Used to be a fastpass fan but...

[kassonvike]

When fastpass first came out I LOVED it. It seemed perfect. Come to a ride if you think the line is too long grab a ticket to come back later. Of course the biggest reason this worked well was probably because crowds were smaller then and 80% of the people in the parks had no idea how to use it. Fast forward a couple decades and the parks are even more crowded and more and more people are looking for ways/strategies to skip the lines. Its just gotten WAY too complicated. My preference at this point would be to just go back to a single standby line. No lightning lane plus and no individual lightning lane. Estimated Q times have never been an exact science but now its barely better than a guess. For example we went to 7DMT and the lightning lane q was completely full. I'd never seen that before. Standby at the time was posted at 60 minutes but we stood in the line for 20 minutes and didn't move. We left the line and a few minutes later it said 150 minute wait. Then with boarding groups we have no control over when we can ride. The 4 days of our trip we did virtual Q our boarding time ended up overlapping with dining reservations and causing extra stress.

I also noticed something that is probably purely psychological but had a major affect on me none the less. When a really long Q has great theming and keeps moving, it is a lot easier to stomach the wait. I noticed this for Rise, Guardians, and FOP. For example I'd much rather spend 70 minutes walking through FOP Q at a steady pace then to walk direclty through the first 2/3 of the Q and then spend 60 minutes in the last 1/3 of the Q, barely moving.

Maybe a hybrid approach would be make the standard Q roughly 60 minutes long (or maybe 90 for the most popular rides) and cap the line at that. If you show up to try and ride and the Q has reached capacity you get put in a virtual Q to be notified to ride when the Q has room again (in a first come first serve order). If the Q ever gets below a certain amount of people they reopen the Q to general entry again.

 

[Lumpy1106]

This is L-O-N-G, but so, SO good. Why is Fastpass no longer a thing? It's exactly why you think - the line skippers are making everybody else wait a lot longer. If everybody has it and uses it, it evens out - you skip a few lines, but you wait longer in the lines you are not skipping. The problem was there were too many people trying to use it and not everyone knew all the tricks. So now you only get to skip lines if you pay? That's not right.

BTW - We went on August 2020. No FP+, No G+, No LL, nobody skipping lines. It was glorious. But, as the crowds got bigger and the lines got longer, too many people clamored for the return of FP+ and Chapek got greedy. Be careful what you wish for.