to the 'statistical relevance' thing all along as well.

When you only have a small group of people qualified to make a judgement and you sample a majority percentage of them - it's pretty damn relevant. Even more so in this context.

Kinda like saying the opinions on comparisons about being on the moon versus being other places of astronauts who've been on the moon are invalid because there's a statisically irrelevant number of them to ask. :)

I don't care what the math says, if I want the collective opinion of people who've done 'X' and I ask most of them that have, their answers are entirely relevant.

Especially if 'X' is to compare an obscure gimmick coaster in Sweden with some of the most ridden, most popular coasters in the USA. For the few people able to make that comparison with first-hand experience on their side, it compares favorably. Good enough for me.

Is this the same coaster that those 17 people rode? If so, I guess the videos don't do it justice, because none of them that I have watched portray any kind of...insanity.

I'm really hoping that that group of people doesn't have a skewed opinion of the coaster, based off of rides that were ran in a more-intense-than-usual mode during an event.

^ Unlike X2 and Eejanaika, the Intamin ZacSpin coasters do not have a programmed or controlled spin.

The pitching of the seats and the somersaults are all dependent on weight-distribution. That's one of the selling points of these rides...every ride will be completely different and unpredictable.

If you board a vehicle that is evenly distributed in terms of weight, you'll get what you watched in that YouTube POV --- relatively little spin. If you board a vehicle that has heavier passengers on one side and lighter passengers on the other side, you'll probably end up riding a mind-effer, crazier than X2 or Eejanaika.

So tips for people waiting in line for a ZacSpin...make sure you're right in front of or behind a couple of REALLY OBESE or REALLY ANOREXIC people while queuing. You'll lock in a crazy ride for certain.

If that's the case, then Green Lantern could be all over the rankings in everybody's polls, depending on with whom you ride.

Re:17 riders
The real problem is that there's no way to tell if the 17 riders got a broad enough sample of the possible ride experiences to accurately measure it.

If all 17 were on "random coaster club trip" and rode it all at the same time, perhaps they hit it on a good day or got trim-free rides or the park greased everything up.

Not to mention the bias of riding things in other countries, riding them with a group of friends on a coaster trip, or the possibility of one loud voice in the group influencing the opinions of the group as a whole. Heck, maybe they figured out how to weight the ride properly for flippage because they were all 8 passengers on the train.

I'm not saying any of these did or did not happen, I'm just saying that even if only 17 people have ridden MF and the ZacSpin and they all loved it, that isn't going to be representative of how a whole bunch people who ride the ZacSpin will compare it to MF.

LostKause said:
For example, I love Kennywood, but when they announced their new launch coaster, I had the same concerns about capacity.

...Does anyone know what kind of wait times the new Kennywood launch coaster has had this year, by the way?

When we went to Kennywood last month on a Sunday there were anywhere from 30-1.5 hr waits for SkyRocket. We hit it 1st thing, the wait then was 20 minutes, and later in the day around 30. Well worth the wait, I think it was ALOT of fun but WAY too short! :)

I dont care why SFMM is doing what they're doing. I cant imagine they really feel like they can compete with Disneyland and Disney's Adventure. Those parks are clearly family friendly, top of the line on EVERYTHING!!
Can anyone really compete with Disney?

In years past, the so called coaster wars has only gone on between CF and SF. I cant see SFMM thinking this would be a way to get people to come there instead of CP. Its not like the drive distance from Sandusky and Aurora!
As for aiming for Knotts, could be but Knotts vs SFMM are completely 2 different kinds of parks, rides and kinds of guests it attracts.

All I know is my 2 visits to SFMM were amazing I loved everything about the park!! These new additions (as well as changing STE) only enforces my desire to want to go back again next season :)

With that I have a question, with STE running backwards will it make it the longest straight vertical fall?

