Boat Arrival Times

[mickmoranis]

Ok.. well.

Its one of those things I always wished i did in classic.

Wrote down every time the boat arrived at the dock that I've witnessed.

Im new so this is my first time seeing it, but at 5:50pm the boat arrived at the Butcherblock dock.

in an effort to collate all the arrival times etc, could you pose the time the boat arrives at the dock here if you think about it while you're waiting? I Know you got a lot of time on your hands when you wait for the baot, so you should remember!

Just post the dock and the time the boat arrived and hopefully we can find a pattern and never have to wait again!

[Kowalski]

Quicker to go through TD or just use firepots.

[Crookstinger]

This is a wild goose chase, unfortunately. I had hopes of trying to nail down the BB/FP boat route, and left a newbie dwarf on the boat for many trips back and forth to log the times when the boat zoned. The travel times varied to the point that trying to predict the boat arrival times was not feasible beyond more than a day (or maybe less) from any one observed trip.

I am not sure what I did with the data I gathered, but the only useful observation was that it took about 15 minutes to make the crossing.

[mickmoranis]

I got another time on 8:50 am weird.

[Sorn]

30 minutes round trip (and a 30 minute wait time if you're trying to catch it), 15 minutes one way, plus extra seconds for zoning and waiting for players to zone in.

Over the course of time the boats will shift their arrivals due to the extra couple of seconds, so arrival times are only consistent for about a day. Timeline-wise, we should actually have two boats for FP/BB and possibly announcements, but boats are a pain in the butt to program (so I hear).

Soooo the boat zones 4 times in a round trip (from BB, zones into OOT > FP > OOT > BB), with 48 round trips a day (approximately). Let's say zone times vary between 10-20 seconds, meaning each round trip shifts the arrival time between 40 seconds and 1 min 20 seconds, which in turn means throughout the day, the arrival time will shift between 32 minutes and 1 hour 4 minutes...and of course it eventually makes a full circle around the clock, leaving us convinced that it arrives at xx:xx and xx:xx if we only ride about once every three or six weeks.

Well, that's just with a guesstimate of 10-20 seconds variance on there, which may not be the case (could be smaller, could not even have variance). Also, I suck at math. Feel free to correct me. :P

[mickmoranis]

30 minutes round trip (and a 30 minute wait time if you're trying to catch it), 15 minutes one way, plus extra seconds for zoning and waiting for players to zone in.

Over the course of time the boats will shift their arrivals due to the extra couple of seconds, so arrival times are only consistent for about a day. Timeline-wise, we should actually have two boats for FP/BB and possibly announcements, but boats are a pain in the butt to program (so I hear).

Soooo the boat zones 4 times in a round trip (from BB, zones into OOT > FP > OOT > BB), with 48 round trips a day (approximately). Let's say zone times vary between 10-20 seconds, meaning each round trip shifts the arrival time between 40 seconds and 1 min 20 seconds, which in turn means throughout the day, the arrival time will shift between 32 minutes and 1 hour 4 minutes...and of course it eventually makes a full circle around the clock, leaving us convinced that it arrives at xx:xx and xx:xx if we only ride about once every three or six weeks.

Well, that's just with a guesstimate of 10-20 seconds variance on there, which may not be the case (could be smaller, could not even have variance). Also, I suck at math. Feel free to correct me. :P

All of that said, nobody has ever created a thread where people actually print their arrival times... perhaps server resets keep them aproximitly on the same schedual give or take a few mins and you can make your plans of travel a little bit easier, if we confirm all this data ;)

Post your boat arrival times and where, and see what kinda magic we can uncover!

Or just post random times to be mean, which in reality is far more likely.

[RDawg816]

Are we to assume everyone is posting in EST?

[mickmoranis]

Are we to assume everyone is posting in EST?

good point. My first two are in PST!

[Crookstinger]

Here are the data I found if you are interested. As I mentioned I left a newbie dwarf on the boat from about 11PM one evening to about 4:30PM the next day, which was 32 complete round trips.

Travel time in OoT: (in mm:ss)
Min: 13:41
Max: 14:04
Avg: 13:45

The max was an outlier, and without it, all times were within 4 secs of the average.

Travel time in EFP:
Min: 2:46
Max: 2:51
Avg: 2:50

The min here was a tad low, and without it all times were within 1 sec of the average.

Travel time in BB:
Min: 2:11
Max: 2:35
Avg: 2:32

The min here was an outlier, and without it all times were within 3 secs of the average.

Round trip time:
Min: 32:46
Max: 32:53
Avg: 32:50

Travel times were consistently within 4 seconds of the average for the round trip. One other detail I noticed is that the really high OoT crossing time (14:04) was followed immediately by the really low BB crossing time (2:11). So I think in that one instance, it just took me longer to zone into BB than normal and the two times on either side of the zone reflected that.

Using this data, I attempted to create a calculator that, for any given known zoning time of day, could predict zoning times for the near future. As I mentioned, it seemed reasonably accurate within a day or so, but beyond that, either zone lag or the slightly inconsistent zone times, or both, caused the predictions to fail to line up with the real times of day.