So I am looking at the wait times right now: 4 PM Aug. 23rd.
Long waits, it seems. 95 minutes FOP, 65 for Kali river, 55 at RRC, 60 at Splash mountain, 90 for 7DTM, 55 at Space mountain, and so long and so forth…
I am thinking to myself, wow, this must be a high numbered crowd level and I go check and MK is a 4 while HS and AK are both a 3 !!!
Either the predictions on TP.com are way off or going on a 7 or 8 day must be truly horrible.
Thoughts ?
You need to look up wait times as they equate to rides:
https://touringplans.com/magic-kingdom/crowd-levels
This shows MK. If you scroll to the bottom after reading you’ll see the other parks too
So looking at what crowd levels mean, only RRC is out of range to the detriment of the guest. Most are in range and a couple are shorter than the predicted level would allow them to be (to the benefit of the guest)
Interesting that 7D would only call for an additional 40 minutes wait at a crowd level 8 than it does today at a “4”
That’s a really interesting post! Hopefully thanks to TP, none of us will have to wait the max for rides!
Thank you so much ! I had never seen that. Naively, I thought a 1 meant pretty much no wait anywhere…I don’t know how I could believe such a thing but I did !!! 
You’re welcome. It’s easy to be under that impression. I think of the pain scale - one means no pain at all, ten means worst pain you can ever imagine. This doesn’t work that way though 
FWIW, I was myself pretty surprised that it was such a short (relatively) increase between a 4 and an 8. 40 minutes isn’t double.
Know this - the important thing is to have a good plan. Then the crowd levels won’t mean so much. You’ll feel it between attractions as you try to move around, but as you breeze your way onto one attraction after another, it won’t feel so bad. 
I built out a personalized touring plan for MK for Thursday September 27th that is currently rated as a 4 and the wait times on my touring plan are much lower than what is in this post. For instance we are scheduled for Buzz Lightyear at 4:30 PM and it says the wait time as 20 minutes. When I look at the chart in the link from above it says typically a 4 rating leads to 48 to 65 minute wait. Which is more accurate?
That’s because you’re working the plan.
The crowd calendar tells you what the AVERAGE guest will wait - and the average guest is not armed with a touring plan that helps you go about seeing and doing things in a different way than most will
See?! It’s the plan that matters, not the crowd level (except insofar as it helps you create the plan that makes the crowd level irrelevant)! 
I don’t understand the people who don’t use a plan but I really do love them cause if everyone had plans they wouldn’t work anymore !!!
Shhhhh!
The unfortunate thing (for them) is that they don’t even realize there is a need to plan ahead. I think they think of it as a bigger 6 flags or something akin to their local amusement park. A coworker recently asked me about planning a trip in December and when I told her it was on the later side for planning a trip that “soon” she was shocked. I explained about the ADR thing and the FPP thing (as a bare minimum for why) and she was suddenly thinking spring sounded smarter. She represents most people.
As @OBNurseNH says, the plan makes CL usually irrelevant.
I sometimes see on Chat folks planning trip around CL, which park etc. One person was thinking of switching plan around, changing fpps etc, to put days in different order when CL level changed per a notification. Not a good idea.
We were there one week 8/9 CLs every day. With RD, a good PTP & fpps, we had no waits in lines at all. I should say that we do skip afternoons, when crowds are highest (& weather hottest). Also, we had a couple of waits that week, but only b/c 2 lines were down.
The chart above is the highest wait times of the day. Your TP will help you avoid those times, so all your waits should be much shorter.