Touring Plan is making no sense

Originally I had added about 10 or 11 rides at Universal, selected that i had an express pass, and selected that I had early admission. After crunching the numbers it came back with a very optimized plan. So optimized it fact that I had to laugh, as it had me hitting every single ride on the list between 7am and 8:50am.

Since I had left all the shows and parades and all that jazz out, I decided to add them back in and see what it would do, and thats when it really lost it’s mind.

In the original plan it say that we would be in the park at 7am (early admission), and so of course it had us start at Diagon Alley. On the new one it tries to make ET the first ride, and it states we will be in line for 3 hours… which is due to the fact that the ride doesn’t open until 10am. Why in the world would it send us to an attraction that doesn’t open for 3 hours first? So I removed ET from the plan, and now it sends me to Transformers with a 90 minute wait. Again, that ride doesn’t open until 8, so that makes no sense.

here is a screen shot after “optimizing my plan” with express pass and early admission checked:

Your setup is broken, and it isn’t doing me much good in it’s current state.

I have also been trying to set up a touring plan for Magic Kingdom, and yet ever single time I hit optimize, it totally changes the entire plan. I specifically selected minimize walking, and yet it has us crossing the park from one ride at one far end to another at the other far end over 5 times in the day.

There seem to be some major problems with your algorithms.

The best way to get help with the problems you are seeing is to e-mail webmaster@touringplans.com, describing the problems and giving the plan URLs.

Also, re minimizing walking, I think that you are misunderstanding the purpose of the slider. You are not telling the Optimizer to come up with a plan with the least amount of walking, you are telling it to put more weight on walking time when coming up with the “best” plan. If you moved the slider back to “Balanced” and re-optimized, the optimizer should return a plan that will be better overall in terms of time, but has more walking than the previous plan.

I hope things sort themselves out soon. @len and the rest of the TP staff are very helpful.

I understand what the walking means. My point was, with “balanced” set it only had us crossing the park twice, and our walking time was like 45 min for the entire day. When I selected “minimize walking”, it had us crossing the park 5 or 6 times, with a total walking time of 2.5 hours.

But it’s not even a factor in the example above. If you look at the screenshot provided, everything is set to balanced, and yet it still thinks waiting in line from 7am for a ride that opens at 10am is a good idea.

Thanks for the tip on the email.

OK, now that I know how the “balanced” plan worked out the “minimize walking” results do not make sense.

Also, with the USF plan do you have any attractions selected that will be open during EMH? If you don’t, then the plan will have you wait during EMH as you cannot do anything. Also, ET has HORRIBLE wait times, so I can understand why a plan might have you go to it first and wait until it opens, but not for 2 hours from normal park opening time until ET opens. :smiley:

As @SallyEppcot says, the TP folks are very helpful and usually quickly respond to issues that you e-mail them. Good luck!

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Now that I think about it @Skubersky is the Universal TP expert. Maybe he can help. I haven’t really played around with the UOR plans very much.

One additional thought on USF - do you have enough activities to fill the day? The Optimizer can come up with funny results if it does not have enough attractions to play around with. Either limit the hours you are spending at the park or add more attractions, and see what happens.

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@exoscoriae - ah, I see the issue with Twister. Looking at this now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I just saw this thread, if you are still having trouble please email your plan URLs to webmaster@touringplans.com and cc seth@touringplans.com

There is a random bug where your plan start time can get messed up, make sure you always hit edit and verify your plan date & time before optimizing.

Thanks Seth. It’s not my plan, but hopefully @exoscoriae will see this and shoot you an email. :wink:

Its much better, but it is still odd. Why would it have me riding Despicable Me , Shrek 4D, and REvenge of the Mummy in the first hour, and then heading to EFG which now has an hour long wait?

Does it think that the combined wait times for those three rides will be more than an hour if I go to Diagon Alley first?

I tried removing the Diagon Alley entrance and exit gates and moving EFG to the top, but it caused the entire sheet to turn “NA”. it appears that EFG requires you to go through the entrance gate first and requires you to go through the exit gate before moving on, which is an odd requirement.

After forcing the entrance gate to the top, then EFG, then the exit gate, it finally calculated everything properly on the Universal touring plan.

Over at the Magic Kingdom side, I reoptimized it, and it did a MUCH better job of doing each section individually, rather than having me running back and forth across the park. Thank you for the prompt fix.

It’s probably exactly this. Glad to hear the plan re-optimized well. Sorry again for the issues earlier.

The entrance and exit steps are there to ensure that you see everything in Diagon Alley before moving on to other areas of the park. The alternative would allow touring plans to go in an out of Diagon Alley multiple times. That would have caused its own set of complaints, especially on crowded days.