Please help - Want to pull my hair out trying to optimize my Epcot TP!

OK so I get how to input your FPP selections and force optimize, that’s done. I even checked to utilize evening EMH so we’re good there. BUT, my first FPP is TT at 10:30 and it has that as my first attraction even though I am getting to the park at 9 (and have indicated so) and for FEA I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it have me do that at RD… It’s telling me to do it in the middle of the day and saying it will be a 37 minute wait (not sure if I trust that)…it also has me going back and forth between WS and FW and I don’t wan’t to do that!! I’m super frustrated, this is the first real TP I’ve tried to build and it’s not doing what I want. Any advice would be great! My head hurts and I want to cry! :tired_face:

I’m not sure why your TP won’t put other attractions from FW before 10:30. The system usually will look for a way to keep you in lines less time - even if there are relatively long gaps of nothing scheduled (like you have between 9 and 10:30), so that might be the reason.

It seems like I ran into that issue with FEA for our trip last month too. It would never automatically place it at RD but in the middle of the day when it said that there would be 34-minute wait. I can assure you - I never saw a wait that small. It has a lot of breakdowns which affected the wait times throughout the day. So if you can do it at RD that would be best.

Did you move the slider so that it knows to limit your walking? That might help. That park is huge, so you don’t want to be walking back and forth like that. (I checked our step tracking app after our trip, and EP was always the one where we did the most walking.)

Other than that, you may want to use move the attractions (at least FEA) in the position you want and then use the Evaluate button rather than the Optimize one. That will keep them in the order you choose.

Especially at Epcot, which is so spread out, but even in the other parks, I put in rides, optimized once, and then rearranged to my liking and only Evaluated after that. I know that might not be what you are ideally trying to do, but it might help your headache to see all the steps in the “right” order and get a realistic sense of the timing, even if it’s not technically “optimized”!

1 Like

I think i have it on balance, if I put it on minimize walking should it group FW stuff together and WS stuff together? Let me see…

My thoughts exactly. I just don’t know how to get it at the start of my plan at 9 for RD…

Good thinking, I may try this! Will it just not show FEA at RD no matter what b/c “it knows” WS opens at 11 and not 9?

Another possible solution that I’ve seen others suggest, is to remove FEA altogether and start your plan from say 10am. Let it optimise the rest, minimise the walking, and see what the plan looks like then. And just rd FEA as you planned.

Bear in mind I’ve not used tps before, this will be my first trip using them, plus mine are mainly just evaluated. So I can’t vouch for this!

2 Likes

Publish your TP here for better input.
Likely what’s happened is that the optimizer is moving things around to give you the shortest TOTAL wait time for the whole day, which may mean ignoring your FPP. Also, set your preferences to “Relaxed” walking speed and “Minimize walking” if you don’t want to be tearing around all over the place.
Let the experienced folks here look and give some suggestions and jury rig it to include whatever FPP you want to include, and I promise we’ll help make it work. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I think it knows Frozen opens earlier, but good question. @Nicky_S’s suggestion of leaving it off the plan and starting with your next step would work, too, if you can’t add Frozen pre-11 AM.

I find “optimize” to oftentimes be more frustrating than it’s worth. To me it’s like a GPS that routes you to save 1 minute, but puts you ona street with 7 stop lights…

I have much better success with Evaluate. I’ll use optimize to get a starting point, but then I manually rearrange my schedule to “put thing where I want them”.I’ll then do an evaluate after each step and see what it does to my overall wait time. I’d rather have an extra 15 min of total waiting that have to go back and forth between FW and WS

I often do that now too… but that’s because I can come close to building an optimized plan just with my knowledge of the attractions and their average wait times. For rookies, optimize is a great tool. With caveats (relaxed pace and minimize walking being good ones.)

EPCOT is always a hard plan for me too. I would replace FEA with a “breakfast” at Ackershus, that way you will be able to plan on the walking time. I have even gone so far as to make 2 separate TPs for FW and WS.

Without seeing the plan in question I can’t make any reasonable guesses as to what is actually happening here - as @mossymom asked, please “publish” it and post the link here. If everything appears to be set up correctly then you might have to emails webmaster@touringplans.com so that they can look into it further.

Thank you so much for all the advice guys, I am going to look at all my TPs again today and try again. Stay tuned! Lol…

I feel your pain and for some reason Epcot was the only park I had a problem with. I optomized and got it as close to what I wanted (without going back and forth between FW and WS), then I just moved attractions myself and then did an evaluate. Oh also did a balance between walking and waiting

I actually did what @mikimcc mentioned and made one for WS and another for FW. Or started to, lol. Still a little frustrating but stopped it from having me walk back and forth and gave me a little more control. What’s difficult about WS is that I know there are certain Christmas Around the World things we’ll stop for but others we may skip and won’t necessarily know until we’re there! I’m all for a good plan but plan to take a few things in spontaneously, especially in WS, lol.

1 Like

‘Plan spontaneity.’ I like it! :slight_smile:

Lol OMG I just realized I actually did type “plan to take a few things in spontaneously” :joy:

I virtually never make a real TP for WS. If I was in your shoes, I’d decide which of the storytellers you want to see, plan those times, and “fit the rest in between”. The amount of time you typically spend in WS is based largely on how much time you spend looking through the shops and eat/drink.

1 Like

Yes! We have a 1:30 Akershus Candlelight lunch and CLP at 6:45 (so excited, never done CLP before!!!) so we’re of course working around that. Have a later dinner at Biergarten. But I kind of like wandering around WS and deciding where to shop/look etc…