Thanks, I have already learned the refresh trick…
I generally keep refreshing the ‘View Details and More Times’ page that shows all times currently available…
And AGAIN, with still 5 days to the finish line … 
‘RD FEA from IG’ strategy is still well ahead with the same times…
BUT, I was just able to get an earlier SE FPP, which fits PERFECTLY into my FPP usage plan. I will now use the first three FPPs, as is, no in park re-arranging needed 
This also resulted in being able to add some longer Pavilion times and better timing at the Pavilions for the ACTS, now including ‘Voices of Liberty’… Even added a note to consider taking Friendship Boats to go from Canada to Germany…
I will still try to get, ‘at the park’, my 4th and 5th FPPs for a 2nd Soarin and a 1st TT, which would shave another ~25 minutes off this amazing low InQueue wait time (For my Plan ‘20th-5c-noDel’):
https://touringplans.com/plans/print?id=3936765
Imagine if we get the 4th and 5th FPPs, the whole InQueue wait time of about 40 minutes for the WHOLE day… my husband is ECSTATIC NOW 
Day includes three 30+ minute, well separated ‘Eat and Shopping’ periods, all day Tapas at 30 WS Food Festival booths, 2xSoarin, 1FEA, 1TT, 1LWTL, 1MSG, ALL pavilions (20+ minutes at each), Sergio, Voices of Liberty, American Adventure, Seveur Amusant, Impressions of France, 3 Cabs etc…
You’re doing really well fitting this all in!
Just out of interest, and as I know some other bits came up and have been in and out of the plan, are all of these being skipped deliberately?
Rides:
- Mission Space Orange
- Journey into Imagination with Figment
- The Seas with Nemo and Friends
- Gran Fiesta Tour with The Three Caballeros
Other:
- The Seas (pavilion)
- Imagination (pavilion)
- Turtle Talk with Crush
- Mariachi Cobre
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Not sure about Mariachi Cobre… I will look into what that is… 
MSO because I don’t really like spinning…
The Seas out because we are Tampa Aquarium AP holders (we may wander there thou by going in the Nemo exit) …
The others left when we decided to leave out the ‘kid in us’ events…
I also think we may seamlessly fit a Friendship Boat ride to Germany, lots of options later in day with the breaks we have.
I will be continually updating my Plan Notes now, to make sure we consider all these minutia items…
All good then, I just remembered all of China fell off earlier and wanted to make sure!
Mariachi Cobre is the Mexican band, they used to do a Coco-based act but I think are now back to “regular” music. There are a few musical groups around actually, but MC are one of the more prominent ones by all accounts. You may see them whilst in Mexico anyway!
Oh - MSO. May not affect your decision, but there is no spinning sensation. You just get pushed back in your seat a lot!
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Thanks, everyone that has helped so far.
I am hoping that this post will be close to the end of this long topic.
The reason for THIS post is that I just feel compelled to tell all the people who have actually followed my journey to this post, what an amazing day my husband and I just enjoyed while working on the TP plan. 
He amazingly agreed to sit with me and help update all the Notes for each Plan event…
With our combined computer skills, we did something that truly blew my mind today.
When I went to Epcot decades ago, I am not even sure that the internet existed 
We started by forcing ourselves to summarize, in the TP plan ‘Plan Summary’, the steps we have taken so far in order to optimize the plan to where it is now. 
BUT, there were very few Notes on each Step of the Plan, so that had to change 
At this point, my husband set up a blank Chrome browser instance and just started making these tabs:
- Tab1. A tab at TouringPlans.com, setup to edit your latest plan for the day.
- Tab2. A tab open to Google Maps at Epcot (He is able to enter and leave Street View at will and fly around things, an acquired skill. Epcot is spider webbed with blue Street View paths that can be walked along and they have 360 degree panning WITH the ability to look up and down at any angle as you walk and move you head… WOW)
- Tab3. A tab that takes us to TouringPlans attractions at Epcot.
- Tab4. A Wikipedia tab that lets us look up things like the Pavilion histories.
- Tab5. A tab open to here so we can look at the ride seating arrangements and transfer some info from it to our notes for the ride…
- Tab6. A tab open to Google for ’ epcot XXX “Chris Barry” ’ items (replace XXX with what article you want, say ‘Germany’) . He is our favorite reviewer.
Then the fun began… 
Our plan had 25 steps, so we started at Plan Step 1 and started adding/editing the steps’ notes…
This is the new fun process we took from there and we repeated these STEPS:
- In Tab2, fly around the attraction with Google Maps, the maps have labels with even the Pavilion restaurants on them , this is where we saw things like massive building attached to Germany with no ride label on it so we simply had to find out why…
- In Tab2, we land, say in front of Germany on the blue Street View path and then spin our head 360 degree to take in the whole panorama… Then we look into the pavilion and follow its Street View blue path into the pavilion, looking around as we walk in… It is almost like you are there in real life…
- Then, with the mental notes of what we saw on our trip in and out of pavilion (there are even blue Street View paths in the restaurants), we go to Wikipedia Tab4 and/or TP Tab3 and look up what they have to say about Germany. All along here we are making notes in the ‘Germany Pavilion’ on the Tab1 Plan.
- Then, read Chris Barrys’ review (find it by editing Tab6 and open any results found in new tabs). A lot of our notes came from his reviews
- Then, if needed, we open new tabs for further research.
- After all notes are done for the Plan Step #, then we close all tabs that were opened beyond Tab6
Move to next Plan Step # in Tab1 and then Repeat Steps 1-6 above for the new ride/act/pavilion…
By now I am sure you want to see our Plan with all the notes we made, here it is:
https://touringplans.com/plans/print?id=3936765
I KNOW that these notes which we made today in our plan, would not be the notes which YOU would have made in your plan, but that is EXACTLY why this process is so neat. You could be putting your own notes in your plan.
