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Craptacular! posted:Disneyland skyway was open from 1956-1994 and had fewer injuries than the parking lot trams in that time. WDW had their own too, of course, but the service record was shorter. I am absolutely terrified of Peter Pan's Flight for the first 20 seconds and then I just get mad about the racism because I'm Indigenous and man, I don't glow orange. Harrumph. Soarin', the first time I was on it, is a big blur and terror because people talked me on to it and I freaked the hell out for a solid 2 minutes until my spouse slapped me and I smelled oranges and I disassociated so hard that I forgot to be scared, I guess? And Flight of Passage had me literally unable to breathe for a few minutes while I was waiting (a cast member asked if I was having an asthma attack) the first time I rode it. If I can get past swooping/floating stuff, I'm cool. But one tiny bar connected to a carriage that goes over lots of water and me not being able to swim is a huge oh no and it makes me sad that I can't stay at the skyliner resorts ever because I can't bring myself to go on it. Hence why I wouldn't want it to expand without busses for broken brains like me being an option. I don't always drive down to Orlando or rent a car, though I suppose I could Minnie Van since they're back and the service dog care is absolutely amazing.  SweetMercifulCrap! posted:Well, they had the opportunity during last year's refurb, but the only worked on upgrading the ride control system. WDW of years past would take any extended shutdown to spruce up everything they could, but today you're lucky if any of the show elements look better after required maintenance shutdowns. That's entirely fair, too. I know it's a huge crowd pleaser (no one is going to be surprised that I don't ride it, but that I often go watch it and wave as people come down the drop hill) and I know that if that's the case, it's often that good enough is... well, good enough until they have more reason to do more, if that makes sense.
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Jun 22, 2023 01:16
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I actually did experience Everest with the yeti working way back in 2006. The scene is so "blink and you'll miss it" that it doesn't make or break the attraction, but it was also so quick and impactful that it remains memorable. It swooped at you fast and it looked like it could really grab you. The quick fly by nature of the scene was by design. It left you with "did we really just see that?" and adds to the legend of the yeti when you only get a quick glimpse. But this is also why they are in no rush to spend money on it. It would probably be a different story if this were a scene you stopped at and watched. Still, something better than some strobe lights could have been implemented since 2000-freaking-7. Even just strobing theatrical lighting would look better than obvious white strobes.
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Jun 22, 2023 01:47
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https://twitter.com/OOCParks/status/1671645686331318274?t=yzV583Yip6vzEN6xbcaF1w&s=19
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Jun 22, 2023 02:02
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I heard it's due to the fact that the yeti is alive and angry
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Jun 22, 2023 02:02
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I've only done the ride once but I didn't even notice the yeti, and I knew it was in there. Is it before the backwards part?
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Jun 22, 2023 02:12
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Aphrodite posted:I've only done the ride once but I didn't even notice the yeti, and I knew it was in there. Is it before the backwards part? It's right at the end, after the final block brake section and before the tunnel that slows you down and returns you to the unload station. It is up and to the right of the track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMV8Sgui9AA
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Jun 22, 2023 02:25
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Also, and no I don't condone this but it's worth seeing just so people get a better understanding of the scene, here's a dude that trespassed into the ride after hours and climbed up to the yeti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBS0UAHT6QE
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Jun 22, 2023 02:26
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Aphrodite posted:I've only done the ride once but I didn't even notice the yeti, and I knew it was in there. Is it before the backwards part?  Didn't-notice-the-Yeti-my-first-time pal
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Jun 22, 2023 02:54
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SweetMercifulCrap! posted:It's right at the end, after the final block brake section and before the tunnel that slows you down and returns you to the unload station. It is up and to the right of the track. Wow yeah I didn't even look up there. It doesn't really draw your eye I guess.
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Jun 22, 2023 03:11
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I’d much rather all of Tower’s effects were fixed if I had to pick between that and the yeti. I’d assume Tower would be easier as well with it being two separate drop shafts.
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Jun 22, 2023 13:41
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I'm worried that if they were to take down ToT for fixes they would re-theme it to something stupid
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Jun 22, 2023 13:47
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Dugong posted:I’d much rather all of Tower’s effects were fixed if I had to pick between that and the yeti. I’d assume Tower would be easier as well with it being two separate drop shafts. Me too, to be honest, and upgraded. My hope is that if they ever nix The Twilight Zone, they keep the same basic story. It works without it if done right. I don't have any faith in current leadership to commit to a non-IP attraction any time soon though.
