All the park fanatics must be in line for RotR that early!
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We rope dropped the Hagrid this morning, At 7:00 AM we were at the gates, since we were the first in our turnstile, the lady decided to prescanned us before they let people into the park, and that gave us a needed advantage, because to my surprise people broke into a full sprint. The cast members were just saying once in a while, “don’t run” but not one care, is a good thing that we are in decent shape, because we had to work hard to keep up.
At the end we only had 4 people in front of us, but once we got to the end of the queue, they stop the front of the line from riding because the ride had problems, so before any one could ride it the ride had problems, I think by 9:15, they say the ride was good to go and we went on it 
It was as good as yesterday, so far two days at Universal Studios and a ride each day
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Great job!
The app said Hagrids was 90 minutes, when we entered the queue at 1:20pm, we are testing the thesis that is usually 60 minutes, even though is posted 90 minutes, the other day that was the case for us. If this time is the same, I don’t think there is a benefit to show up at 7:00 AM for the rope drop.
I’ll edit this post with the actual time it took us
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Oh! I can’t wait to see how long it is!
Forget about the 60 minutes, the line hasn’t movedl for a while, we are outside of the last room, but they haven’t announced the ride is down yet
Edit: actually I was wrong there was another room to go, so even if it didn’t temporarily stop it wouldn’t
have been 60 minutes
By 2:35PM we were out of the ride, great as before
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So how many minutes was the wait?
Edit: You said you entered at 1:20pm and exited 2:35 so I’m guessing about 70 minute wait?
I think 75, minus the 5 minutes non announced down time, that will be a 70 minutes wait, but you may get more data coming from us, my son is sad because he unintentionally stapled himself so hard in the seat that he said it hurt throughout the ride, so after we are done eating, we may do it again
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We did it twice last week…once on Thursday posted as 90 mins but only took 40 mins (around 1 pm). Did it Saturday Posted as 120 mins and took about 50 mins (around 11am). The queue went much faster then our trip in August 
. I love this ride!!!
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Some more stats for the past two weeks of Hagrid’s. The story remains the same in most respects, however, large chunks of afternoon downtime on 12/9, 12/10, 12/13 and 12/16 would point to timing an earlier arrival.
On a more qualitative note:
- If you’re up for a gamble, rope drop has been successful for some forum members, and being at the front of the pack would reduce/eliminate the wait times seen in “official” numbers. Early morning uptime continues to be an issue, so if you’re unlucky, you may lose valuable time that could have been spent elsewhere.
- There are reports on the UOR Lines app of Hagrids being open as late as 7:30pm. These openings are not reflected in the official Universal app, the UOR Lines app or these statistics (which draw from the UOR lines app). So if you’re in the area of Hagrids, even if it’s much past “typical” closing time, it might be worth a look.
One big question is: Is Hagrid’s reliability getting better? I ran a comparison of the last two weeks analyses (they are overlapping). The answer I would say is: “No, it’s not.” If anything, the unreliability is getting harder to predict, with the normally “safer” early afternoon being hit with outtages. This is certainly a limited analysis though, it will be interesting to see if the trend continues.
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Hagrids was at 120 minutes for a long time, we were at Universal Studios and it finally went down to 90 minutes, we took the train and entered the queue at 3:50pm, I’ll keep updating this to see if 90 minutes, really means 60
7:57 we are walking out of the ride, the last room went pretty quickly. The ride still feels amazing!!!
4:14 entering the building
Just talked to a cast member, she said they added more carts than a month ago, so now they can accommodate more people on the ride
4:47 last room
4:57 we are walking out of the ride, the last room moved very quickly, the ride still felt amazing!!!
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Our last day at Universal, the ride finally went down to 90 minutes, we entered the queue at 11:44 AM
12:15 PM entering the building
12:42 Already half way into the last room
Sorry with the excitement of talking to my family about how good was the ride, I forgot to check the clock in the way out, so incomplete data but if it helps the last room moved very quickly
We are done with Universal, now is one day at SeaWorld and two at Busch Gardens, so no more reporting, thanks again guys for all of your help planning this trip!
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I don’t trust Hagrid’s posted times at all. They are not just inflated, they are also a bit random.
I rode 2 times in a row, both times with 120 minutes posted. First time took 50 minutes, second time took 90. It was clearly visible on the second time that the line was considerable longer (it had a whole new outside section). Another time I rode it with a posted 60 minutes wait and it was almost a walk on (10 minutes walking + 5 minutes waiting seeing several ride vehicles arriving and being sent away empty for some misterious reason).
Maybe they do it because the ride is so unreliable, they don’t really know how many people will be able to ride per hour and so they don’t really know how long the line will take. Maybe is just so people don’t get too disapointed if they have to stop for 30 minutes.
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Can confirm Universal has ended the scheduled early closings for Hagrid. The ride might still go down randomly due to issues but it is no longer a standing policy.
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Great news. Thanks for the information!
Out of curiosity, where do you get the up-time data? I only see wait time data on TP, but maybe I’m not looking in the right place.
I kinda fake it. There’s not an explicit “uptime” stat, but when Hagrids is up and running there are 5 recorded wait times per hour. If there are less than that/none for a particular hour, it’s recorded as a partial/full outage. It’s not a perfect system, but aggregated over two weeks, it should give an accurate impression of the likelihood of an outage.
A slight issue with the TP data is that they continued to report Hagrid’s as closed early recently even when the hours were extended.
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We tried in the afternoon on 12/16 to ride Hagrid’s but it was down and they weren’t sure when it would come back up. We opted to try first thing in the morning on 12/17. There were a lot of people ahead of us at rope drop that morning, and with one person in a wheelchair there would be no sprinting. We ended up waiting 60 minutes from start of the queue to getting on the ride. Park staff were heavily preaching the strategy of going to Hagrid’s first thing in the morning, but I will say it worked out well for us.
We just got back from our 3 days at the park and were able to ride Hagrid’s each day. The first day we rope dropped the Studios side. That night we wanted to ride it and so we decided to just wait the line out after dinner. I will say the wait was worth it, but the next 2 days we opted to rope drop and that went MUCH better. They opened the ride up 30 minutes early both days and we were off by 8:40 each of those mornings. (got to the park at around 7 before 8 am early entry, then ride opened around 8:20-8:30 when it wasn’t supposed to open until 9 with the rest of the park)
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