Absolutely correct, of course split riders in to pens, we just don’t need categories.
I also agree with your point above, categories, or a fixed method of splitting riders, is of course required for team based racing. When I say categories, I mean global, static categories like we have today.
Category benefits:
-
a way to progress up the ladder. (not applicable to zwift. A ranking system would solve this, and the current cat system doesn’t do it anyway seeing as people try to maintain a lower cat)
-
a way to keep riders of a particular skill set together for safety reasons (not applicable to zwift)
-
a way to keep riders together of a similar ability to make for closer and more enjoyable racing (there are far better methods to do this in zwift, as we have huge amounts of data and the ability to change settings on a race by race basis)