I have a problem, and I wonder if anyone else has ever seen it.
I made a personalized touring plan for USF, and included most of the attractions (except HP; we have a separate day set aside for the Boy Wizard). My plan day is about 6 months out, and Universal just announced hours, so I updated my plan to cover the whole day (7am to 7pm with early entry), and hit “Optimize” to see how it was looking.
The optimizer is always setting my first step to Woody Woodpecker’s Nuthouse Coaster (hours: 10am-7pm). Always. So, my plan starts 3 hours after park open. I tried moving it to later in the day, but it always gets put at step 1 when I optimize.
So, I thought I would try to move things around and evaluate, to get an idea of how much we could see, but when I move Fast & Furious to an early part of the day, Evaluate doesn’t have a guess for how long the wait will be. From that step to the end of the plan, every column is “NA” instead of a number.
This is really surprising. I’ve been using TP and making touring plans for about 5 years, and I’ve always gotten decent results from the Optimizer, but this is my first trip to UOR, so this is the first time I’ve really used the touring plan functionality for USF or IOA. (My IOA plan, though, seems pretty good after optimizing).
So, has anyone else on the forum ever seen the Optimize or Evaluate functions completely fall on their virtual faces before?
This has happened to me before. My current plan keeps putting my Fast and Furious after the park closes and saying I can’t do it, even though there is time earlier in the day. I understand this to some extent because we don’t know how long the experience will be, and that is also why you are ending up with NAs.
When other weird things happen, I usually wait a day or two and come back to it and it seems to work itself out. Be sure your start and end times are correct. Sometimes that can throw a monkey wrench into things. I have had instances where I had marked it to start at park open, and, for some reason, when I went back into the plan, it showed me starting two hours later. Also, it will often not acknowledge early entry until the park has been officially confirmed.
Finally, if you mark the plan public and post the link on here, we can check it out and see if anything pops out as being “wonky”. In the end, my plans have always ended up working out.
Here’s a link to my plan: Personalized Touring Plans
E-mail webmaster@touringplans.com, explaining the situation and including the plan URL. They will be able to get to the bottom of this.
Try reducing the total time you are going to be in the park by changing your end time or inserting an afternoon break. You don’t have enough attractions to fill the entire time. The optimizer is having you stand around for 3 hours at the beginning becaus it is looking for overall shortest waits which it is figuring is at the end of the day. If you say door are leaving the park 3 hours before park closing it will shift those to the morning instead.
Check to make sure you have attractions that are open during the early entry, otherwise move your starting time back to regular opening because that throws off the optimizer also.
The optimizer is having you stand around for 3 hours at the beginning becaus it is looking for overall shortest waits which it is figuring is at the end of the day.
I’ve seen that before, and I might agree, except that the last 2 steps are after the park closes. The optimizer should be doing a better job.
I changed the hours to 8am to 5pm, and it finally put something else first, but then I got the “you may arrive later than you’d like” warning. I shifted the hours back, and got the 8-5 plan and the warning again.
Truly, the optimizer is a mystery.
I am just now looking at this, and it looks like you have got it worked out. It does have a couple blocks of wait times, but it has you starting someplace rational and it looks like it’s not pushing anything to after park close.
I used the contact link, and Brian from TP said they found and fixed an issue with Fast and Furious. It looks pretty good now.
1 Like