Just did an event this morning, and it’s nice to see the bots move line to look for draft / help you draft them. This helps creates little groups (that we can draft too) and it’s much more pleasant than the last few weeks !
13 Likes
That is great news!
1 Like
I hosted a test event in our NorCal Tue Niter last week
- bots will shift lanes to take a draft of a rider on the same lap. They will not seek draft off riders of a different lap.
- bots will shift to take the inside line on corners. They do this fairly late, so if you’re passing them approaching a corner, you might want to pass them to the outside.
- on straight roads, they will occasionally change lanes, perhaps at random, perhaps moving toward the center of the road (I couldn’t tell).
- bots don’t intentionally steer to pass: they won’t pass unless they have enough power to move past in the same lane.
1 Like
I set up a short race with 20 real bots in order to test this. There may have been some increased left and right movement but if so it was very subtle. For the most part the bots remained in their starting lanes and did not form into small groups of 4 or 5 bots like they did before steering was introduced. I ended up racing against 1 bot at the front who sat in his lane the whole time. At the beginning of the race a bot tried to push me off the road! Otherwise I feel the bots have a long way to go before regaining their former racing prowess.
On a positive note the manual steering was fun.
1 Like
That (see image) is typically what my impression was among a group ride with 99 bots.
They do go “left and right more than needed” and are not perfectly aligned to gain more watts, which gives a spread to the little group, but definitely not into a “1 bot per lane” configuration"
Let’s see how this evolves 
Reading between the lines, the “bots seeking draft as before” has been “On and Off” on the different events.
But now we know that they’ll release a server-side update (nothing needed this time on our side) in 2 days to make it live “all the time, back as it was”
Sorry if my enthusiastic post created some confusion and worried some who didn’t get the same “bots auto-drafting” when testing on their side
1 Like
Has anyone seen or heard of any progress with this as I’m not yet seeing auto drafting from the bots?
Saw another comment (on FB) saying the same as you. Think it’s still a “soon” thing, but not deployed on their side yet indeed
(well, tomorrow then)
Needs to be out back for regular riders too. 
2 Likes
I can confirm that auto steering and auto drafting have been restored to the bots which is great news.
FYI there have been some issues with drafting for humans. RGT are looking into these.
1 Like
Just had another look and the bots seem to be working fine including for drafting.
The bots move about semi-randomly a bit more than I’d like – it makes it hard to follow their draft. I’d probably cut their rate of lane changing by 2x, at least, maybe even 4x. But I won’t complain – it’s a LOT better than it was when they were confined to a single lane.
Yes I would agree with that. I found it very difficult to manually steer into the bot’s draft quickly enough due to the steering lag. By the time I got there they had moved again. This wasn’t a problem when we had auto steering and auto drafting but now that manual steering is compulsory it makes riding/racing with the bots very difficult.
1 Like
The autosteer function for pacing bots is far from great. The pacing bots swerve all over the place (where before they had a predictable, stable, riding pattern), rendering them useless for the purpose of pacing anyone.