We have seen how unpopular autocat was because no one knows how it is defined. People need to know the rules before entering a race.
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Definitely. I think everyone agrees with this.
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Hot diggity! Tomorrow’s the day!
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A ranking system would be where your ranking is adjusted based on performance against those around you. Not necessarily results based, although of course winning is the best way to get a ranking improvement (but not guaranteed).
A points system would be a ‘pure’ results based system, although I haven’t fully got my head around what that could look like in practice. Maybe @_JamesA_ZSUNR can give an overview of a mechanism. ‘Promotion’ would infer there are categories or divisions to be promote through.
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Points can be arranged however you want, the principle is that you award them for whatever result you want to reward/limit, which could be just a win, or perhaps top 3 placing, or top 5% of the field…and the points expire after a fixed period of time. Then the pen thresholds are something like under X points for D, under Y points for C…and no limits on who can go in A. It’s a far easier calculation than the convoluted ranking scheme that currently exists and is also very intuitive for riders, which I think is also a benefit. If you just look at a ZP profile you can count up the wins in the past X months or top 5 placings or whatever. Riders won’t necessarily belong to a particular “category” though if points thresholds for the different pens are the same for many events, effectively they would do, but they’d have to top up their points at the same rate the expire in order to stay there. More likely, riders would move up and down a lot more than they do at present.
I believe that most points schemes would be a bit more volatile and less “precise” in terms of always ranking riders in the best order, versus a comparative ranking like the one that already exists. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. It is self-correcting, errors can’t persist indefinitely, and all riders are guaranteed a range of win/lose experiences whereas ranking definitely doesn’t achieve this unless pen thresholds vary a lot between events.
Here’s the fairly complex UK cycling points system explained…in zwift where people can easily race on a weekly basis or more frequently without travelling there is probably less motivation to award points well down the field.
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all you need to know is that it works perfectly!
Hi Martin
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This seems an underappreciated point more generally. The post-hoc disqualifications that WTRL still apply in ZRL races based on their own feelings are a sure sign that their system is fundamentally broken. Yet you still get hordes on FB posting “of course the rules have to be secret, people will game them otherwise”.
They arbitrarily upgrade some teams in the Thursday TTTs as well, based on no known criteria. (They definitely don’t routinely upgrade all teams where riders are hugely over the thresholds.)
No credible sport has to keep its rules secret from the competitors.
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The idea that footballers might find a goal disallowed for some rule they weren’t aware of made me think of this:
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Got ya. I still think for a lot of people the racing experience wouldn’t be great for the same reason as IRL. I raced a few 4th cat races last year. I would say that half the field at least would be Zwift cat As, because you have so many riders that are new to racing or don’t race enough in a year so haven’t got the points to move up, yet you can get similar strength riders as high as 2nd cat. I think a ranking system, even a pretty basic one, would work much better, because it sorts everyone, all the time.
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The problem with non-relative points is that they’re non-relative. It’s effectively impossible to say anything about two people’s points score because it depends entirely on the fields they’ve had. The reason this isn’t an issue in points-based series is that they’re effectively closed categories.
The strength of Ranking is exactly that you can ride with any field because the relative strength determines your gain (or loss/stagnation). So you could have R1 who rides in ‘B’ and ‘A’ races, R2 who rides in ‘A’ races, and R3 who rides in ‘C’ but once or twice hit the same event as R2, and you can still get an idea of the relative strength of R1 and R3 from their Ranking because they both intersect with R2. This is totally impossible if they had been awarded points on straight results.
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I voted for “Organiser defined pen boundaries (enforced)” because i think it´s the most effective in a realistic timeframe.
But would love to have a ranking system with pen enforcement … but i think it´s too long down the road.
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Autocat with zero votes 
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If everyone did their best 20 minute effort then it would be an ok system to roughly rank people. The issue is that quite a few racers purposely avoid doing 20 minute efforts so they can keep their category lower. There are different levels to this with some monitoring power to the watt and will pull up if they think they are going too hard (look at b cat zrl playoffs winners last season) or those that just don’t like crit races so choose longer races and naturally stay a lower cat for longer.
Short races are really fun but a lot of people are put off them because it’s known to push you up cats quicker.
Whether that is cheating is debatable. I used to think so but accepted it’s now part of the game until the system is fixed. Look at ZRL it’s rife with riders monitoring power to avoid DQs
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Many times the top guys have VO2 power that is totally disconnected to the power they can handle for 20min.
It´s a clear signal they are cruisers and are just managing the 20min efforts in order that they don´t get upg to Cat A.
If they know the routes well, and choose the routes were you only need to stay with the front with an 1-6min effort you can “fool” the system.
In other words: the real power of some of this “Top Bs” are over 4wkg
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Today is Valentine’s day 14/2/22.
I scanned the events on ZCA looking for the new races with pen enforcement.
Is this going to be a new series, applied to a few existing races etc?
Should there be any evidence of anything new or is it behind the scenes?
This info may have been issued previously but I don’t think about until the day arrives.
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It’s only 7am or so Pacific time, isn’t it? I’d give them a chance to get into work first. 
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That´s me today.
Can´t imagine how it will be on Sunday or next Monday 