Hi, as an avid RGT racer I do welcome the new features however like many others I feel like steering in its current form doesn’t make the racing more engaging and it is often frustratingly sluggish.
Here is what I feel could make it a lot better:
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If I am pushing a much bigger power than the rider in front, my avatar shouldn’t stay behind (even when “auto avoidance” is off). I also don’t want my avatar to immediately leave the draft and go into the wind if I pedal only marginally harder than them (which currently happens when “auto avoidance” is on)
=> I imagine the solution to that is to have an algorithm in which the bigger the power difference, the quicker the rider would try to get ahead of the rider in front. Push twice the watts, then the avoidance should be almost immediate. Push consistently a bit more, then avoidance should happen after a few moments. To make it user friendly, the GUI could show an “overtaking” bar that fills up depending on the power difference to the rider in front. When full, then overtaking happens. -
More generally, there should be an hybrid mode in which some steering is done automatically, but can be influenced by user input. For instance if I am in the draft in (or leading) a pack and another pack to my left is going faster, I would like to be able to “tell” my avatar to get in the draft of that other pack with a left steering input, without having to precisely steer there.
Bike racing, online or in real life, is all about how you react to your competitors’ attacks, and how they react to yours. In the current implementation, responding to an attack takes multiple steps, and not only there is an inherent (hardware) lag to register power increase but the whole steering dynamics are so slow and inconvenient that it is almost impossible to react in a realistic way. If this doesn’t change I believe it will deter people away from the platform, which is already struggling to keep sufficient numbers for engaging and challenging racing.