I get that Facebook has a bigger reach, but itās like they donāt know these forums exist? I abhor Facebook and try to avoid at all costs.
Thanks for the post though.
This forum is far busier than the Facebook page
Iām not RGT staff, just transmitting the info for those interested 
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Why Magic Roads? What have you used them for, what was the goal or outcome you were looking for? So far I have used MR for pre riding a race this May, My goal has been to see how to handle the extended climbs. I have also used it for recreating some older local race courses.
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Whatās frustrating you in using them right now? Ror making a (good) Magic Roadā¦if the process could be streamlined a bit it would help a lot because now there are quite a few steps.
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What would make them even more valuable and fun for you? The modeling is pretty good as far a I can see so maybe add some fluff like animals or flora based on location/regoinn. And maybe some kind of fast forward āprerideā feature so you could see if there were issues with the uploaded route.
I transmitted your ideas on the staffās post
How about the most requested magic routes become part of a list to pick from? You know, for the couchlandrians among us that canāt be bothered to go through the process of creating a magic route. Fairly sure half the UK users have modelled Hardknott Pass in there. Might as well make it public.
How about going a bit more open source. Iām thinking āSuper Mario Maker 2ā from Nintendo, or MITās Scratch. Where the user can add features and perhaps propose it to make it public when approved by RGT? Iād like to build a Mount Sufferlandria with laser goats, fluffies, lava and whatnots and I want other to add to that too. Make a few donut traps, have a billboard-bot go up the hill at 7W/kgā¦ that sort of thing.
Now weāve got steering, we may as well add forks in the road too. Thatāll be quite somethingā¦ Auto-steering is always picking the hardest route of course.
Copy and Paste from my response to the Facebook question:
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Why Magic Roads? Because its the best thing in virtual cycling. Itās what drew me to RGT and with the steering farce (sorry, but it is, private events should allow auto draft, the lack of it has made riding with my son literally impossible (or unenjoyable to the point of being worthless)) itās the only thing I might come back to RGT for currently.
I have no interest in riding made up virtual locations, indoor cycling for me is mostly just training for outdoor, but if I want to mix it up then I want to ride real world mountains and not just the one or two famous ones in everyoneās platform.
I have a small library of Swiss and French Alps climbs Iāve done in real life. Being able to ride simulations of those when I canāt actually be there is brilliant.
Magic Roads, for me, is the differentiator for RGT, its the feature that RGT should have front and centre. -
Whatās frustrating me with it? Steering!!! Honestly, bring back auto-draft in private events and expand banding to auto-band groups of riders outside the main Peleton, this is what I need to make it a viable platform to ride with not only my son, but my casual cycling club who were prepared to give RGT a go instead of Zwift until the steering change came in, none of us are interested in facilitating manual steering and without it the experience is frustrating. I know this isnāt a Magic Roads answer, but Magic Roads for me are pointless without addressing it because I wonāt be using the platform.
Aside from that, you need to partner officially with GPXMagic or build your own WYSIWYG route creator. Iām happy building my routes and using GPXMagic, but itās not trivial and I can imagine itās a gatekeeper for some people. -
What would make them more valuable for me? They need more features. They are horrendously dull to look at, which again is an issue for my little boy at least. Iām more prepared to focus on the ride, but a 10 year old wants it to look interesting too. Iāve always filled the road with bots so we at least have those, but with poor auto steer and no auto draft now theyāre a problem, weāve simply stopped using the platform.
I know people will ask for photo realistic features drawn from Google Maps etc, but we know thatās not really realistic. However, you could quite easily build an asset pool for different āarea typesā and then allow GPX files to be marked up, like segments, to say ābetween here and here is a village/town/city/woodland/ thereās a nearby lakeā and populate the ride with features. Itās, in relative terms, easily achievable and would make a huge difference to the in ride experience.
I love Magic Roads, I rode a lot of them before Christmas, I think itās an incredible feature.
I am, genuinely, not using the platform currently because of the steering.
Iām happy for public events to be steering enforced, but please let us toggle back auto-draft in private, I really donāt see myself using the platform much without it.
