How did I not know it uses two standby lines, also why?
Pirates has always used two standby queues. Prior to FP/MP/LL, the same was also true for rides like BTM and HM.
I'm probably going to explain this poorly, but here's an attempt to explain their rationale:
If you have a ride with mega high capacity, you want to make sure it's all going to be utilized properly. One of the ways to do that is to actually divide the queue into two. If you just send everyone into one line, you run the risk that the line never gets long enough that you are properly utilizing the attraction's capacity potential, and what happens instead is that you're just sending out tons of seats empty.
Back when IOA had the Dueling Dragons coasters, they built two coasters, each with three trains for a total of six. Sounds like a great way to build a high capacity attraction, right? But Universal made the fatal flaw of building only one extra long queue to get to the ride, and the result was that the attraction much of the time never generated a big wait, and was using less capacity than it was capable of-which is something that parks don't like and has similarly spelled doom for attractions like America Sings or CBJ over the years. Gemini at Cedar Point used to run six trains at a time, but they had trouble actually getting people to the station fast enough to use that capacity, so they had to build another set of queues to direct people to the other side of the station and actually utilize all the capacity they had properly.
In order to properly use the high capacity potential on rides like Pirates, you need to get people to the station quickly and get a bit of a wait to build fairly early on so that as many seats leave the station filled as possible. That's why there are two queues.
So did they actually change the queue configurations? I had finally learned to always go right to avoid that long extended queue that the left side was always forced into.
