Oh dear lawd no more dirt/sand. The fake dust clouds are unnecessary and it’s mentally more difficult when you’re used to going much faster on paved surfaces. Although I find the glass roads equally as unnecessary but at least those don’t create poorly rendered clouds.
As I’ve mentioned before I’d love more massive climbs. There are so many brilliant climbs around the world. You could keep it close to the alpe that emulate the climbs about the ADH or you could do something elsewhere. But to this point I agree!
My semi-serious suggestion for Level 100 reward is “Magic Tyres” where you can ride any surface as if it was tarmac. I loathe gravel, and dirt both because of the mental effort as you say, and secondly because the simluation is broken - you cannot have the same cadence/gear if your speed is different: if the rolling resistance changes make it apparent.
There is already a big fight over level 100 and XP adjustments so adding an exclusive very desirable upgrade for level 100 would cause outrage when some folk will take longer to achieve it.
But I do seriously say that NY needs the park perimeter roads to become dirt / gravel.
Any other worlds missing the surface should also get it. Even Crit City could have some roadworks zone where the road is replaced with a dirt/gravel section.
I don’t get beleive dirt/gravel is popular. Rather the reverse: I’ve (as part of the Route badge stamp collecting) been down the Jungle a few times recently, and the number of people who have completed the jungle loop (with thousands of concurrent users) was … 6 (and 7 and 12 to be fair). Derisory numbers.
People mostly don’t ride dirt - I suspect the predominant reasons for people being in the Jungle is 1) getting to the Alpe, and 2) Route badge collecting with a tiny tail of those who enjoy it
Turn New York into, as it were, an Urban Jungle would just crash the numbers using it (and, honestly, New York is not reknown for unpaved roads in any case).
I know it’s not in the character of Watopia, but I’d love a tunnel section which you can ride through to by-pass the gravel in the jungle to get to the bottom of the Alpe. Make it interesting in some way but different to riding through the arcade on Mankini island or the tube stop in London - maybe hidden Bond villian layer; the ultimate hidden bike man-cave; or a level of an iconic computor game…
New York is already the worst world; changing some of those roads to gravel would certainly solidify that standing, and only make a bad world worse. I’m 100% with @Paul_McCombes and @Freighter that gravel is terrible. Rather than adding more, it should be completely abolished. Or at least get the “construction crew” to finish the repairs to the tarmac that would split off to the right as you’re heading down towards the jungle loop.
Heck you could even use the magic of London to bring some climbs or expanded loops to the map. I 100% agree that of the non-event only maps it’s the worst thus far.
I was hoping to see how many of our gravel loving Zwifters would come to support this idea, evidently none. They are usually pretty vocal when it comes to the jungle.
No I ride the jungle and I almost never see high speed bots. I see lots of people doing workouts in the jungle. Coast road is often tens of seconds between every rider. Pacer groups are visible as a group, rarely seen if you’re doing jungle routes like Serpentine 8.
Personally, I don’t ride the coast road very often because I either have to flip a U-Turn to make it an out-and-back, or I have to ride back through the jungle to get out. If I could keep going without having to ride the jungle gravel, I’d be on the coast road much more often.
Maybe the coast road has less traffic because the people who love gravel don’t need to go there, and the people who don’t like gravel avoid it because you have to ride gravel to connect to it from one end. Give us a paved option, and maybe more people would ride it. I don’t know that for sure, but I know for sure that I would ride it more.
Yeah that probably has something to do with it. I suspect the jungle workout crowd just doesn’t care about bogus speed for more XP (like Coco on Tempus) because they get their XP from the workout, so they just want something pretty to look at, and the jungle has some of the most fanciful and rich scenery.
No bonuses that I know of. And despite being there fairly often I’ve never seen what you’re talking about, though I assume we ride at different times given the time zone difference.
They are usually pretty vocal when it comes to the jungle.
