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News Tron coaster coming to the Magic Kingdom
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
It's picking up the pace! Definitely seems on track for the current timeline. Good to see! Thanks for the update.
RnRC
MrPromey
Well-Known Member
I don't think anyone is arguing against that. It's not a zero-sum argument. They could add more rides (or attractions, in general) and not take away your ability to enjoy atmosphere if that is what you're inclined to spend a sizable chunk of your day doing.
MrPromey
Well-Known Member
I know that was the original plan or at least, what we were lead to believe the original plan was but do you have actual proof that is what happens today?
I say this because I know there are a group of people who are happy to get a fastpass for Flight of passage and walk past everyone in the 3+ hour wait line to ride it but who wouldn't stand in line for over one hour to ride it themselves if that was their only option.
If these people didn't have access to FP+, they'd simply skip the attraction but they'd also be unhappy they weren't "able" to do the most popular attraction that day.
How it appears to work in practice is, Disney provides 60+ day access to FP+ to resort guests which are of course, their most valuable customer base. Giving these people the best access to reserve their little-to-no wait time on the most popular attractions in concept, creates a better overall experience for them making them more likely to leave as satisfied customers.
They pay more, they get a better experience. The freeloading plebs who only paid $125 to get in can either wait in these huge lines and do very little over the course of a day or they can choose to wait in smaller lines and do more of the 20-40 year old attractions, instead, just with longer lines than they've likely ever experienced for them, before.
Free market, economics 101, nobody has a right to or deserves anything, etc.
Of course, where this all falls apart is when Disney has such little capacity relative to this first group, that it becomes cutthroat, even at that 60 day mark to give people what they want which is where the true evidence of the whole problem with this system becomes obvious.
Is it FP+ or overcrowding with not enough capacity that's causing today's problems? I believe with a right-sized crowd FP+ would work as it was sold to the public (and probably was intended - I believe that in good faith) but with the way things are today, my strong gut feeling* is that it compounds an existing problem.
Of course, if Disney didn't already know capacity for the best stuff was an issue, that 60 day reserve window for resort guests wouldn't be all that much of a selling point, now would it?
*If you have access to internal data and not just DIsney's marketing and your own gut feeling to go by to back up your own statement which you've presented as fact, I'm willing to be swayed, though.
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More like Rockin'...and it does fall between those two in intensity. No inversions but a lot of high banked swooping turns with cool music and graphics. No lose your stomach drops. The last row of one of the trains allows you to sit upright like a traditional coaster. Just wish it was a bit longer in duration but it's a solid addition nonetheless.
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Expanding the current retention pond and bolstering the firmament along side the train track to keep it from sliding into the now-closer pond.
The Pho
Well-Known Member
Well regardless of whether fastpass existed or not, a line would not be 3 hours if people weren’t willing to wait 3 hours for it, and it’s not like 3 hours lines are rare at theme/amusement parks without fastpass and that is at parks that have nowhere near the attendance of Disney Parks. And on top of that, it’s not like Disney didn’t have 3 hour lines prior to fastpass. I’d also say Animal Kingdom has probably benefitted the least from it considering it doesn’t really have many lesser rides to spread people around to. But as the attendance grows, so does the general capacity problem, and if there were more worthy attractions to absorb people, then they would spread out to those naturally. But since Disney World gives everybody 3 minimal wait rides, essentially everybody aware of the system uses it. And since there isn’t enough supply for them to all do the headliners for all 3, essentially everybody using the system winds up with fastpasses to lesser attractions which they may have skipped otherwise.
And as you said, with the right sized crowd, fastpass would do as it was intended. Lack of capacity growth is the real issue. Everything has a long line not because of fastpass, but because there isn’t enough in the parks to handle massive crowds. Fastpass’s biggest benefits to Disney are that it makes sure most rides run at capacity consistently and allows them to more easily predict crowds to adjust staffing. Unfortunately fixing the capacity issue would be extremely expensive and they preferred to patch it with a different expensive solution.
I’m not solely basing my comment on gut feelings and observations. I trust what @lentesta has said, and he certainly has quite a bit of line dynamic data to base his comments on.
tirian
Well-Known Member
You’re both kind of right.
I’ll cue the broken record, because even though @marni1971 and I have said this many times, it’s helpful to remember why FP+ exists. Before Uni built Potter, Disney believed the theme park market had topped out. They decided they owned the market, focused on selling DVC, and comfortably settled into what they called a “Blue Ocean” strategy of cost-cutting and minimal maintenance (even though that’s not what a Blue Ocean business plan actually means).
