The Great FP Mystery of 2018

PrincessWithABlaster

DIS Veteran
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Ok, I exaggerate, my kids have been binging Scooby Doo, but I’ve noticed some trends on the boards related to 4th and more FPs. I feel like people are reporting very different experiences and it goes beyond what would be expected (ie, it's easier to get FPs with a smaller party on a less busy day). Some people are reporting much better experiences than others and I think it's worth a little investigation to see if there are some trends that we can identify that might help people make changes to get a better experience or at least understand why others have a different experience.

So. To look for trends, I need data. 8-)

If you are an FP user who uses the refreshing strategy, I would love to get the following info from you. Please only provide this data if you regularly refresh to get better FPs and better times. If you're not doing that, please don't participate because it could skew the results.

For those of you willing to play along, could you please rate your experience given the following definitions and provide the info below? Thanks much.

Ratings for your 4th (and more) FP experience:

Excellent: You can get anything you want for a 4th including rides like FOP, 7DMT, FEA, and others often with no more than 10 or 15 mins of refreshing even during busy park times.

Good: You can get a lot of good FPs pretty easily with 15 minutes of refreshing (things like HM, TT, EE), you can get better FPs or move them up with longer than 15 minutes of refreshing and you might occasionally get lucky and get FOP, FEA, 7DMTs, etc.

Not Great: You refresh repeatedly and you can get kid rides like IASW without a problem but things like the mountains are very elusive even with a lot of time spent while in lines refreshing. You tend to give up and forget about it because it's too much work for not enough reward.

Please provide:

FP Experience Rating:
Phone Type (iPhone, Android, Windows):
Browser or App (if Browser Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or other):
Do you have APs:
Approximate level of crowds when you go (Holiday, Busy, Manageable):
Number of FPs you are typically looking for:
Any other info you think might be relevant:
 
Somewhere between not great and good. iPhone 7, 4 people, last trip was week before Christmas. New AP’s.
 
Android, app, currently have APs but didn't during our trip in January. I would say crowd level were manageable to busy (trip was during MLK week), and I was always looking for a total of 3 FPs (although at times I had to change search parameters into smaller chunks).

I would rate my experience that week as good, sometimes excellent. I know we rode 7DMT, FEA/Soarin/TT, and Toy Story multiple times depending on the park we visited that day. On average, we were able to ride Tier 1 rides 3-4 times, and we rode 7DMT 3 times on our last MK day.

Edited: I agree with AngiTN's comment below that the 15 minutes parameter is hit or miss. Some FPs I found right away, while others took longer.
 
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I have an iPhone 6, and use the MDE app. We have APs, and last August, in what I would call manageable crowds, I was able to easily get FEA FP as a fourth fastpass one day in the late afternoon for three people. We also frequently got 4th 5th and 6th FPs for TT, Soarin, TSMM, and RnRC during that trip for three-five people. My travel party is typically five people but two of the five tend to head back to the room early.
 
FP Experience Rating: Good+
Phone Type: iPhone,
Browser or App (if Browser Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or other): MDE app
Do you have APs: Nope
Approximate level of crowds when you go (Holiday, Busy, Manageable): Holiday (NYE week)
Number of FPs you are typically looking for: We generally get original 3 plus 6-8 more
 
I’d also say “Good+”. Iphone6, MDE, 2 people, last trip was Dec 14-18, crowds were listed at 5-6’s on TP but after the fact ended up being 7-9’s. We got TT, Soarin, RnR, FoP, Splash (I didn’t try for 7DMT) plus some of the smaller rides. Almost all of them were with 30 mins or so of the FP+ time...except FoP was about an hour. I refresh when in lines etc but not excessively. I refreshed nonstop for two weeks before we went trying to change my FoP only to get one on the first try day of. Next time I will not stress so much before we go knowing what we were able to get on the fly.
 


FP Experience Rating: Not great
Phone Type: iPhone 7
Browser or App (if Browser Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or other): MDE app
Do you have APs: yes
Approximate level of crowds when you go (Holiday, Busy, Manageable): 2/7-10- unexpectedly NUTS
Number of FPs you are typically looking for: 2 people, just an extra one or two after our initial three
 
Party of 2, have AP's, were there Feb 1-7 using old iPhone with Safari. The parks were much more crowded than anticipated, even though it was still somewhat manageable.