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Jun 22, 2023 20:31
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SweetMercifulCrap! posted:I actually did experience Everest with the yeti working way back in 2006. The scene is so "blink and you'll miss it" that it doesn't make or break the attraction, but it was also so quick and impactful that it remains memorable. It swooped at you fast and it looked like it could really grab you. The quick fly by nature of the scene was by design. It left you with "did we really just see that?" and adds to the legend of the yeti when you only get a quick glimpse. But this is also why they are in no rush to spend money on it. It would probably be a different story if this were a scene you stopped at and watched. Same. I went there sometime in March/April (I think) that year when they were still doing the soft-open and got to ride it. You're right, it was such a fast interaction, but I remember it vividly. It made a hell of an impression. I really wish they would have taken the downtime during the COVID shutdown to gut it and fix it correctly, but oh well. Glad I at least got the memory of it.
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Jun 22, 2023 21:36
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Fluffy Bunnies posted:Soarin', the first time I was on it, is a big blur and terror because people talked me on to it and I freaked the hell out for a solid 2 minutes until my spouse slapped me and I smelled oranges and I disassociated so hard that I forgot to be scared, I guess? I had a panic attack while still grounded on Soarin and had to flag them to unbuckle me and let me go. OTOH the Skyway was my most missed Disneyland ride for many years and I think Monorails Pilot is the park's second coolest job. (At least in the case of Soarin, I joined an elderly couple as a party of three so we/they could get the very front and highest row of chairs. Which probably contributed to my freakout.) And yeah, for some reason Peter Pan on MK feels cheap compared to the DL version for me. I don't know why many people think the MK version is better. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 00:10
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quote:
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Jun 23, 2023 21:56
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In theory a good change but I imagine it will quickly become a way to gouge people.
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Jun 23, 2023 21:58
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It either means prices going up, or it's a desperate attempt to drive adoption which will lengthen standby. So it's all quite not good. Prices going up and people saying gently caress that and saving "line skipping" for just 2 days of their vacation instead of the whole week might be good, I guess.
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Jun 23, 2023 22:28
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My favorite part of G+ and ILL was the couple of mornings I was already out $150 (group of 3) before I even got out of bed to have my morning Joffreys. gently caress G+.
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Jun 23, 2023 22:31
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Anything that makes G+ less appealing (including raising the price) is a win imo.
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Jun 23, 2023 23:08
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Aphrodite posted:In theory a good change but I imagine it will quickly become a way to gouge people.
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Jun 23, 2023 23:22
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all that's gonna do is have a "It's $20 for Magic Kingdom, it's $25 for Hollywood Studios, or $49.95 for LIGHTNING LANE!! access for ALL FOUR PARKS!" poo poo.
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Jun 24, 2023 03:45
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As it stands now, it saves you some money if you're not going to MK. I don't think it will stay there but for a few weeks it's a nice little bonus for some people.
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Jun 24, 2023 05:10
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Aphrodite posted:As it stands now, it saves you some money if you're not going to MK. This is how they get you. Keep raising things until you’re on what used to be the ceiling going “well, at least I’m not up there”.
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Jun 25, 2023 01:32
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Anyone been to Monsieur Paul since it re-opened post COVID? Curious if the food/experience is worth the premium.
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Jun 25, 2023 20:20
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How safe is it to just toss old magic bands? I'm trying to figure out where on the spectrum disposal falls between just toss it in the trash, to run an RFID eraser on them and drill them out. I don't know if there's enough PID on the bands to make them a security risk from dumpster divers or whatever?
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Jun 26, 2023 00:54
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Deactivate them in your my Disney experience app and toss them. It’s my understanding they just link to your Disney profile and don’t store any personal info. In a perfect world they would be properly recycled/e-wasted
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Jun 26, 2023 01:07
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I had some old ones that I brought back to WDW and returned at the resort. They probably threw them away but at least I did my part.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:12
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Chainclaw posted:How safe is it to just toss old magic bands? Remove it from your account first, then you have nothing to worry about with it being linkable to you at all. The way that stuff works is the band has a unique, persistent ID number linked to the serial on it (the number may even be the serial) that it broadcasts with a weak radio signal, and when you scan it the Disney machine looks up which account has registered that serial in their database. The band is never written to and is just a dumb little chip constantly yelling out "MY ID IS 123456!" to anything in range that can listen. Everything that makes the connection is in your Disney account. Aphrodite fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 01:18
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Besides Chapek and the Disney board at the time wringing their hands in excitement at another way to fleece park-goers for more money, was there ever an actual, practical reason for the switch to Genie+? I'd be really curious to hear a real reason for it. Or even a single actual benefit to guests (cost notwithstanding). I've only been to the parks once since it came to exist, and all it really did was make my entire vacation demonstrably worse.
