Maxwell42
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2009
- Messages
- 111
Personally, I’m CAUTIOUSLY optimistic about the new system. Sure, I don’t like paying for something that used to be free, unless the thing I’m paying for is an improvement. And I think there’s a chance that this could be a net improvement over FP+.
I’ve never experienced MaxPass at DLR, but I do remember the legacy FP system at WDW, and it was great as long as you didn’t mind the legwork (I was the FP runner for my family, and it almost doubled the steps I got in the parks). Of course, it was even better when they didn’t enforce the end of your return time, and you could stack 4-5 premium FP's to run through in the evening, but that’s another matter. I have little to no issue with returning to a similar (but digital) system as long as it works. My main complaint (other than the cost) is that it prioritizes arriving early at the park to start pulling LL passes rather than having your first three scheduled for later in the day if you’re not rope dropping, but we can adjust and learn to live with that. At least we'll be able to pull LL passes before we arrive in the park, so we can start pulling them as early as we want to use later in the day.
As for the individual attraction selections (LL$) – I see a potential upside to this system. Assuming that the vast majority of guests won’t want to pay for access to a single ride, the LL utilization for those rides will be quite low, meaning that the standby lines for those attractions will move much more quickly than they did in the FP+ days. That will actually make access to those rides MORE egalitarian, as most (90%?) guests will be in the same bucket, and hopefully multi-hour waits will be less common. The exception here is ROTR and Ratatouille - allocating some of those rides' capacity to LL$ means it'll be that much harder to score a free boarding pass, so that's not great. But I still hope that the utilization of LL$ is low enough that it won't have a huge effect.
As for the complaint that I’ve seen that people don’t want to spend their vacation staring at their phone, I think we’ll be doing much LESS of that than we were when we constantly refreshed the FP+ listings hoping to score a hard-to-get ride.
We've been going to WDW since 2009, and I've done my research and learned how to maximize legacy FP and FP+. With FP+, we really enjoyed the days of aggressively refreshing to score more rides, and it wasn't unreasonable to do 8-10 FP+ per day if we wanted to. Those days are probably gone, but hopefully so are the days of standby lines moving at a snail's pace because 80-90% of a ride's capacity was allocated to FP+. I'm willing to reserve judgement until we see how the new system is implemented and how well it works in practice.
There are some aspects of FP+ that we’ll miss, but I’m holding out hope that Genie+ will not be a total disaster and MIGHT even be an improvement. If it is, then I won’t complain too much about the $15/day. We'll be back in January, and I'm really hoping they have the kinks worked out by then.
I’ve never experienced MaxPass at DLR, but I do remember the legacy FP system at WDW, and it was great as long as you didn’t mind the legwork (I was the FP runner for my family, and it almost doubled the steps I got in the parks). Of course, it was even better when they didn’t enforce the end of your return time, and you could stack 4-5 premium FP's to run through in the evening, but that’s another matter. I have little to no issue with returning to a similar (but digital) system as long as it works. My main complaint (other than the cost) is that it prioritizes arriving early at the park to start pulling LL passes rather than having your first three scheduled for later in the day if you’re not rope dropping, but we can adjust and learn to live with that. At least we'll be able to pull LL passes before we arrive in the park, so we can start pulling them as early as we want to use later in the day.
As for the individual attraction selections (LL$) – I see a potential upside to this system. Assuming that the vast majority of guests won’t want to pay for access to a single ride, the LL utilization for those rides will be quite low, meaning that the standby lines for those attractions will move much more quickly than they did in the FP+ days. That will actually make access to those rides MORE egalitarian, as most (90%?) guests will be in the same bucket, and hopefully multi-hour waits will be less common. The exception here is ROTR and Ratatouille - allocating some of those rides' capacity to LL$ means it'll be that much harder to score a free boarding pass, so that's not great. But I still hope that the utilization of LL$ is low enough that it won't have a huge effect.
As for the complaint that I’ve seen that people don’t want to spend their vacation staring at their phone, I think we’ll be doing much LESS of that than we were when we constantly refreshed the FP+ listings hoping to score a hard-to-get ride.
We've been going to WDW since 2009, and I've done my research and learned how to maximize legacy FP and FP+. With FP+, we really enjoyed the days of aggressively refreshing to score more rides, and it wasn't unreasonable to do 8-10 FP+ per day if we wanted to. Those days are probably gone, but hopefully so are the days of standby lines moving at a snail's pace because 80-90% of a ride's capacity was allocated to FP+. I'm willing to reserve judgement until we see how the new system is implemented and how well it works in practice.
There are some aspects of FP+ that we’ll miss, but I’m holding out hope that Genie+ will not be a total disaster and MIGHT even be an improvement. If it is, then I won’t complain too much about the $15/day. We'll be back in January, and I'm really hoping they have the kinks worked out by then.