Better still, allow auto-draft in all modes, but put lane changes on a delay that is enough to allow a manual steering rider to successfully initiate a break, that way the people who want to steer get a clear advantage, but itās also not just pointless to ride without it.
- Why Magic Roads? What have you used them for, what was the goal or outcome you were looking for?
- Iāve really enjoyed cycling places Iāll likely never get a chance to (e.g. formula 1 tracks such as spa) and also practicing on places Iām going to be going soon (e.g. Sa Calobra)
- Whatās frustrating you in using them right now?
- Discoverability. RGTDb does a decent job of allowing you to search for magic roads, but I still find it a frustrating process. This could be done so much better by RGT themselves e.g. showing a globe with the magic roads on them so you can find ones close to you or close to where youāre going on holidays, but even more useful would be some ranking by popularity and potentially some other measure of the āqualityā of the road
- What would make them even more valuable and fun for you?
- As others have said, it would be nice to have slightly closer mapping of the ārealityā of a road to whatās represented in the magic road. Itās highly likely the effort to value ratio for this is too high, but it would certainly be a nice cherry on top of an already very cool feature.
Thereās a workaround for this that I use to test my magic roads before riding them:
- Create a Group Ride on your magic road, configured to have a few pace bots set to min and max of 999w:
- Join the race and use Spectate Mode to view the bots.
Edit: Instead of Spectate Mode you can actually use the rider selection arrows (used for teleporting) to move to the bots:
Yeah itās a shame most of the RGT chat is on the FB group; this platform is so much better for discussion. This forum has been shared on the FB group a few times, but people tend to stick to what they know. Itās also generally pretty negative about RGT on here and very cliquey, so it probably puts most RGT users off.
Weāve used magic roads when the weather impacted on a club ride. I uploaded the GPX file to magic roads invited people and off we went. We used whats app to chat. It was relatively simple as the route was already potted in RWGPS
More to the point, itās almost like RGT actually needs an āOfficialā location to exist these days, now itās a more corporate product.
When I have tried to interact with people on the RGT Users group on Facebook I was repeatedly told that the people were volunteer moderators, not actually directly associated with RGT, but now thatās also where they are directly posting soliciting feedback from users, so where does a user go for a contact point with RGT, just through support tickets alone?
Information is āspreadā indeed, between where to look for races / where to get info / discuss things, from RGT to RGT-fans (rgtdb / gpxmagic / etc) and across several platforms (here, discord (several groups), FB (several groups), etc)
I think the RGT devs are ājust more used to the pre-mergerā communication channels indeed. At least they ask the community and communicate more than before, we can see a lot of improvement already.
And yes, I go via support tickets (when itās a general bug report, for example). In very precise occasions, you might want to directly PM a person in charge on FB
Itās more for discussional issues with the RGT as a whole.
Referencing my above post, there are very tangible issues with the implementation of steering as it stands for a significant group of people (the poll on the Facebook group recently implied that more than a full third of users donāt like it and 17% of users had or would be stopping using the platform because of it, with only 40% saying they definitely liked it as is), but when the subject is broached on that page the typical response from the moderators is that they are not directly involved with RGT.
Itās not really a support ticket issue. Itās a community engagement issue, but there is nowhere that community (or the newer members who werenāt already embedded in the old communication channels) can go to engage with the developers.
Given that RGT is now a part of Wahoo and this is the de-facto home of Wahoo conversation, it would be good to have more direct engagement here.
Agree, itās strange thereās no RGT staff presence on here. Thereās a big contrast with the TrainerRoad forum - various TrainerRoad staff members respond on there (including the CEO).
Iāll ask RGT to check this thread. I will also gradually read the many suggestions above!
The wide range of mostly unofficial fora that @totolekoala lists is frankly a pain! This style of forum is far better for segregation of information into threads.
It is a good point re RGT having an official presence. There is some RGT presence on FB and Discord, probably largely due to āhistorical inertiaā, and it is perhaps difficult for the RGT team to figure out the best way to go from here.
Just speculatively thinking āaloudā: perhaps a shift away from Facebook and towards this Wahoo-owned forum would be bestā¦