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Jun 26, 2023 16:38
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Doronin posted:Besides Chapek and the Disney board at the time wringing their hands in excitement at another way to fleece park-goers for more money, was there ever an actual, practical reason for the switch to Genie+? So it was definitely a flawed system that could have been improved, and in fact when Genie+ was first announced, a lot of Disney bloggers thought it would be an improvement. No pre-registration meant everyone using it got an equal chance at the rides, and since now instead of coming included with the ticket it'd be an optional, costed add-on, they thought usage would go down, which would mean standby waits would drop too. But as it turns out, no, it's worse and waits haven't dropped at all. And of course, actually improving guest experience wasn't even remotely in the minds of Chapek and the board. COVID gave them an excuse to kill FastPass (and a bunch of other freebies) and they took it, and it was very much of a piece with everything Chapek did, which was providing suites of micro- and macropayments to make sure that every family spent the absolute maximum amount they were willing or able to, and anyone who didn't would be barraged with FOMO. And if so far Iger hasn't expanded on that or anything, he also has done nothing to reel it back.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:00
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CapnAndy posted:FastPass made the standby waits longer (all prioritized entry systems do)
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Jun 26, 2023 17:08
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FastPass was completely out of control since they decided to give hotel guests guaranteed passes each day, and since Disney in Florida has about as many rooms as the Las Vegas Strip accommodating the math for that required making almost everything a FastPass ride plus inventing new things that weren’t even rides for people to burn passes with. So much planning was involved that it pretty much killed exploring the parks and doing things as it comes. The new Lightning Lane system serves two purposes: 1) It recognizes that to some park goers there can never ever be a return to how things operated before FP, and they will spend whatever it takes to get ride times. It then gives these people the frog in boiling water treatment, since it makes FP a video game style microtransaction that becomes a terrible value pretty fast. 2) It can be priced such that for most situations it’s not worth it and you just do the parks like you did before 1998 when there was no FastPass. (The sheer number of customers who never went to Disney before 1998 are often part of the die hard in the previous paragraph, because many sadly don’t know any better.) To some extent Disney doesn’t (well, they shouldn’t) want everybody to buy Lightning Lanes because a big part of FastPass’s problem is that the biggest contribution to it saving you time was if someone in the parks did NOT use it. If everyone is making the most of FP all at once, you won’t ride any more rides in a day than you would just waiting in lines, because no new seats on a ride are created by this system, it’s just juggling which people the seats are intended for. FP provided it’s best benefits when it was “the best kept secret at Disney” and many guests were too befuddled or too traditionally bent on waiting in standby to bother. When EVERYBODY has a FastPass, the main benefit it provides is load balancing, which is nice for operations cast members because it spreads the huge morning crowd across the day but that’s it. So the best way to use the new system is to wait for the last few days of a multi day vacation, how many days depends on your finances and party size, and buy LL priority for those days. You’re about to go home and these last couple days are the ones where you need to squeeze in everything left you need to see or you won’t see it at all. Compounding the issue is that even though the new system is actually called Lightning Lanes, management and access to most Lightning Lanes was tied to Genie+ in order to make Chapek’s new thing something people must talk about and interact with. If we just forgot entirely about Genie when we discuss the new system it would be much less confusion of marketing lexicon. But for the first five days of your seven day vacation, just don’t bother. You’re pouring money down the drain and still have time to just wait in lines. Wait until that last day or two to buy that micro transaction and cram rides in. If everybody did the parks this way, the system would still provide some efficiency and many people would save some money. After all, every day at Disney is somebody’s last day but usually not the majority’s. (Something like the day after New Years would be an exception.) Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 17:09
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Arquinsiel posted:FastPass+ did that. Regular ol' FastPass was pretty great if you were of mindset and physical ability to use it. Apparently it's mathematically the best solution too, ahead of even "everyone just queues".
