GoG Lightning Lane Difficulties

Walt Disney World
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This may haven been covered before, but this is getting frustrating and I could use some help.

Scenario:

I have two GoG entries in my plan. I want the first for rope drop and the lightning lane for later (10:20am). Since I’m entering from the gateway, it doesn’t like to use GoG as my first attraction. So I set up my plan with everything where I want it and I hit Evaluate. The system then takes the LL version of GoG and makes that my initial attraction, so my day starts at 10:20am even though I have Rope Drop turned on.

I think I can make a “break” for the LL return time, but this seems like a kind of nuts workaround. Has anyone dealt with this and what have you done?

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The queue theory says that the LL for Guardians is almost always going to be faster than standby, especially first thing in the morning. That’s why the program keeps trying to take it there. The best thing would be to hit the break first, and then use the LL after that. It is a bit convoluted, but it’s really the best way to work around the programming.

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My workaround is to turn LL completely off. Then click “manually enter LL return times.” Then manually configure a LL for the time of your second ride on GotG. (This is also the way you are supposed to enter DAS return times.)

By having LL off, it won’t try to assign or use any other LLs. You will have to manually configure each one, but I find this approach less prone to bugs as long as you are realistic about which LLs you can use.

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Fun development. I tried this and it works if I set it for using the main entrance because that will always choose GoG to rope drop. I’ve set two GoG entries, one with a return time (not a LL) and one without.. If I switch to the IG (because I like the order that it has given me) and then I evaluate the system uses the GoG return time at 10:20 as my first attraction and has me skipping the first 2 hours of park time (same as it did with the LL).

@len I’m sorry to tag you with this, but I’m struggling to come up with a solution.

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That is a weird bug! I would submit a ticket for that. You can use the form at the below link. Or on your touring plan itself I think there is also a link.

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Do you have steps at the end that you can not get to? If not, you need more stuff in your plan. Either add a 90 min midday break or shorten your plan by 90 mins.
Sometimes this helps me when my suggested plans look wonky.

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I have a large break in the middle. If I optimize, it is fine, but when I evaluate, it moves my starting time. I think if I say I’m doing a rope drop that it should start at that time.

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I think there is also a setting that puts free time at the end of the plan? You could try that.

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Just tried and it didn’t work. It completely ignores the start time.

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I’ve responded to @feep’s ticket, so this is mainly for future reference (and for me to talk through the fix).

  1. Yeah, that appears to be a bug. It’s on my to-do list now.

The optimizer knows to penalize that much free time in the morning, when the “Optimize” button is clicked. The rules get more complicated in an “Evaluate” scenario when you’ve got:

  • Multiple visits to the same ride
  • Only one Lightning Lane to use for those rides
  • And several of the visits can occur during the LL return time window

There’s special look-ahead code for Evaluate that tries to determine which visit benefits most from that LL use. But it can’t backtrack to consider everything. (Why? One of the bedrock principles of Evaluate is that it does one pass over the plan to calculate waits. It’s not supposed to test alternatives or make decisions, because those decisions should be up to you. In theory, anyway.)

Anyway, my approach for this is that the optimizer should see the “Use Rope Drop” flag and not add in that free time under those conditions. I think this is relatively straightforward to fix.

I’ll probably work on this next week, and I’m working with @feep on workarounds for his July 5 visit. (I don’t want to make an optimizer change before a long holiday weekend, as you can imagine.)

If any of you are math nerds, the interesting thing about choosing Lightning Lanes is that it makes touring plan optimization many orders of magnitude more difficult. One reason is that the impact of each LL choice affects wait times for the steps after it. So you don’t know really know the second LL to get until you’ve identified the first.

The general optimization for a touring plan with N steps has N! things to consider. So for 10 steps, there are 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800 possible touring plans.

That’s not particularly hard - the software can get exact answers for up to 15 attractions reliably (1.3 trillion possible touring plans).

But the number grows faster than exponentially with each step you add. Adding 2 more steps to a 15-step plan doesn’t double the number of possibilities - it increases by a factor of 272 (17 x 16 x 15 x … x 1).

Let’s assume there are 10 MK attractions that are good uses of Lightning Lane, and we want to choose the 3 “in advance”. There are (n choose k) = (10 choose 3) = 120 different ways to do that.

So for each candidate touring plan we have from the 1.3 trillion options, there are 120 ways to choose just the first 3 Lightning Lanes. You can see how this gets complicated fast.

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I don’t understand anything else in this post, but this homeschool mom knows this is a “factorial” and can be written 10!

Which makes me wonder if F! means FxExDxCxBxA. :thinking:

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:joy:
Maybe there is a very limited set of Disney+Math Fans that would enjoy a shirt like this.

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95% are probably on these forums

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True, lol

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Never make changes on a Friday or before a holiday. Rules to live by.

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