HydroGuy
A Pirate's Life For Me
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2005
- Messages
- 18,415
First let me say that I am a RideMax fan. I am a software developer, and think RideMax is a creative piece of software and I hope it achieves increasing success. Any comments that are not strictly positive are intended to help others better understand what it can and cannot do. FYI, the RideMax website is www.ridemax.com.
We went to DLR on Aug 1-4. I bought RideMax in May and experimented with it for several months. I consider myself a DL veteran. The unconventional RideMax usage proved to be the most valuable for us.
UNCONVENTIONAL USAGE
The wait time data in RideMax is designed to allow people to achieve the itineraries. Thus the wait time data typically overestimates actual wait times. With this caveat, I spent several hours before our trip dumping RideMax itinerary data into Microsoft Excel. I used mathematical curve fitting routines to create daily wait time profiles of all DL rides. I did the same for DCA. I printed out the DL data for each day, and the DCA data for the same day was printed on the other side. The screen capture
shows the printout for DL on Monday Aug 1. I referred to the daily sheet numerous times throughout our trip, as we typically were not following a strict RideMax itinerary but were deciding on which rides to go based on previous experience, how we felt at the moment, and projected RideMax wait times.
CONVENTIONAL USAGE
I printed up a conventional RideMax itinerary for DL on Aug 1 and for DCA on Aug 2. We ended up not following the Aug 1 itinerary, but we did follow the Aug 2 DCA daytime itinerary although California Screamin' was down which changed things a bit. I did not print anything up for Aug 3 or 4, as we planned a lot of shows on Aug 3 and on Day 4 I expected (correctly BTW) that we would be hitting rides we missed and going one last time on our favorites.
Typically we did not follow a RideMax itinerary, but I had an approximate plan in my head and collected a lot of FastPasses to give us choices. In four days we never waited in a line longer than 20 minutes, and made it on every single DL ride once, all of the big rides two to four times, and most of the DCA rides as well. We also made it to all the shows and parades except for Block Party Bash at DCA.
Here are my observations on RideMax:
1. As many know, RideMax creates an itinerary that allows you to get on more rides than you otherwise might. The less you know about DL and DCA, the more valuable RideMax is. And the more crowded DL and DCA are, the more valuable RideMax is. Rather than you spending time in the crowds and heat trying to figure out what to do next, RideMax helps make that decision for you. This appeals to many people.
2. Our kids saved up a lot of money before our trip and they wanted to spend it at DLR. They ended up spending way more time in stores than I had planned. I discouraged them from doing this early in the morning when the lines were real short, but other than that it happened spontaneously. It would have been a real downer to disallow this because of RideMax. I was OK with this, because of the flexible plan I had in my head and my FastPass collecting. One way to work around this is to use the "slow" RideMax touring option which allows more times between rides. Another way is to only use RideMax for parts of days (e.g., use it for the day schedules but let the evenings be completely spontaneous).
3. RideMax typically overestimates wait times, and occasionally is way off. One evening we went to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at 9:15PM. This was during the first showing of Fantasmic!, BTW. RideMax gave a wait time of 40 minutes, while the actual standby wait time was about 9 minutes. In general, RideMax was slightly conservative on wait times.
4. RideMax does not handle very well cases where you want to go on the same ride multiple times. If we specified we wanted to go on a ride twice in one day, usually RideMax scheduled the two times on the same ride back-to-back. Typically we would rather go on the ride at different times of the day. The Day 2 DCA schedule worked for us because we did not know DCA very well, and we only scheduled rides once.
5. RideMax is very FastPass savvy, and can take advantage of the late FastPass rule, Enhanced FastPass and disconnected FastPass attractions. But it is not designed to handle runners. This is where you have a group and one person (the runner) goes to get FastPasses for everyone while the group goes to another ride, waits in line, shops in a store or orders lunch. For example, in mid-morning when my family made their way from Main Street to the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes I snuck off to get a FastPass for Space Mountain. Then I joined them in the Davy Crockett line. On another evening my family grabbed a spot for the Parade of Dreams, and I snuck over to Buzz Lightyear to get a FastPass and then came back to join them for the parade. By doing things like this, I got FastPasses for all of the major rides and we usually had these available to go on any FastPass ride in the afternoon or evening. This kind of parallel time efficiency is obviously beyond RideMax, but it can make a big difference. Since many of the FastPass rides have wait times of 45-120 minutes, if you can pick up FastPasses more efficiently this can save you several hours in line and allow you to get on even more rides than even RideMax can. But you have to know what you are doing, and be up to speed on all the FastPass tricks. If this is not you, then let RideMax decide for you.
