Lots of questions, not many answers or even consensus…
Some bold predictions in the article seem laughable, honestly…the idea that the market is going to triple in size in the next 5 years is nothing but wish-making and completely at odds with the current trends.
MyWhoosh is obviously banking on eRacing to separate themselves from the herd, but I don’t see that as a compelling differentiation. And while “free” is nice, it is also painfully apparent that it is not a compelling motivation to switch platforms.
TPv, after coming on strong, seems to have cooled in the last few weeks, based on my observations.
“Realism over gamification should be the first priority. Right down to the finer details of making the avatar look like a real cyclist. This is one thing a lot of platforms miss,” Miller states. “As cyclists, we ride behind other riders a lot so we know how a cyclist looks and moves. Once the look and physics are sorted – then it’s on to the gamification. I’d still like to see real-world race scenario replications as an in-game option on a platform. Imagine loading up the last 30 km of Milan-San Remo with all the actual rider positions replicated so we can ‘jump in’ and see how long we can hold on. Maybe an option to dial down the difficulty so we can attack the pros.”
While I would disagree with the need for “realism”, I do think he is on to something re: the “real-world” race scenarios. The now-ancient Schwinn Velodyne had a rudimentary version of this concept where you could sit in the peloton and attack when you felt like it on a given course and see if you could make it stick. Again, it was very rudimentary, but still engaging. I would imagine that today’s platforms could make it a much more viable option.
I’ve not read the article yet, but the snip from Shane about overlapping IRL races with virtual rings in my head as ideals we had long ago in sim auto racing. We also thought about blending real & virtual to share the experience, but it gets rather messy in short order. Basics like position on track have to be handled if you want to allow/prohibit same space occupation. This gets into drafting and passing issues as well as tactics and becomes a larger problem to solve, hence the reason it’s never really happened in this other world.
His notes on speed deltas is massively important and part of the reason that AI in sim auto racing is scalable. Despite the cars being equal, driver ability still differs enough from Pro to Joe that there are rather few people that can hang with pro drivers. Cycling kicks that up 10 fold considering the fitness delta is larger than the skill delta WRT bike/car sim.
All that said, when they actually share their race lap data, it’s possible to race “ghosts” against IRL pros (more so from sim racing pros) to see just how fast and skilled they are. I expect the cycling equivalent would be just as shocking (if not more so) to people who could roll against the ghost of a pro cyclist. I got a taste of that when I did the Pro Challenge in Utah years ago, and got to see Sepp destroy the final climb literally 2x faster than I did with my feeble effort a couple hours earlier.
Regarding realism, I prefer a gamified virtual world over realism. One reason being that indoor cycling will never be like outdoors but I also want my virtual cycling not spoil any surprises for when I ultimately might do the route in real live.
I don’t really care for racing either, I just want something fun to look at and cycle to to make the intervals go by sooner
Interesting point…I had long been a proponent for mags to do more long-form content (with premium paperstock) as a way to keep the printed press a viable option.
But man, do I have trouble reading some of the EC articles online…it is just too much for this old fart to read digitally, I guess.
Taken to the extreme in the wrong direction, it becomes laughable though. CVRCade having riders on some kind of futuristic hover-bikes was absurd. So is getting dropped from a bunch within seconds on a -10% gradient because I wasn’t pedalling, this being the “realism” that needs more work.
Yeah, I’ve been using TPV for my workouts, and I’m at a loss as to what use there is for my bike hitting the brakes in turns. I guess I’m supposed to slow down or coast? Realism like that is lost on me.
I’m in the opposite camp, I’d love an accurate/realistic version of classic climbs and Tour de France routes without yetis or dinosaurs or whatever since the odds of me ever doing the real thing are extremely small. Then again, I acknowledge I’m probably in the minority, since I’m the kind of guy who really enjoys Flight Simulator, which is the most boring game ever, and if I wasn’t into cycling and triathlons I’d probably have an expensive cockpit setup in my home office instead of a bike trainer and a treadmill.
I’m the same. I love long form content but I think they need tighter editing about what really matters in the article. Hearing them talk about the details of tools over a podcast is a lot easier than reading all that same detail. It’s interesting but too much both in the effort to write and read.
the physics on zwift especially are so laughable i always find it funny how people push their yearly distance ridden with zwift pacerbots in tempus fugit. riding around 10km/h faster than they could ever do outside.
Zwift and TrainingPeaks have 3D rendering platforms with ERG workouts, but there has to be a better way to visually represent riding an ERG workout than going up and down virtual hills that the trainer doesn’t respond to (when in ERG),” he says. (@GPLama )
This is the pertinent point in my opinion. Doing an ERG workout (or even non-erg) when the terrain is completely irrelevant to what you are doing just makes no sense and is totally unengaging. If one of the platforms finds a way to properly gamify workouts, that will be a significant step-change.
