I have noticed very strange behavior with coffee breaks twice over the last weekend.
On friday I rode the 15:00 CET Friday Freight Train ride. After my cooldown at the 180° turn on constitution hill I called it a day & I let my avatar spin down while I started cleaning up my setup. After which, to my suprise my avatar was still rolling at a steady 21kph pace almost all the way back to Buckingham, with 1 coffee breaker alongside me. It very much looked like the coffee breaker was actually dragging my avatar along & because my avatar kept rolling so did the rider with the coffee break (feedback loop). It was only after I hit the A button my avatar actually stopped riding. Strange bug I thought… oh well.
Then yesterday I rode the 10:00 CET KISS Endurance Ride, D cat. When we hit “les intestins” on the first lap, 2 people on the front activated coffee break: they just got shot of waaaay the front. It very much looked they just slingshot of each other back & forth, giving them crazy momentum. No human powerd rider(s) involved to actually drag them along…
On the next lap in the same (2.5 max) ride there were several riders complaining as well about 1 or 2 riders pushing like 3.5-4wkg on the front with a wall of coffee breakers forming behind them. Making it way harder then it should’ve been to keep the group together. Under normal circumstances those 2 try hards fly off the front & the rest of the group stays reasonably bunched but with coffee break in the mix it creates extra drag on the front which streches out groups far more then it otherwise would with people falling victim at the back every time.
Look, even if you don’t want to admit that coffee break in it’s current form does a lot more harm then good, at least make it work properly & fix this behavior where the coffee break riders apparantly have started to keep themselves going rather then relying on a 3rd party to drag them along…
There’s other ways to fix this… in the open world people can already teleport back after a break. In events you could give people the chance to hop back in with the group they were tethered to rather then dragging them along. It avoids game breaking side effects for people that are actually still pedalling.