I would say Good, overall. I had the best luck on getting FP's by first taking any random time that popped up for a preferred attraction, even if it was a time I couldn't use. Then, I would keep refreshing to get a better time. For some reason, new times would come along much faster than it took to get the attraction to come up in the first place.
 
FP Experience Rating: Half Excellent and Half Good. BUT (big BUT on purpose, I do not agree with the 15 min limit you put on this. If that is important, then I am not able to answer at all. I can get FP for anything I want but I find it usually takes more than 15 min
Phone Type (iPhone, Android, Windows): iPhone
Browser or App (if Browser Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or other): Chrome, sometimes I use browser sometimes I use MDE app
Do you have APs: Yes
Approximate level of crowds when you go (Holiday, Busy, Manageable): All of the above, from 1's to 10+
Number of FPs you are typically looking for: 2's and 3's
Any other info you think might be relevant: Again, most relevant to me is it will probably take more than 10, 15 min of refreshing for some of the harder to get FP (like FoP). Parks with lots of options, like MK, take far less time

ETA - I will say I think the difference is persistence, and nothing more than that. Some give up way easier/earlier/faster than other. Some check more frequently, faster than others too. So I'm not sure how much help this data is going to be. I may check/refresh every 2 min for 15 min but someone else may refresh 2 times in a 15 min period. Guess who is likely to have better luck? Someone else may give up after 5 min but others keep going for an hour. Again, guess who will come back and report better luck?
 
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FP rating: Good
Phone type: IPhone 8
Browser or App: MDE App
Do you have AP’s: yes
Level of crowds: last time I used this strategy touring plans modified the day later to say that animal Kingdom was a 10 out of 10. It took 20-30 minutes (party of 2), but I got FOP and Safari day of. I averaged 7 fast passes/day on this trip. Most of them were decent ones (a few thrown in that anyone can get anytime)
 
FP rating: Good
Phone type: IPhone 6s
Browser or App: MDE App
Do you have AP’s: No
Level of crowds: We were last there the first week of June 2017, moderate crowds.

We had 4 people, and I was regularly able to get Soarin, FEA and TT at Epcot without much refreshing. I was not able to get FOP at AK, but it had just opened, so it could be easier now, not sure. At MK, I was able to get pretty much everything except 7DMT; and at HS, I was able to get everything except RNR
 
FP Experience Rating: between good and not great
Phone Type: iPhone
Browser or App: MDE app
Do you have APs: No
Approximate level of crowds when you go: Last trip was February 2017
Number of FPs you are typically looking for: We generally get original 3 plus 1-3 more / 2 people
 
FP Experience Rating: Good
Phone Type (iPhone, Android, Windows): iPhone
Browser or App (if Browser Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or other): App
Do you have APs: yes
Approximate level of crowds when you go (Holiday, Busy, Manageable): First time refreshing for FPs over MLK weekend
Number of FPs you are typically looking for: between 1-5
Any other info you think might be relevant: We were able to pull a 5th FP for FEA on our Epcot day, 2 TSMM FP as 4th and 5th on the same day we park hopped from AK.
 
ETA - I will say I think the difference is persistence, and nothing more than that. Some give up way easier/earlier/faster than other. Some check more frequently, faster than others too. So I'm not sure how much help this data is going to be. I may check/refresh every 2 min for 15 min but someone else may refresh 2 times in a 15 min period. Guess who is likely to have better luck? Someone else may give up after 5 min but others keep going for an hour. Again, guess who will come back and report better luck?


I sat and tried for TSMM FPs the ENTIRE time we waited for my husband to ride ToT TWICE. Never give up!
 
ETA - I will say I think the difference is persistence, and nothing more than that. Some give up way easier/earlier/faster than other. Some check more frequently, faster than others too. So I'm not sure how much help this data is going to be. I may check/refresh every 2 min for 15 min but someone else may refresh 2 times in a 15 min period. Guess who is likely to have better luck? Someone else may give up after 5 min but others keep going for an hour. Again, guess who will come back and report better luck?