Jo
Lifetime Raptor flights: 2288 :)

About the claim to having the most coasters, I don't believe that SFMM's reasoning to use that claim is to take business away from Cedar Point, but rather to be able to get attention from the locals and those who may already be visiting the park. It ups the park's status, if you will. As said elsewhere, those two parks are definitely not in competition with each other.

ApolloAndy said:
I'm just saying that even if only 17 people have ridden MF and the ZacSpin and they all loved it, that isn't going to be representative of how a whole bunch people who ride the ZacSpin will compare it to MF.

Agreed. But two things...

1. Probably close to only 17 have.

2. The poll only reports what those 17 thought. If you read that as meaning more than that, with whom does the error lie?

The contention seems to be with the way that Mitch extrapolates the limited (but certainly complete given the small scale of what is being measured) sample side-by-side with much larger samples. But that's his choice. Just like it's my choice to understand the limited context of the sample size in the big picture.

Would the ZacSpin end up ranking as highly with a larger sample group? Maybe, but probably not.

After asking a majority of people quaified to compare the experience to other coasters that a larger base would be familiar with did the ZacSpin compare favorably? Absolutely and without question.

To me, it's just another one of those times where the enthusiasts overthink it. If you're considering sample bias in a list of popular roller coasters, it may be time to step away from the monitor for a while.

I dunno. You've clearly put a lot of thought in to this. To me it sounds like you may be overthinking the idea of overthinking. ;)

Well, I didn't ride Insane. But, I did ride Inferno with is the smaller version in Spain. It gave me one of the most intense g-forces I've ever felt on a ride. And unlike I-305, the G's are momentary, so no greying out here. I absolutely loved the ride. It gets a CoasterBuzz 5 star rating from me. Jeff, just out of curiosity, can you see how many people have a particular ride in their track record?

I don't do Mitch's poll. I know a few other people who have ridden Inferno and Insane and who have also not participated in Mitch's Poll. I've not heard one bad thing about the Zac Spin ride experiences. The line on the other hand, moves slow. Thankfully, I was riding it during an ERT session. I also got multiple back to back rides at one point when a Barcelona news crew showed up after the ERT session.

Usually as more people ride a ride like this, the score over a few years evens out. I've noticed that when something comes out of the gate with just a few riders as being a great ride, in a few years, it may drop, but it is still often considered to be a good ride by people that rode it.

Much like Tonnerre de Zeus, which ranked at the top when a few people went over on a trip and rode it and ranked it high. Now that more have ridden it, it's still pretty high up, 32 out of 181 ranked, so I'd say it averaged out.

It looks like the people that rated it high on Mitch's poll are locals and some TPR peeps. I figure that once it opens at SFMM and more people ride that one, we'll see where it really stands, and it'll probably average out quicker than Insane, but I don't expect it to drop drastically.

I would prefer to have a mechanism whereby I can tell if "those seventeen riders" all rode at the same time (not that I'd want to try and collect that data mind you). But I do think it's extremely pertinent in terms of weighting those opinions...not necessarily "discounting" them, but at least taking all factors into account. For instance, if those 17 riders had ridden in groups of 2-4 over the course of a couple seasons, it would influence me to believe those are "more credible" opinions...

Well, I would assume that quite a few of the American riders were on TPR trips to the area, but of the 18 (not 17 actually) people that counted Insane, there was a decent amount from Germany and Sweden, and of those, maybe only 1 or 2 had ridden less than 100 steel coasters, IIRC.

And even though I may not particularly care for some of the riders, I don't think their attempts to 'fix' results to skew their way (what better marketing than having POV of a new, highly ranked ride for sale, right?), Many others 'over there' tend to rank based off of actual preference, and that's fine for me.

Yeah, a small sample of well traveled enthusiasts who all love a particular ride is good enough for me to make an assumption that the ride in question is a good one. How good? Well I still factor in my personal taste as well as history with similar rides, and I can draw a pretty good conclusion. The fact that Intamin designed and built the ZacSpin, makes it almost a no brainer anyway. :)