Fastpass + and its overall NextGen system were concocted as ways to spread existing crowds to existing attractions, in hopes Disney wouldn’t have to build anything new. You don’t have to take my word for it: execs announced the strategy at shareholder meetings. Iger shilled MagicBands as a new source of income, saying the company expected merch sales to increase as guests mindlessly tapped their bracelets without paying attention to how much they were spending. Again, this is on record.
That’s why FP+ and MagicBands exist. There’s no bigger reason for magic, pixie dust, improved guest experience, or any other claims the Mommy Bloggers ate up from Disney’s marketing spin rooms.
Unfortunately, Disney changed its operating procedures to exploit FP+ reservations, and often runs attractions at sub-optimal levels to artificially create long queues that the day’s attendance should not demand. This is why you can go to the MK on a slow day and still stand in 45-minute lines.
The experiment was also a failure, and the system was never expanded to the other worldwide resorts as originally planned.
Fortunately for us fans, the crowds did not disperse, attendance actually rose, and Uni built Potter! Now we have New FL and Pandora, with many more investments to come — including Tron.
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rle4lunch
Well-Known Member
That's what I was telling my wife. It sure does stank over there, lol.
Definitely RNRC, but it also feels very different without ending up in a pretzel loop. Instead, you are gracefully soaring with epic lighting at night. It's neat and will hold its own very well!
peter11435
Well-Known Member
Everything in your post is 100% spot on except the bolded portion.
They don’t run attractions with the intent of creating artificial lines. They do operate some attractions at lower capacity on lower attendance days which sometimes leads to longer waits than could be experienced on busier days. But this has nothing to do with fastpass+ or regular fastpass for that matter. Attendance based operations have existed long before fastpass was thought of. In most cases I don’t agree it with it but it’s a separate and independent problem from those caused by fastpass or fastpass+.
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justintheharris
Well-Known Member
Yea that sounds about right. At the attraction I used to work at, we typically started with a couple trains on the track and would add more throughout the day if we saw it fit. If the ride is a consistent walk on, there’s no need to run at maximum capacity.
MrPromey
Well-Known Member
Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed followup!
With the ratio figures that have been tossed around, it appears as though fp+ gets the majority of capacity for most popular attractions. I'm still not convinced that all or even the majority of those people would be willing to wait for an hour or more for an attraction that has a standby line of three+ hours with the majority of capacity going to FP+ so it still seems plausible that wait times could go down without FP+.
I'm not saying that something like Mine Train or FOP would suddenly become a walk-on - just that we might see 45 minutes to an hour or more shaved off of the (standby) line without it because of a percentage of guests with fastpasses, may otherwise skip it.
An attraction such as Spaceship Earth which for decades was a literal walk-on at almost all times of the day and night (by which I mean, while seeming to always have guests boarding, it took the time you spent walking up that runway at normal speed to get to loading and on with no stopping or backup as long as the ride was moving) now consistently has a 30+ minute wait with a stop-and-go line running the entire length of the queue. This seems like something difficult to attribute to an increase in attendance, alone, especially in a park which, in recent years has had to resort to tricks to keep guest coming in the gates.
Maybe for Disney, that is a FP+ success story because they are driving more people to ride it this way. As a guest, the change is frustrating though, when in that time, nothing has otherwise been done with the attraction to warrant the new wait and it seems that if an attraction is running at or near capacity without much of a wait, that is the sweet spot, more so than one where people are waiting to ride it... unless it isn't possible to fill out a day in the park without occupying people's time in lines because attraction length of what you have is no-longer enough to do it.
I of course, have no way of testing this and it is not due to a lack of quality explanation of your stance I feel that way.
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FullSailDan
Well-Known Member
I think this speaks to exactly what was part of the problem though. A number of attractions sat with zero wait and little utilization while others had 3 hour waits. The 3 hour waits still exist but the lesser used rides have bumped in ridership. Without MM+ spreading them out and enticing people away from those long lines they would have just continued to grow in length (faster than they did). It sucks for those of us who enjoyed some of the easier lines, but I also think we would have seen some of them on the chopping block sooner if it weren't for MM+. The project should have been coupled with expansion, not instead of, and we would be in an awesome place now.
Buried20KLeague
Well-Known Member
Buried20KLeague
Well-Known Member
We thought it felt like the fastest launch coaster Disney has. And that includes Grizzly in Hong Kong. Maybe it's your positioning, or that you feel more "out in the open" (similar to how SM feels faster because you're in the dark), but it felt faster than RnRC.