6. On all four days we were at DLR, rides were down. California Screamin' at DCA was down all four days. Space Mountain was down several times on Day 2, Splash Mountain opened 2 1/2 hours late on Day 3, and Indy was down for four hours mid-day on Day 4. If you are heavily dependent on RideMax you might have missed one of these major rides which might be a big disappointment. If you are knowledgeable enough about DLR and FastPass, you can work around it better than RideMax can because you can make on the spot decisions.
7. I did not like how RideMax made assumptions about how long you might spend on certain open-ended attractions. Examples are Tom Sawyer Island, Redwood Creek Challenge and the Animation Studio. If I remember right, RideMax always assumed 40 minutes on these. In fact, we spent 90 minutes at the Animation Studio, which is where our itinerary broke down for the day because RideMax had allowed only the 40 minutes. We spent about 30 minutes on Tom Sawyer Island, and maybe 20 on Redwook Creek Challenge (which we did not like really like - maybe because we live in the forest in Colorado - plus we skipped the Brother Bear show). RideMax could be improved by allowing you to enter how long you want to spend at such rides. Based on forums such as this, I expected we would spend 90-120 minutes at the DCA Animation Studios, but I could not tell this to RideMax.
8. If you have it in mind to do all the rides at DL or DCA in one day, I found that RideMax could create an itinerary that allowed you to do this during our high season trip in August. On our EE day it would have been fairly easy. My ten-year old tinkered with RideMax before our trip, and tried to convince the family that we should do all DL rides on one of our days, just to say we did. But nobody wanted to do this because it allowed very little time for an afternoon rest. If we ever decided to do this on another trip, I would let RideMax plan it for me because there are way too many decisions even for a vet like me to make this happen with on the fly decision making.
9. Note that RideMax does not include Monorail or the Disneyland Railroad on its list of attractions, because they consider these "transportation". If you want to do these when using RideMax, you will need to do them during a scheduled break or RideMax "free time"..
10. I corresponded five or six times with RideMax, and their response was always within 24 hours and very helpful. From their e-mails, website and documentation, it is clear that the RideMax author is a DLR enthusiast and really wants you to have a good time.
11. The RideMax Help system gives you many tips and tricks which are regularly updated, so if you buy RideMax you should read these.
12. RideMax documentation strongly encourages you to get buy-in from the group for using RideMax before your trip, rather than trying to force an itinerary on a group.
Check our full trip report to be posted in the next day or two.
We went to DLR on Aug 1-4. I bought RideMax in May and experimented with it for several months. I consider myself a DL veteran. The unconventional RideMax usage proved to be the most valuable for us.
UNCONVENTIONAL USAGE
The wait time data in RideMax is designed to allow people to achieve the itineraries. Thus the wait time data typically overestimates actual wait times. With this caveat, I spent several hours before our trip dumping RideMax itinerary data into Microsoft Excel. I used mathematical curve fitting routines to create daily wait time profiles of all DL rides. I did the same for DCA. I printed out the DL data for each day, and the DCA data for the same day was printed on the other side. The screen capture
CONVENTIONAL USAGE
I printed up a conventional RideMax itinerary for DL on Aug 1 and for DCA on Aug 2. We ended up not following the Aug 1 itinerary, but we did follow the Aug 2 DCA daytime itinerary although California Screamin' was down which changed things a bit. I did not print anything up for Aug 3 or 4, as we planned a lot of shows on Aug 3 and on Day 4 I expected (correctly BTW) that we would be hitting rides we missed and going one last time on our favorites.
Typically we did not follow a RideMax itinerary, but I had an approximate plan in my head and collected a lot of FastPasses to give us choices. In four days we never waited in a line longer than 20 minutes, and made it on every single DL ride once, all of the big rides two to four times, and most of the DCA rides as well. We also made it to all the shows and parades except for Block Party Bash at DCA.
Here are my observations on RideMax:
1. As many know, RideMax creates an itinerary that allows you to get on more rides than you otherwise might. The less you know about DL and DCA, the more valuable RideMax is. And the more crowded DL and DCA are, the more valuable RideMax is. Rather than you spending time in the crowds and heat trying to figure out what to do next, RideMax helps make that decision for you. This appeals to many people.
2. Our kids saved up a lot of money before our trip and they wanted to spend it at DLR. They ended up spending way more time in stores than I had planned. I discouraged them from doing this early in the morning when the lines were real short, but other than that it happened spontaneously. It would have been a real downer to disallow this because of RideMax. I was OK with this, because of the flexible plan I had in my head and my FastPass collecting. One way to work around this is to use the "slow" RideMax touring option which allows more times between rides. Another way is to only use RideMax for parts of days (e.g., use it for the day schedules but let the evenings be completely spontaneous).
