Hey there. I am making my TP for HS. It is recommending I start with Millennium Falcon and then Alien Swirling Saucers then Toy Story Mania. I put down that I plan to take advantage of early entry and arriving at 8:30am. Why wouldn’t it recommend Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway? It has that ride in my plan at 2:45pm and waiting 41 minutes. Why wouldn’t I just rope drop that? To be fair, I am only planning on arriving 15 min before early entry. We have a young one with us and we can’t arrive 60 min early…it’s just not going to happen 
Please help explain the thought behind this touring plan.
The optimiser will suggest the plan to minimise your overall wait time over the day.
If you’re behind the pack at MMRR in early entry, you may be waiting 30 minutes to ride, and then queues for other rides will be longer too.
You could take a copy of the plan, re-arrange it to the ride order you would do and try evaluating, not optimising. That might show you where the overall wait time increases.
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Thanks. I did that as well. I moved MMRM to the top and it says I will wait 22 minutes so that seems like a win to me.
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It depends. As @Nicky_S mentioned, TP is trying to reduce your TOTAL wait time, not minimize the wait time for a specific ride.
So, when you get a 22 minute wait for MMRR, what does it do to your TOTAL wait time? You might be having a shorter wait for MMRR in exchange for longer waits in several other rides.
I’ll make up an example to illustrate.
Let’s say you have 5 rides, one of which is MMRR. If you do MMRR first, you get 22 minutes, but then the other four rides have a wait time of 20 minutes each (because you are now “following” the crowd. As a result, your total wait time is 102 minutes.
Now, let’s say instead you do the other four rides first, but you now have a wait of 40 minutes for MMRR. BUT, because everyone else was getting in line for MMRR, the wait times for the other rides were 10 minutes each. Total wait time? 80 minutes. So, by waiting LONGER for MMRR, you save yourself 22 minutes of having to wait in line in general.
I, of course, made up that example just to illustrate the point.
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That’s an excellent example of why TP arranges those step! (I’m gonna bookmark it for future reference when I try to explain this to others)
Personally, minimizing walking is a bigger deal than waiting. I’m happy to a total of 20 “lost” minutes if I don’t have criss-cross the park.
Optimizing my TP is step one. Then, I like to print / screen shot / open a new tab. Next, I personalize it trying to keep the steps nearby. I rarely optimize it again - only evaluate. I keep the original TP just to make sure the amount of wait or free time has gotten out of control…
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Yeah. I actually try to do the same, usually.
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Wait times are usually really reasonable for MMRR. We’ve never rope dropped it - usually hit it mid-morning or in the evening and typical wait is probably 20-30 mins.
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Curious…have you been since LL was introduced? The YouTuber noted that due to the LL, the wait time for MMRR was the highest they had seen in a very long time. I think it was about an hour? (Forget exactly.)
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Yeah, good point. This was pre-LL. I’m sure LL is driving wait times up now.
I just wish TP allowed you to set a ceiling for wait times at attractions.
While waiting for 1 hour at one attraction might save you a whack of time elsewhere, some families won’t be talking to each other after an hour wait and then won’t be riding anything except each other’s nerves.
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That makes sense. However, like G+ right now I think it would add another level of unneeded complexity to the average user. One of G+ biggest issues is how unfriendly it is to use.
I think you have to just look at the TP and trust the times in advance. (You can see the historical / predicted waits by the hour right for every ride here on TP - along with places like ThrillData)
If you see that no matter where you put it that a ride never goes under a 70 minute wait that’s why you have to decide is it worth it to even have it in your plan…
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I look at this all the time
Overall, yes, I want to minimize how much time I spend in line. But, I will also say that if shortening one wait time by 20 minutes does not have a dramatic effect on my total overall time, I’m inclined to do it. 20 mins is way more acceptable than 40, even if my day’s end is longer because of it. I look at it both ways and decide which is more palatable.
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Yes, that’s a good point. Sometimes the overall saved wait time is only on the order of a few minutes.
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That is a great example and makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining. We have a 3.5 year old with us so are a little concerned about waiting 40 min for MMRR so my thought was I would probably rather rope drop MMRM with a 20 min wait and a few other rides go up for individual waits.
Great thoughts. Thank you!!
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That’s kind of what I am thinking…We will have a 3.5 year old with us so I am trying to keep waits at 30 min or below. My thought is do MMRR at 22 min wait and if Toy Story is now 15 min instead of a walk on then that’s okay with me.
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Yep. I really wish in addition to minimizing waits and minimizing walking there was also a minimize individual wait times option. I get it’s complex but 15 minutes is about the max we can wait at any ride with current toddler attention spans. So I’d take the 100 minute total over the 80 minute every single time. And it’s a pain for me to have figure that out on my own.
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So true. Same here…we have a 3 year old so we can’t wait 45 min for MMRR later in the day even if it minimizes waits in total for the day. I would rather have a few rides with 20-30 min wait than one long ride wait time and a bunch of short ones.
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I have a 49 yr old and we can’t wait 45 minutes for MMRR late in the day. 
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Hahaha right
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