Ok....here's my two cents....we did the full 24 hours (on only 4 hours sleep at that), and we did it primarily for the characters. I would say that while I never anticipated that all of the characters in the 140 character tweet were going to be out, I did expect to see many more of them. We got in line for Maleficient and The Queen at 9pm and were about the 25th people in line. The issues started to arise as we got closer to the actual 11:00 hour when they were supposed to open it and people started trying to just wait up by the entrance. When we arrived at 9, we asked the cast member is this the line for the Scary Tale Hall M&G and she said yes, it is already forming, so we got in line....the problems started when others around 10:30 started showing up and randomly standing by the entrance thinking they were just going to jump in front of everyone that had been patiently waiting, the line at this point was down to Pooh. The new CM at the front of the line stated, that all the people lined up were not an official queue line, and that it would be first come first serve. This almost started a riot.....finally they got it all sorted out, but it could have been bad. We then after that M&G went straight to the area where Meg, Hades, Pain & Panic were going to be meeting.....this was much more organized at first, as they had multiple cast members forming the line and keeping everyone against the wall around the circus. The M&G was scheduled for 2:15.....they closed the line at 1:00am. They then announced that Hades and Meg would meet together and that Pain and Panic would rotate with them every 30 minutes.....while this did not surprise me much, it seemed to anger a lot of people, but they seemed to be getting over it. The issues started arising when they announced that they would not be signing autographs and that all groups must take their photo together and not individually so they could get everyone through the line. Parents started talking about how there kid was going to throw a fit if they didn't get an autograph and that it wasn't acceptable (fantastic parenting right!). Then they didn't actually get everything started until 2:45am so they were 30 minutes late and the line was moving really slow....I couldn't figure out why until I decided to go upfront and check, to find out that the first 70 people or so that were in the line at the time, did not want to take pictures with Pain and Panic and weren't moving until Meg and Hades came back out......no cast member thought to come and ask the people in the line if they wanted to come up and meet P&P until I asked!!!!! Would I have preferred M&H, yes, but if it meant waiting another 2 hours then no, so we moved to the front and people started complaining that we were cutting in line until I pointed out that we weren't cutting, we were willing to take a picture with the characters that were out.
My issues are that with everything that they do, they continue to amaze me with there lack of organization and underestimating how popular the villain M&G's are. Also, they touted this as a heroes and villains event, that the villains would be out at night, but there were no special Hero M&G's during the day time......just the usual ones they have every day, and their claims that a Characters Appearance in a parade counts further demonstrates there lack of touch with reality. People want to meet the characters, interact with them and take a photo with them, not point at them at a parade and say "oooohhh....look there's Hercules".
This is my second 24 hour event, I'm sure it won't be the last, as we quite enjoy them, I just hope that they learn from each one so that the next event is better.