3. RideMax typically overestimates wait times, and occasionally is way off. One evening we went to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at 9:15PM. This was during the first showing of Fantasmic!, BTW. RideMax gave a wait time of 40 minutes, while the actual standby wait time was about 9 minutes. In general, RideMax was slightly conservative on wait times.
4. RideMax does not handle very well cases where you want to go on the same ride multiple times. If we specified we wanted to go on a ride twice in one day, usually RideMax scheduled the two times on the same ride back-to-back. Typically we would rather go on the ride at different times of the day. The Day 2 DCA schedule worked for us because we did not know DCA very well, and we only scheduled rides once.
5. RideMax is very FastPass savvy, and can take advantage of the late FastPass rule, Enhanced FastPass and disconnected FastPass attractions. But it is not designed to handle runners. This is where you have a group and one person (the runner) goes to get FastPasses for everyone while the group goes to another ride, waits in line, shops in a store or orders lunch. For example, in mid-morning when my family made their way from Main Street to the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes I snuck off to get a FastPass for Space Mountain. Then I joined them in the Davy Crockett line. On another evening my family grabbed a spot for the Parade of Dreams, and I snuck over to Buzz Lightyear to get a FastPass and then came back to join them for the parade. By doing things like this, I got FastPasses for all of the major rides and we usually had these available to go on any FastPass ride in the afternoon or evening. This kind of parallel time efficiency is obviously beyond RideMax, but it can make a big difference. Since many of the FastPass rides have wait times of 45-120 minutes, if you can pick up FastPasses more efficiently this can save you several hours in line and allow you to get on even more rides than even RideMax can. But you have to know what you are doing, and be up to speed on all the FastPass tricks. If this is not you, then let RideMax decide for you.
6. On all four days we were at DLR, rides were down. California Screamin' at DCA was down all four days. Space Mountain was down several times on Day 2, Splash Mountain opened 2 1/2 hours late on Day 3, and Indy was down for four hours mid-day on Day 4. If you are heavily dependent on RideMax you might have missed one of these major rides which might be a big disappointment. If you are knowledgeable enough about DLR and FastPass, you can work around it better than RideMax can because you can make on the spot decisions.
7. I did not like how RideMax made assumptions about how long you might spend on certain open-ended attractions. Examples are Tom Sawyer Island, Redwood Creek Challenge and the Animation Studio. If I remember right, RideMax always assumed 40 minutes on these. In fact, we spent 90 minutes at the Animation Studio, which is where our itinerary broke down for the day because RideMax had allowed only the 40 minutes. We spent about 30 minutes on Tom Sawyer Island, and maybe 20 on Redwook Creek Challenge (which we did not like really like - maybe because we live in the forest in Colorado - plus we skipped the Brother Bear show). RideMax could be improved by allowing you to enter how long you want to spend at such rides. Based on forums such as this, I expected we would spend 90-120 minutes at the DCA Animation Studios, but I could not tell this to RideMax.
8. If you have it in mind to do all the rides at DL or DCA in one day, I found that RideMax could create an itinerary that allowed you to do this during our high season trip in August. On our EE day it would have been fairly easy. My ten-year old tinkered with RideMax before our trip, and tried to convince the family that we should do all DL rides on one of our days, just to say we did. But nobody wanted to do this because it allowed very little time for an afternoon rest. If we ever decided to do this on another trip, I would let RideMax plan it for me because there are way too many decisions even for a vet like me to make this happen with on the fly decision making.
9. Note that RideMax does not include Monorail or the Disneyland Railroad on its list of attractions, because they consider these "transportation". If you want to do these when using RideMax, you will need to do them during a scheduled break or RideMax "free time"..
10. I corresponded five or six times with RideMax, and their response was always within 24 hours and very helpful. From their e-mails, website and documentation, it is clear that the RideMax author is a DLR enthusiast and really wants you to have a good time.
11. The RideMax Help system gives you many tips and tricks which are regularly updated, so if you buy RideMax you should read these.
12. RideMax documentation strongly encourages you to get buy-in from the group for using RideMax before your trip, rather than trying to force an itinerary on a group.
Check our full trip report to be posted in the next day or two.
I just figured that if they are too long, that will just put us a little ahead of schedule and allow for short shopping and bathroom breaks. I do wish it would include strategy for EE; what I did was put in all the FL rides for a non-EE day (Wed) and then move them all up one hour and slightly shorten the wait times for EE on Thursday.
