You mean you aren't surprised that they don't want to built queues that can house 6,000+ people for multiple hours, if the plan is to eventually turn FP loose on these lines?
While the standby lines on these new attractions may eventually hold multiple hours of people, ops intent is that you dissuade people from getting in queue for it. The queue may house a fraction of what would be needed without FP; but, it's still going to be multiple hours of standby at the ratios they will be using. The easiest way to keep people from lining up for standby is to make sure the line is full and spilling out where it can deter people from getting in line for it.
I'm pleasantly surprised on multiple fronts how well both the virtual queue boarding system worked the last week or so when we were in town for Alcatraz's opening and the progress that has been made in this short period of time in operational uptime and capacity. They've found somewhat of a sweet spot for the current technical bugs with the number of RVs in use and uptime and the true mechanical gremlins have been the ones that have resulted in the more lengthy downtimes. Software based resets are in the 45 minute ballpark and mechanical issues are the open ended downtimes. I know when we left town last Sunday, they were now going to start trying to up the loaded RV count to start stretching the capacity further.
This could've been far, far worse than it's turned out to be.
Virtual boarding groups at this point in time seem to be a much more fair solution to the not getting into an actual physical queue philosophy than FP as it controls the pace of those returning much more efficiently than a "guaranteed" return time that FP provides. If your new attraction is having a rough morning operationally speaking, you kick the can down the road for everyone instead of just taking all of those with a guaranteed return time that were missed and then having to deal with all of them showing back up once the attraction comes back online.
I for one welcome our new virtual boarding group overlords as an improvement over FP; but, would openly relish the days of standby only making a return everywhere.