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Jun 26, 2023 17:14
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Regular Fastpass inflated the standby waits too, but the effect wasn't as drastic as it wasn't implemented at every ride, you couldn't book three at once, and couldn't book in advance. The advanced booking and stacking ensured that all standby lines would already be artificially inflated shortly after park opening. Whereas with traditional Fastpass, people would pick one major ride to return to a little later and use the standby queues until then. You typically had about two hours until the standby lines became artificially inflated. On paper, Genie+ seemed like it would cut down on the amount of people using it since its no longer free, thereby having less effect on the standby lines, but for that to work they'd have to charge a LOT more, but at a certain price point the benefits it provides would have to be better. Even then, there's not much of a limit to what people will spend to skip lines - Universal often charges more than the price of an admission ticket for their Express Pass and people still buy it enough to where it affects the standby lines.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:20
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Also, if you stay 1 night at a Universal premium hotel you get 2 days of Express.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:33
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CapnAndy posted:I'm tremendously fascinated by the problem, honestly. I really wonder what the actual best solution is Paper FP required people make a trip to the front of a ride just to leave and come back later, often causing groups to assign all their tickets to one member of their party, who would sit in front of the FP dispenser machine for five minutes running their entire tour group's admissions through and collecting a ton of FPs while their friends explored the parks. Overall this results in a lot of people milling about the sea of humanity on benches and pathways rather than "being in line". This is usually okay in Orlando and Tokyo on most days because both parks (especially Tokyo) are built with huge football fields of concrete for people to mill about on. Disneyland is terrible for this because the park spent 45 years packing attractions into every available square inch of the property and connecting them to a collection of paths that are often out of the 1950s. Disneyland was built on the idea that a huge amount of the people inside are going to be standing in line, which detailed queues in 80s-90s rides that are often spread into different rooms. When you put significant real estate interior space into detailed and fancy lines, and then make standing in them optional and allow the occupants to just wander around, you're going to feel like you can barely move. The current system eliminates all this foot traffic, so that's nice I guess. Furthermore, a good number of people in a virtual queue will get into a line for a ride with no FP or historically shorter queues, adding wait time to that ride. Before FP, you might have to wait an hour to ride Space Mountain but you could also hit up the entire Fantasyland dark ride collection in that same time. With FP, the little dark rides are each 20 minute waits because there's a ton of people "in line" to ride the mountain range and Pirates filling those queues. As a little kid in the who was scared of roller coasters and spent most of the time at 90s Disneyland repeatedly riding simple rides that had very little wait, you can sort of see why I have strong partisan feelings against these "line skip" programs. What benefit FP does provide operations is load balancing: Instead of the huge wad of people riding Space Mountain every morning, some of that wad grabs a FP and leaves for something else, and they are distributed throughout the run of the park's hours. The "flash flood of humanity" effect depends on what the ride is, though. We all know Spaceship Earth has a huge line every morning due to being an attraction people at the entrance must walk by before they see anything else, and so every morning the people who just walk up to the first attraction they see and plop in front of it will gather there. Since omnimover is the most efficient system possible (the line moves forward at the speed which people can put their asses into chairs) that flood of people will be mostly gone in an hour and someone with a reservation for later in the day is just removing efficiency since the operators have to divert chairs to returning people and close off standby. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 17:34
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One of the biggest issues I had with FP+ (and we were "power users" who knew how to max the system") was that FP+ could be allocated almost 90% of a rides capacity, so the standby lines barely moved. This made the line feel longer than it really was. Mentally there's a big difference between spending an hour in line where the line is moving at a regular pace, and one where it moves infrequently. But if you reduce the amount of FP+ you piss off all the resort guest that pay a premium for FP+. We haven't bought G+ since the change, and probably won't in the future. Our trips are usually longer (8 or 9 days), so we use other tactics to make sure we ride what want to ride. We do usually pay for the ILL for RotR and cosmic rewind. I don't have answers on how best to do it. We just have our own strategy when visiting WDW that works for us and work around the crowds and the worst of things.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:35
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CapnAndy posted:I'm tremendously fascinated by the problem, honestly. I really wonder what the actual best solution is; if you had a park full of willing automatons who'd follow every order given to them, could you get everyone on every ride, and how low would the wait times be? I'd love to know what that behavior would look like, because to me, the smart thing to do is model the absolute ideal case and then work from there, saying "okay, how can we incentivize real people to hew as closely as possible to this?" Craptacular! posted:The best solution for efficiency is just everybody waiting in lines because of foot traffic and line diversion, the best solution for customers is probably close what we have now.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:45
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Craptacular! posted:2) It can be priced such that for most situations it’s not worth it and you just do the parks like you did before 1998 when there was no FastPass. Craptacular! posted:The best solution for efficiency is just everybody waiting in lines because of foot traffic and line diversion, the best solution for customers is probably close what we have now. Arquinsiel posted:Have I got the one hour and forty two minute video for you, my goon! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE I don't think anyone knows what the parks look like when they're operating at theoretical max efficiency, and while that's obviously not attainable in the real world, I think that knowledge is crucial, because until we know what perfect efficiency looks like, how will we know what behavior to encourage? Arquinsiel posted:You need to take another step and define what "efficiency" means here, because it looks like you mean "maximum rides per person per day" whereas to Disney it means "rate of money extracted per customer per minute" and time in rides is not time in shops or getting food. CapnAndy fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 17:49
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It doesn't really help that the time when "just waiting in line" proved the best system was during the worst of COVID when nobody was in the parks. quote:People are apparently gonna buy this, either becausee they're whales who don't care I think my wife and I must be whales. I simply do not want to go on vacation to wait in line for hours. I did that at Cedar Point. In Florida it is even worse. I remember the days of Fastpass+ when the parks were less busy (2016 or 2017 I guess?) when you could still walk onto some rides without a FP and not even wait in line.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:53
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