I’m wondering if they will let people in but check MBs at the rides to determine the EMH entitlement - sort of like they do with evening EMH.
Of course anyone who’s thinking should not be going to an EMH park without that entitlement anyway.
With the BG, when booking do you get to select a time of day or does it just assign you the next available?
If there’s EMH I don’t see a problem with opening boarding groups during EMH.
Even opening the ride during EMH would surely be a bonus to onsite guests? Which is what EMH is supposed to be by definition. It may disadvantage offsite guests, or those onsite guests who arrive later, but no more so IMO than EMH is anyway.
2 Likes
Yes, I guess Disney might just open EMH early. I’ll work on incentivizing my family 
1 Like
Thinking more about it, if they only let onsite guests in during EMH and RotR is open for FPs during that time there is a large chance that only onsite guests will get on RotR that day, which doesn’t sound that good.
About the idea of letting people in early but only staring boarding groups at 9am, this would create a BG lottery, with everyone trying at the same time. I like in theory, but I don’t think MDE could handle the load.
2 Likes
The one odd thing about this is that if they don’t open RotR until park opening at 9am on an EMH day, an absolute fewer number of people will get to ride that day, resort guests or not. They could mitigate this while still being fair by opening BG early, but only issuing enough to match capacity through 9am (breakdowns notwithstanding).
2 Likes
I am happy to serve as reporter for our real time experiment!
3 Likes
I am definitely interested to know how an EMH day pans out.
You are there Sunday, right? I’m looking forward to hearing your reports!
1 Like
As far as I can ascertain (I may have missed some), there were four instances of downtime, each about one hour today. Two instances of one hour each yesterday. That’s not too bad compared to Hagrid’s! Operating for something like 14 hours each day.
My advice if it breaks down while you’re there (with a valid BG) is to come back about an hour after first reports of a breakdown and stalk the line!
1 Like
Ride went down again around 7:30, this time for the night. 1 successful attempt out of 3
1 Like
It died last night around the same time. 
1 Like
Personally, I think they should restrict ROTR BG access to on site guests only until they get it running smoothly. I say this as someone who never stays on site. But I think on site guests should have incentives. Once they can predict the ride reliability, or if they aren’t full on capacity, they can open it up to off site guests.
3 Likes
Is the Starbucks in the park open at soft open too?
Wisdom!!!
2 Likes
Some places had signs with later opening hours, but a lot of places were open - we ate at Woody’s Lunchbox at 8:30ish, which was 30min prior to posted opening. I imagine the Starbucks would be.
1 Like
How did you find out that it was down for the night? I struggle to find sources on downtime because MDE doesn’t tell you. I have to look for eyes on the ground - TP chat, forum,etc. I have resorted to searching Twitter sometimes.
That’s the frustrating part, there is no way. There was never any push notifications when it went down or when it was back on line. I had already left the park when I got the push notification for the complimentary one day pass. When that came thru I knew it was not opening back up.
2 Likes
It was on Thursday at least—we got hot chocolate at about 6:15am.
1 Like
There are sites that report pretty much every downtime within a few minutes.
WDWMagic have a thread running where people post boarding groups, downtime etc pretty much all day.
I would think there are twitter feeds too that will be reporting things as they happen. I’m not on Twitter but I’d try WDWMagic, BlogMickey and others.
2 Likes