My interpretation is “It” being the available return time for that ride, not the current actual time.
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Exactly.
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i feel like never buying hoppers again on principle now.
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now what, for HS? good lord every time i think i have a good strategy to share w/ my clients they pivot.
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I don’t think this changes things as much as it seems. There will still be some attractions with return times pushing past 2pm fairly early in the morning. You only need to get one or two of those if you’re stacking for the afternoon / evening.
I wish they’d leave it as is, but it’s something that doesn’t come up super often as is (except at DL, where you can churn through LLs much more quickly).
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the problem i see is getting more than one or two this way. by the time your next two hour window opens, all the big stuff at HS is sold out anyway so i was adding stuff like TSM or ASS just to have several rides in a row with no lines. now that won’t be a thing.
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I agree with Jeff. I misunderstood originally and thought you could not book until 2pm which would have been dramatically different. But for my TP I had gone through Thrill Data and just looked at what was available when for stacking and there are definitely at least 1-2 headliners at each park that advance past 2pm by 7:30/8am which does not put you at a disadvantage for booking your next one.
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It’ll require an adjustment, which hyper-planners like us tend to hate, but it should be OK once people get used to it.
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I would have definitely utilized park hopper on our next trip since we never do many days in total at WDW. Here’s what my plan was:
APR to Epcot to mainly ride GOTG in the AM. Start stacking immediately in the AM for HS where we spend most of the day. I really don’t want any LL at EP because we want to stack all of them for HS.
So now, we’ll be forced to choose a couple LL for EP and possibly not have time to get on all of the attractions we want to at HS on that same day, correct? Do I have this right?
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I don’t see why you would need to choose a LL for Epcot. Slinky will advance past 2pm by like 7:02am.
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OH! Me too.
So what is the big news today then? 
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You have to wait until the times advance on their own to 2pm. They don’t magically show up starting at 2pm. So if you wanted say Star Tours after 2pm, you’d probably have to wait until like 1:45pm to book it.
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I have actually very intentionally not researched all of the strategies deeply because I feel confident that they will change before my trip in November. (Case in point.) But I didn’t quite realize that the UI showed you past 2pm first thing. So at least I’ve already been planning to have to wait for times to advance. It didn’t seem that bad.
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I feel you might end up with the same result, but dramatically increase the amount of time spent on your phone. “Is [insert ride] at 2 PM yet?” “No, let’s check again in 10 minutes.” Repeat……
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Ah. Thank you!
Normally, you want to book those headliners first anyway so this doesn’t seem like a big deal to Liners.
I can totally see the logic there in that Disney wants to encourage more LL bookings at the park where the visitor has an APR so it can potentially shore up more LL availability at the hop to park.
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I personally think that there has got to be more to it than that really. Like if you are’nt hopping you probably wouldn’t even know that the system did this. Otherwise there is maybe a gap in when you can book LLs in the very middle of the day but at some point it has to even out. This just seems like such a freaking low priority “problem” to solve!
I just really hope this is the beginning of the end of the 2pm hopping time.
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this is probably true, but if you want to stack ASS or TSM those won’t be at 2:00 when the next booking window opens. I’m really sad and upset about this for my trip in 15 days. We had an amazing plan and I’m not sure how this will change things. I’m sure it will be fine, but I wish this had either happened weeks ago or waited until a month from now!
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Or it codifies it. Not to be a downer. 
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I hear you! Any changes within 60 days are just not cool in my opinion. I guess I personally just hadn’t even realize that there previously was an advantage in the hopping space.
And yes, I suppose this could be the nail in the coffin but I don’t see why they would change it then. I feel like if they are taking out any reference to 2pm then it must mean that something about 2pm is changing.
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I would love this! Or at least move it to 1pm like DLR!
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