If there aren’t enough people in the queue then there aren’t enough people in the queue.
At the start of the day when there’s a couple thousand guests queuing for headliners at any theme park (hagrids, guardians, FoP, etc.) that queue doesn’t reach a steady state density for a while (let’s just call it ~hour).
This supposed huge drain on time already occurs and is part of the process. Filling up the preshow room requires people to move through the queue. If people can move through a queue before the preshow then that doesn’t change by suddenly going into a different room. It’s the same flow of people. You might have some slowdown with switchbacks if that decision is made, but queues aren’t laid out with a long stretch that matches the preshow occupant load. Look at something like Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway where there are multiple pre shows and they’re still able to stage people in front of the doors, because the queue is keeping up. The big slowdown is the pulsed nature of a preshow.
MMRR works in the same way that Guardians does now. You go from queue to no queue free for all and then queue.
Starting from scratch:
1) Guardians preshow room is empty with switchbacks setup in the preshow
- For this to work, switchbacks need to be filled to have same density as current state Guardians preshow
2) Guests in queued line start walking into room group by group
3) Queued line fills after a couple minutes with low density
4) CMs have to instruct Guests to fill in all available space to increase density of the queue to hit the desired load
5) Guests at front have to move in, which takes time for Guests behind them to respond
6) Guest compacting reaches end of line in of couple minutes
7) CMs send final Guests into preshow
8) Preshow commences
9) Guests in queue start walking out
10) Final Guest leaves
11) Show reset with empty Guardians room
Without even considering the density, let’s just think about this for a second.
Focusing on point 2) assume when walking in a queue, 1 Guest enters per second. In a normal queue, that means a max of 3600 Guests can experience the attraction at the rate they walk through a queue.
Now, the preshow is about 2 minutes. Let’s assume it’s slightly faster to unload the preshow than load from a queue, so if it takes 1 minutes to unload and 3 minutes to load, you’re only loading for half the hour, so on average, one Guest every 2 seconds, soooooooo, that gives a max capacity of 1800 Guests per hour, which is less then the capacity of Guardians according to Google, meaning you’re starving the attraction of 200 Guests per hour.
This is being incredibly generous, it would really take longer than a minute to unload, so the starvation would be far worse than described here.
The difference with a normal queue is you don’t stop a normal queue for minutes at a time, whereas you do for a preshow, so you have to free for all pre-stage (and not have a queued set-up).
In the current set-up, there might be 20 Guests wide, so you might have 10 Guests entering per second, which is needed to account for the time the queue is stopped.
Yes, the pre-show’s final design is poorly designed, but no, there’s not a quick fix.
