Waiting in line at theme parks is normal but with the progress of technology we're not just waiting in actual lines, we're waiting in virtual lines now. Whether it's a virtual queue to get on Rise of the Resistance or a virtual line to be able to buy some limited edition piece of merchandise, people will stand in some pretty long lines when they don't actually require standing in line, and a lot of people did that yesterday when the new Disneyland Annual Pass, the Magic Key, finally went on sale.
Disneyland ended its Annual Passport program while the park was closed and so many people who were used to having free reign over the resort lost the ability to just go whenever they wanted. Clearly, a lot of people wanted that ability back, as people sat in a virtual waiting room for hours to spend several hundred dollars to but their Magic Key.
As anybody who waited in a similar virtual queue earlier this year knows, when tickets went on sale again at Disneyland for the first time in over a year, the "over an hour" wait time was perhaps a bit misleading. While the wait time was certainly going to be more than an hour, it was just as likely to be multiple hours, and for some people they were apparently starring at that "more than an hour" wait time for most of a day.
But those people certainly waited. Waiting in a virtual line certainly doesn't require much from anybody, you just need to keep an eye on a browser window to be sure you don't miss your chance. But when people finally got their Magic Keys, they were quite happy.
And while people clearly wanted their Magic Keys so bad that they jumped at the chance to buy them, it does seem a little strange. When we normally see people in virtual waiting rooms for long periods of time, it's for something special or limited. It happens with concert tickets, or even with Disneyland reservations. But in those cases, you're talking about something with a finite supply, and you potentially want to be first because you can get the best seats to an event or just want to be sure you get in before the thing you want is gone.
In the case of Magic Keys, that's not the case. There are essentially an infinite amount of Magic Keys, so you don't need to be the first in line. You can go on the Disneyland website right now and, while the virtual queue is still active even now, the wait time is about 1 minute. And once you get in you can buy the same Magic Key everybody else already has. Disneyland is offering special bonuses to early adopters, but even then you have 66 days, in honor of the 66 years Disneyland has been open, so you can buy one next month and still get everything you could want out of it.
And being among the first also makes you something of a guinea pig. When there are a bunch of people online at once trying to use the same website, there are bound to be glitches that simply won't happen during the same site's normal operation. By waiting you can potentially avoid such headaches.
There do appear to be some legitimate issues with the system beyond long wait times. People with existing Disneyland tickets who are trying to upgrade them to Magic Key passes do seem to be having trouble getting that to work and there were images last night of Disneyland ticket booths being crowded by guests trying to figure it all out. In the end it will almost certainly all work out. Annual Passes are back at Disneyland.
