Lets consider being there for opening and then at 9 walking to Astro Orbiter first.
That goes against my internal logic of getting in the queue for a bigger ride first, I would have headed straight to SDMT then PPF then SM then i dont think the others matter that much.
I suspect this is a function of the fact that at 9:00 am you aren’t truly rope-dropping SDMT OR TRON. You’re behind all the early entry folks who are already in line, and even though it isn’t open for EE, Tron attracts a lot of that crowd. So the TP is sending you to SDMT at ‘the lull’ which it expects to happen when the first (and second) wave have been dealt with, and as far as TRON is concerned, it’s sending you there at the lunchtime dip.
i get the point but most early entry folks would have ridden by that point? and allowing the general crowd coming in 45 minutes to getinto the que well I doubt 9:45 sees the sDMT queue in a lull…
So…you have to always remember, TP is optimizing for TOTAL TIME standing in lines, not keeping all wait times below a certain threshold. It absolutely makes sense to hop onto a bunch of rides with <5 minutes (often walk on) while everyone else is queued up for the “big rides”. By the time they are done with one ride, you will have finished 5! And then the wait times for those 5 climb to much longer waits. Now, you will end up waiting longer for the 1-2 rides people rope drop, but your total time standing lines will be reduced, sometimes significantly so.
I’ll make up an illustrative example. Let’s say there are 7 rides. Rides A and B, everyone wants to rope drop. Rides C, D, E, F, and G people don’t rope drop for. At rope drop, the waits for C through G are about 2 minutes each. A and B have waits of 25 minutes each. Later, the waits for C through G climb to 20 minutes each, and A and B climb to 50 minutes each.
If you choose the rode less traveled, you will wait 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 50 + 50 = 110 minutes. If you choose to follow the herds, you will wait 20 + 20 + 20 + 20 + 20 + 25 + 25 = 150 minutes. So, sure, you waited a lot less for the main rides, but you are spending way longer in lines overall.
So, don’t necessarily be afraid of the longer standby wait times later in the day!
I’m hypothesising, but I’d rather suspect that the fact that early entry is now only half an hour, and is now available to so many people has impacted the effectiveness of rope dropping the biggest ride for those who are not staying on site.
Additionally, the increased sophistication of the predictive software has revealed that while rope dropping the biggest ride is a good strategy, it’s not always the best one for everyone at every park.
The data tells a story I just have such a strong reaction looking at that data point thinking it cannot be right! In Ryan’s image it shows a 50min wait at 9am assuming that’s because a queue has built at 8:30 onwards. But surely numbers getting early entry don’t have it that high.. and then everyone is let in at 9 and it drops by 50%!!! So that at 10 it’s a 25 min wait!?
I wouldn’t think so, because there are many factors at play. There are those who would rather wait a maximum amount of time for each ride, rather than maximum total wait time across rides. If that’s your goal, then rope-dropping an in-demand ride would suit that goal. But if you are willing to wait really long for one or two rides, in order to save a lot of time across ALL rides, then you get a different answer.
Also, my illustration was just that…an illustration. In practice, the ride choices, time of day/year/whatever, will make the differences be less so clear cut.
The point of my illustration was to show why it can be that TP will actually recommend you spend more time doing the least popular/busy rides at rope drop, since it is optimizing based on total wait times. It seems counter intuitive for people because they just look at something that says a 90 minute wait and think, “But if I rope drop, it is only 30 minutes!” and don’t realize that you spend much more than that extra hour standing in OTHER lines as a result. (Or whatever.)
Then, of course, there is the unfortunate variability of unexpectedly high levels of crowds, or rides breaking down/having delayed openings, which can mess things up entirely. A couple years ago, my son and I rope dropped HS expecting to ride ROTR. It was down at rope drop. So, we decided to pivot to RnRC. It was…DOWN! Our game plan was foiled!
I agree, it’s counter intuitive but that’s exactly what happens, day after day. Very quickly after 9:00 am arrivals push the wait time at Tron to the point that, given you have the whole rest of the park to choose from, with low waits everywhere else, it looks like a bad time to ride - so people don’t join the line.
Without new guests joining the line the wait time comes down, for a little while, then starts to climb back up again. That’s the lull. It’s an observable phenomenon at the ‘biggest’ attraction in each park (it also happens at Guardians, Flight of Passage and Slinky Dog Dash) and it happens, as you suggest, because early entry - available to more people than ever, but only for half an hour - has broken rope drop for everyone else.
Anecdotally, counter intuitive though it is, it works.
We were at MK three weeks ago with early entry. It was a party day, and official opening was 8:00. We were admitted at 7:15 and being among the very first people into the park, I toggled ‘rope drop mode’ on our touring plan and optimized it.
It put us on SDMT, then Winnie the Pooh, then Small World, then Tiana’s (where we joined the official opening rope drop at 8:00am) then Space Mountain, then People Mover(!) then Tron. It sounds mad but we rode Tron in the lull with a 25 minute wait.
So we rode Tron 7th, but waited only 25 mins. Had we gone there at 8:00am, we would have had a 45 minute wait, and while we’d have been on it earlier we would have missed out on walking on to Tiana’s, Space Mountain and the People Mover with no wait at all.
There is a very strong contingent that believes you should rope drop a 2nd tier or even 3rd tier ride, not the super headliner, for the reasons @ryan1 mentioned.
IME, if you are going to rope drop the super headliner, you really ought to be at the very front of the pack (during EE). Otherwise, it’s usually better to RD something else.
That said, I don’t like the idea of rope dropping Astro Orbiters because it is a slow loading ride that often opens late. I would go for something like Space, Buzz, or Peter Pan to get the most bang for your rope dropping buck.
You could knock out JC, Pirates, Tiana and Aladdin in a jiffy as you would truly be rope dropping those.
I gave up on optimize on my last trip when it sent me to WTP before SDMT at rope drop. Those were the days where it assumed we weren’t at front of the pack, and being a newbie to the tool I followed it - completely screwed up our day by 2 hours.
Never again. I redid all my TPs later that night for the balance of the week.
I build and rebuild my tps using evaluate only.
Play around, move stuff around and use evaluate to see what it says.
I think Astro has a 25 minute wait much of the day so it’s trying to save you time . At DLR I waited forever to get ion that ride with my kiddos. Painful.we hadn’t put it in thd plan but of course my son begged to go in it, so we hopped in line near park close thinking it would be faster, but apparently all the young adults wanted to ride??
