Yeah, and they called the later boarding groups at an accelerated rate. Sounds like they are loading up the queue, hoping to clear it by 10, and getting to work on making sure today's issues don't repeat.
While I understand the sentiments of some of those who are dissatisfied, as an engineer who works on complex systems, I see nothing out of the ordinary here. Disney could have played it safe and given us an attraction that would have high reliability and fewer moving parts...and a lesser experience. With Galaxy's edge Disney has declared that playing it safe is not their mission. They are trying to do the impossible. And, as it happens, doing the impossible means pushing boundaries and taking risks and accepting some down-time. The technical aspects will improve over time. 3 days here is not enough to determine anything resembling a trend. And even with 6 weeks of data in Florida, we're just starting to see what might be an improvement trend.
Early adopters always pay the price for being on the bleeding edge of innovation. And that's what the folks that are riding this now, at release, are. They are the early adopters. They exchange reliability for the opportunity to be the first users. Software these days is never released bug free. The first commercial users are essentially the Beta Testers. You can think of the cast member preview as the alpha/smoke test, and the first year or so of regular riders as Beta. Bugs will be reported and fixed. Some bug fixes create or expose additional problems. Shortcomings in some of the mechanical systems will be discovered and redesigned to be more robust. And over the next year you'll see the up-time improve until it levels off at something close to the expected capacity.
Now, the people-angle issues we are seeing I expect will correct a lot sooner. If the ride is down for an hour and you are held captive in the queue under threat of losing your BG, that's a problem I expect will be solved quickly. So please bring that up to Guest Services and name names, not to punish, but to help those CMs get the training they need to deliver a Disney experience.
Honestly, the people who built the land love it far too much to allow it to languish or be mediocre in any way. If all this is too much for you, skip it and wait a year or so. I would be willing to wager that reliability and throughput will improve.
All of the above x 100.
This ride has a lot of software involved. I strongly suspect that the reason they aren't yet running the ride up until park closing time is because of nightly bug fixes and troubleshooting. So consider that sort of like a smaller software release...like on Friday when it officially opened, that was v1.0 of the ride.
Friday night, they made adjustments & probably tested all night long. Then on Saturday, v1.1 of the ride ran.
Then Saturday night, more testing. Then today (Sunday), it was v1.2 of the ride. With these iterative small adjustments over time, Disney will improve the ride operations in order to improve the guest experience and in order to allow more park guests to experience the attraction each day.
That same v1.0, v1.1, v1.2 thing is also probably happening on a human level with the CM team who work the ride. All of this kind of follows the general business concept of continuous improvement.
If you look back to reports & accounts of how opening day at
Disneyland went in July of 1955, there were a whole mess of problems. Heck, just Autopia alone had almost every single car break down in some way...and park guests were leaping over barriers, kicking other people out of the cars, purposely driving into other cars like it was a bumper car attraction, etc., etc. They adjusted all of that in order to address the wild card factor - park guests.
When Carsland opened, our family didn't even venture in for a couple of years after it opened. Why? The insanely long lines scared us off. Didn't want to stand in a 4+ hour line to get on one ride. When Pandora opened at WDW, the lines to get on Flight of Passage were crazy. Heck, they still are pretty crazy. I find it kind of amusing that people are complaining that they can't stand in a 4 hour line because of the boarding group policy for ROTR.
If going on ROTR with
100% certainty is an absolute must do for your DL trip otherwise, the trip is totally ruined, then at least right now, you should not go to Disneyland. Or at least don't go with the expectation of getting on the ride.
I'd also encourage folks to consider that maybe one shouldn't put so much emotional stock in doing A particular "thing" on ANY Disney vacation. I mean, stuff happens sometimes that's beyond your control. Look at how many people over the years going to DL & WDW have gotten so worked up and complained to Disney that their vacation was totally ruined just because something wasn't running, or something didn't work right, or the weather got in the way of fireworks going off that night, etc. Look at the glass as half full instead of half empty.
It's still an awesome park. ROTR isn't going anywhere. Disney has already invested millions and millions of dollars in development & construction of this attraction in 2 theme parks. They want to see the return on investment for it. And seeing that ROI means improving the guest experience so that guests will come back AND so that first-time guests will decide to go to DL or WDW instead of Universal.
Just be patient, grasshoppers. It'll all be ok. Heck, OUR family hasn't even been to Galaxy's Edge yet since it opened. We're going for 2 days in March. I'm totally stoked just to ride the Millennium Falcon ride with my family & friends. If we get on ROTR, too? That'll be the icing on the cake. But if we give ROTR the good old college try and we don't get a boarding group? I'll be disappointed, but that just means that we'll have to go back because dang it, I'm not going to wait a whole extra year to go on that ride.