So here’s what prompts this. There is a group of longtime posters who have been saying they can get almost anything they want with not that much effort. Honestly, I just didn’t believe them. I have been spending more time than I should testing the system to see how likely it’ll be that I can get certain FPs during our upcoming trip. And that is definitely not my experience. I really have to spend a lot of time refreshing to get lucky (I still have not even seen an FEA come up at all). I figured they were just spending a lot more time than they realized refreshing. Like playing a video and looking up to realize it’s 4 hours later and you had no idea. But JETSDAD’s post in this thread has screen shots with time stamps.

https://www.disboards.com/threads/what-are-realistic-expectations-for-a-4th-fp-at-mk.3664476/

I was floored. There’s no way on my luckiest day of testing have I had that level of success. It’s where the 15 mins comes from (if that’s too tight a limit I can relax that). Because of that I would argue it’s not just how often someone refreshes (although that certainly plays a role). I ran a test this weekend where I refreshed for 15 minutes constantly and my results were very different from JETSDAD. I was able to get 2 mtns and PPF but the soonest I could work them in to was 4-8 hrs from the time I was trying. I assume JETSDAD was constantly refreshing as well and not on multiple devices at the same time or anything crazy. So in this case it’s not a matter of one person refreshing more so getting more lucky. Admittedly it’s just two people refreshing for 15 mins so horrible sample size. But he showed he could get mtns and 7DMT in 15 mins and all within about 2 hrs of when he was looking on a whim because somebody posted about it.

On a tip (also detailed in the thread I linked), I tried changing to a non Apple browser. Ran the same 15 test. Got similar rides mtns and PPF but at much closer times 1-4 hrs out instead of 4-8 hrs out). Again it could have been a fluke but the amounts and times of FPs available seemed much better to me. I plan to run the tests again this weekend a time or two to see if the non Apple browser theory holds.

My FP window opens next week which will end my probing on this issue. But I really do think there’s possibly something more here. And if it lets more DISers have the same Good+ experience that others are having it’s a good thing.

But I do think you’re right that I’m not going to be able to see it in this data. Just from what’s been posted so far, its not obvious and there are probably too many variables to control for. But it was at least worth a try.
 
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When you are doing your test do you select a FP or just refresh? You do need to select any time for the FP and then refresh to change the time. It makes a difference, for whatever reason
 
When you are doing your test do you select a FP or just refresh? You do need to select any time for the FP and then refresh to change the time. It makes a difference, for whatever reason

Yes. I grab the first best ride at the best time I see and refresh it for about 5 mins to get the best time. Then I grab a screen shot, and switch to the next best ride and best time I can find and refresh that for better times, etc.
 
Ah, ok. I know I've gotten FEA, FoP, SDMT, all the hard to get rides, as 4th+ FP. Pretty much anything we wanted. I wouldn't say not much effort though, it does take effort, but it's not so much that it is a problem, if that makes sense. I don't worry about knowing I'll find something that we'll use. On our New Years trip (This was on 1/3 specifically) I got FoP twice, so we did it 3 times counting the one I had booked in advance, plus we got Navi. Could have gotten FoP a 3rd time but we had a dinner that night at DS so I didn't take the FP.
I remember on our August trip we were at Epcot and had used our FP there and were checking for AK (we were heading there for dinner and I checked for FoP while walking back to our resort (BWI) and got a FP for FoP for that night. That particular time the first FP I got was not the best time so I kept looking and even managed to get it to a better time by refreshing.
 
FP Experience Rating: Excellent
Phone Type (iPhone, Android, Windows): iPhone 6s
Browser or App (if Browser Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or other): MDE App
Do you have APs: Yes
Approximate level of crowds when you go (Holiday, Busy, Manageable): Potpourri (Mostly Busy with a Sprinkle of Holiday and Busy)
Number of FPs you are typically looking for: Between 1-3
Any other info you think might be relevant: I agree with AngiTN - it's a combination of persistence and luck.

I'm planning a solo trip in the next couple of months and I'm to see how many FPs I can get in a day :)
 

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