I can’t see how anyone would NOT have fun doing this process.
This is a crazy and wonderful use of the technology which is available to us today.
I CAN say for sure that there is no reason for anyone to wander around Epcot aimlessly anymore…
This does not bode well for Disney, as it may no longer take 4 day trips to Epcot in order to effectively see all of Epcot
After you do this process, you WILL feel like you just spent a day at Epcot but please do not cancel your trip as, in person, the trip memories will be much longer lasting
EDIT: I edited the first post of this Topic with a link to this post so that people who stumble across this topic can jump here to ‘read the last chapter of the book first’
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It only works for ‘Optimize’. There may not be ways for the Optimizer to make FPs work in an ‘Evaluate’ scenario, without moving steps around.
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@len, could you spare a few more bytes of data storage and double the length of allowable size for the Notes of each Step (preferably before this Wednesday ) 
When we are using the Plan at Epcot, I think that I would like to manually add, to each note, what Arrival Time, InQueue Time and even Walk Time etc that we ACTUALLY had, so that we can truly evaluate how close we were able to stick to the Plan. (LOL, I will even be having a GPS logging APP running, silently in the background, all day for use in my ‘day after’ analysis, how obsessive is that ?)…
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Yep - I’ll ask the team to make the change.
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Looks really nice! (Still a very full day!) If you continue with your mindset of “We can skip it if running behind…” you’ll be fine.
Sorry… .I took so long to get back. My weekend got pretty busy. Hope you have a great time this week!!
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Now I think I am simply reading too much here on the forums…
I just started to read the All Time ‘Top’ topics in the Touring Plan Forum…
I came across this topic of last year:
Were @len posted at post #23 there:
Which means that today I have to HOPE that TP has really figured out how to maintain the, currently still in use, CL1-10 system.
How can the CL1-10 system even work, when the whole CL1-10 system is based on posted wait times and when @len says that Disney now tries to make the same wait times on CL1 and CL10 days by changing ride capacities…
- Has TP wait time prediction improved since Disney began this draconian ‘bottom line’ practice almost 2 years ago
- Are TP wait time predictions for RD non-FPP FEA strategies worth planning on
I’ve been a TP user since 2012. It has taken me multiple trips to figure out that TP should be treated as a “guide” and not an exact step-by-step plan.
I’ve had trips where TP says I’ll be on a ride at 9:12am with a 5 minute queue and I’m done at the exact predicted time. I’ve also had even more trips where TP says there will be a 25 minute wait and it’s closer to 35 - 40 minutes. This is why I’m such a proponent of not overfilling a TP and adding in free time / breaks.
I will say just having a TP puts you ahead of 85% of people at Disney parks. TPs do allow you to get so much more done than the average guest. However, they are not perfect.
I’m, also, not a fan of the Lines app. While it can provide more up to the minute queue data, it is not intuitive or user friendly. More often than not, it’ll Optimize your plan making you walk all over the park just to save 10 minutes in a queue.
@len, in the very least, it would be nice if, when I re-evaluate my meticulously crafted, nearly-perfected plan, it warns me that the Fastpasses I originally had no longer line up.
In the example that prompted the question to begin with, it seems like rather than shift everything, including the step with the FP, it should have left the FP alone and then just inserted free time. Instead, @carmen had to insert a break manually to act like free time. If the only change when evaluating is that a break was removed without anything in it’s place, the time slot should have been made as free time due to the FP (ideally).
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Yes, and I changed my break strategy during this topic because of the recommendations you kindly provided… BUT I do not see how that ‘adding break/free time’ strategy could make up for, up to QUADRUPLE, actual wait times that are mentioned by the OP of that topic in his first post and are due to Disneys’, as of then, NEW policy …
It would also be great when I got the message… “The plan may not get to all your attractions before you leave the park. A solution may be to select fewer attractions or to take shorter meals or breaks.”
If my TP would indicate which step(s) are the issue. I’ve stared at my screen for hours trying to figure why isn’t my plan “updated” with no errors.
There’s the rub. Disney doesn’t really care about Touring Plans. In fact, I’d guess that if it weren’t for the fact that Touring Plans ultimately encourage more people to go, I’d wager to guess Disney really doesn’t like Touring Plans at all. We’ve seen time and time again that Disney tries to squeeze out any “outsider” from providing an advantage to guests.
So, if Disney does something to mess up the kinds of predictions TP makes…well, they don’t care. It now is the onus of Touring Plans to try to figure out how to work around the changes and still offer something useful. At the same time, each user of Touring Plans has to realize that they don’t really have special access to Disney, which means their predictions are, in a sense, little more than an elaborate guess! (Okay…maybe “estimate” is a more accurate term…but lacks the effect I’m looking for!)
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I completely agree. That’s why I added
THIS! (I was trying to figure out a way to say this very thing. Thanks!)
All I am asking here is in effect ‘has TP figured out how to provide more accurate wait times since that topic?’
I am not sure if ANY guide can be of much use if it has to take into account rides that have quadruple wait times throughout the day…
I find that the knowledge about general loading rates, capacities, routing etc gained from putting plans together helps a lot with dynamic re-planning once in the park - and yes, you should expect to be doing that re-planning to make best use of the developing situation.
On 3 out of 4 mornings on our latest trip we diverged from the plan before even the first step due to better opportunities (walk-on FoP, FEA downtime, walk-on 7DMT) - you then just keep an eye on things and get back on track as you go. Average wait times over the day will tend to work out, especially if you have the big-name rides covered via FPP or RD so only have to worry about ones that don’t really build long lines.
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