Hello everyone, I’m new to Touring Plans and this is my first trip using them. Love the idea but now that I’ve bought a subscription I’m a little disappointed with some of the weird things I’ve been experiencing with my plans. Mostly it seems to happen when I try editing a plan. I’ve had a plan where it wanted me to go on a ride an hour before park opening, a plan where I have hours of free time in the afternoon and I add one attraction and all of a sudden I don’t have enough time to ride everything, etc. Too many issues to list so I’ll just post about the latest issue I’m experiencing.
I’m working on an Animal Kingdom TP. I specify I am using EMH that morning which starts at 8am. Have the plan set to start at 8am. I click optimize and for some reason my attractions don’t start until after 9am. I think, “that’s weird” so I manually put some attractions before my 9:30 break and evaluate–the manually edited TP has a lower wait time than the optimized plan! I don’t understand what’s happening.
Am I doing something wrong with these TPs? I’ve consumed a lot of TPs content including tutorials and whatnot and thought I understood how everything worked.
Thanks in advance for your help. This seems like a great community
You need to publish the plan for us to see it. There’s a box to tick. When you’ve done it, near the top it will say something like “this plan is published. To share it use this url and there will be an url you need to copy and paste here.
Is this an optimised version? You have lost of spare time because there’s not enough attractions to fill the time. The Optimiser is looking for the shortest wait times, so it’s waiting until the evening when the wait times for each ride will be much lower than in the afternoon.
There is an option under “advanced options”to force the Optimiser to use your FP times. Make sure that is ticked and then try optimising a few times to get the plan stable. Hopefully then it should start to look better.
Or just put things in an order that makes sense and evaluate. You may need to move things round to fit the FP times you have, but I tend to use Evaluate more than the Optimiser.
Then you can post again and we can see the updated version and see what
As for the EMH question, not all rides and attractions open at 8am.
Yes, this is the optimized version. I know that all the attractions I’ve selected don’t fill the whole day. I’m confused as to why the optimized version has total wait times higher than when I fiddled around with it manually. For example, the optimized version has Na’vi River Journey at 10:08am for a wait time of 37 minutes. I dragged that to the beginning of the day and evaluated and the wait time was only 5 minutes–saving me a total of 32 minutes of waiting for that ride and for the whole day. So it seems that the optimized version is not truly optimized.
Yeah I can manually move these rides around to slots that I know will reduce my wait time–but that defeats the whole purpose of why I got a subscription, yknow?
It’s worth noting that I currently have it set to minimize waiting rather than walking.
I don’t currently have it forcing my FP+s because I want it to minimize wait times, whether I use my FP+s or not. When I forced it to use my FP+s my wait time went up 8 minutes so I’m fine not using them if it saves me time.
I checked and many of the rides I selected are open during EMH, and the waits for those rides and wait time overall went down when I forced them to the morning for my plan.
Hope that all makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to respond
It could very well be that the optimizer hit max runtime before it found the most optimized plan. I would recommend running the optimizer 3-4 times, until the order stabilizes, before you consider it “fully optimized”.
I wonder if maybe the plan is trying to reduce the amount of free time that you have? That might be why it is starting later. Since you have so few attractions in your plan, it thinks you should start later and have less time waiting in the park?
Hmmm. Maybe mail the team? They are usually good at sorting things out.
I do notice your breaks are way off the stated times in the text. There is an option to set the leeway on those, so I would check that, maybe set it to 10 minutes.
I know the Optimiser looks to minimise the overall wait time for the whole day. So if you had a full plan, then doing Navii first might lenghthen the wait times for several other rides.
Not having enough to fill the day does mess things up. If you have 10 attractions listed, the total wait time for those attractions are what the Optimiser is looking at, not the amount of free time. If you have more in your plan, then it forces the Optimiser to use all the time to get through it all.
I don’t see Evaluate as a waste of time though. It gives you a very realistic idea of how long your plan will take. I only ever use Optimise at the start, because I like to plan out my day myself, with lots of breaks.
That could be it. Coincidentally enough I was going through the Unofficial Guidebook and they actually did mention that AK isn’t always worth rope dropping. It’ll be our last day so we actually might want to sleep in that day anyway lol!
I think you’re right, it probably was the empty spaces in the day that was messing things up. I was thinking we’d probably take a long break in the middle of the day so I changed the times to 1/2 day and everything looks much better. Then maybe I’ll make another plan for the second half. That seemed to be it!
You can “add a break” in your Touring Plan and tell it how long of a break you are taking and it will also ask you if you are staying in the park or leaving!!
Was the optimized version trying to keep your walking more minimal? You mentioned Navi at 10 something, so it sounds like the plan was telling you to do that right before FoP to avoid walking through Pandora twice.
I prefer to optimize when I first make the plan and then evaluating to put it in the order that works best for me. (And I don’t think you can make custom touring plans without the subscription, so that’s still worth it for me!)
