I ran Flint’s reply through Google translate, Zwiftish to English. It came out:
Business as usual. We keep focusing 100% on attracting new subscribers from new market segments at the expense of long-time subscribers, and pretend we don’t have any data supporting the fact that racing is a key driver for the community, i.e. all the Zwifters that aren’t new and bedazzled. No, we have no plans on changing anything this year either, or the next. And, besides, Eric wants to place well every now and then. But here’s some oil you can throw on your waves yourselves.
Hmm, weird… Let’s regurgitate once more:
Enforce categories (tomorrow)
Remove the performance ceilings, stop the after-the-fact DQ’s (tomorrow)
Replace the WKG cats with a results-based categorization (ASAP)
This will solve 99% of the problems with Zwift racing instantly. They know this already. They have known for a long time. How does that affect your odds of seeing a change to race rules 2021? Go figure.
Anyway, I’m back cheating again in races. Because they still let me.
@xflintx you personally might not, but the actions from Zwift as a company sure do imply they view the racing community (and long time subscribers) as something to ignore in order to chase “new customers” and shiny new hardware. Again, while I applaud you for being the public face to the frustrations Zwift has created, but may I direct your attention to the following:
In February [2020] Zwift CEO Eric Min, suggested that “ghosting” riders was the solution. This would have seen riders who exceeded some kind of power trigger point vanish and become invisible, although they would have finished the race
The initiative [Anti-Sandbagging], revealed by senior game team member Jordan Rapp on Episode 81 of the Zwiftcast, will be rolled out gradually and will start with selected events.
These quotes were from almost a year ago, my g-o-d how slow of a roll out are you all proposing? I am trying to stay optimistic but honestly Zwift as a company makes it pretty darn hard sometimes. Please, as a company, get your act together and start producing tangible benefits and not just the standard “I feel you guys, we are working on it” tropes. The fact the community constantly uses the “Zoon” meme should be a pretty clear indicator that a lot of your paying customers have no faith in any public comments made as they have for too long not been backed up by actual results.
That being said, does anybody really want the current anti-sandbagging kludge to be used more extensively, considering even the guy who originally wrote it does not believe in it?
Stopping riders from signing up to a category below their level takes approximately a single if clause and maybe an error message, so the only reason why not to do it is unwillingness.
No not necessarily but at least a more widespread implementation would show Zwift is doing something instead of just saying “we hear you guys, this is really tough and I super swear we are actually doing something but I can’t tell you what we are doing” every 3-6 months then go back to ignoring users until we “gripe” too much. Then it’s time to reiterate the previous communication again and again ad nauseam
‘Zoon’ doesn’t even get used that much any more, people are past joking about it. The lack of progress and transparency is basically an insult at this point.
As a relatively new zwifter (starting 6 months ago), and cat D rider I want to add my 2 cents after reading @xflintx ’s response.
To provide context I’m frequently scouring races, trying to find a Cat D race group with as few sandbaggers as possible. Usually I’ll get what looks like a good race, but back out closer to it starting as the C and sometimes B rated riders appear. Not exactly an encouraging situation for the rookie, recovering or weaker rider.
Even with the post race actions of race organisers on Zwiftpower, shifting or DQing riders that are clearly cheating, the race itself is already tainted. It could be a group of supposedly cat D riders flying off from the pens, leading to unrealistic expectations of what a D rider should be capable of in an effort to keep pace, it could be a more fragmented string of genuine D riders that effectively are riding solo and not getting the full race experience- I’ve seen and experienced both.
All in all it’s not a great experience and must be improved if Zwift are looking to not only encourage riders, but retain them. To me it could learn a lot from the video game industry, of which it seems to have a lot in common in terms of functionality, roadmap planning of features and retention.
It’s a good platform overall, but should not rest on its laurels. It won’t be long before rival platforms start to increase their user base, and once migration starts with a pull of better features, it will be very hard to recover.
Hopefully this advice is heeded, and the Zwift racing experience can be something we all enjoy to the fullest sooner rather than later.
Looks like I’ve been living under a rock to see all this discussion in the past 4 days.
I’ll back my buddy Flint here and add a bit more commentary.
Categorization, Ranking, and Results are some of the MOST talked about things on a daily basis at Zwift. I know there’s a lot of concern that Zwift is focusing solely on new Zwifters etc etc etc…these riders need these things as much as anyone!
But yes, as stated, these are hard problems to solve EVEN once you have the decided solution. I can tell you we’re getting closer to our decided solution(s).
So without giving more substance, why do I even type right here?
These topics are near the top of every discussion we’re having right now.
Yes, you’re very much listened to, but I sorry I didn’t hop on the forum this weekend.
The ideas levied here are in the conversation for how we move forward.
You’re all fantastic and thank you for this conversation.
Finally, back to the original post that spawned this:
1.,2.,3. - Anti sandbagging, matchmaking, rankings - noted in the above
UI customization - this is a UI decision that’s being discussed and weighed. Zwift isn’t a headunit for your bike but noted that some other metrics would be valuable to see.
Lots of great work going on Clubs right now.
TTT is one of the coolest genres that just kinda works right now. Agree this has a lot of legs once we put a bit more behind it. Impressive what you all have done and how WTRL has pumped this up.
It is the logical conclusion and pretty much how easy it is to implement. Whatever “update” we get on this better be pretty damn good as to why something like this has not been delivereing.
On those points , I beleive there are more gripes about being able to remove UI from the Ride view .
You say Zwift isnt a headunit but the Companion app has a specific tab that is exactly that . If it was properly explained I think (IMO) the best place to add this is to that tab (and allow you to be more selective on what you DO display) and most importantly allow zwift to be better suited to a wider range of users because more people can get what they want and how they want , as requirements are much more loosely coupled to the main zwift ride view app… That after all is the principle behind the Companion app isnt it ( orginally maybe , I think it might have got lost somewhere since then) .
Clubs . I cant tell you how much talk about zwift clubs makes me annoyed . Great work or not (which for most is meaningless) many here especially those of us who run Real Life and Zwift clubs are being so badly treated here . To example how destructive this closed feature is . I have rival local “zwift privileged” real life club targeting my members to leave and join there club because they have got x y z feature in zwift . Its absolutely disgraceful that Zwift are being party to this happening and not rolling this out but running such a poorly governed “beta” program that can allow there product to undermine and distort cycling grassroots sport in this way.
TTT you are right is one of the coolest genres and has brought so many users to the platform . It has also been run for over two years ,cultivated by a team who had community focus and support . Zwift would be well mindful to remember that (as they seriously didn’t understand in the zwiftpower move) . To succeed here you have to have Customer focus , Vision and Community engagement . Much more one would argue than improvement velocity …
I am now in a bad mood again because someone mentioned clubs so I better end now …
UI customisation - Zwift’s not a head unit, no. But I don’t think that’s really what people are asking more. It more control over what does or doesn’t appear. For example, turning off the main HUD entirely. There’s a hack to turn off the UI, but then you get no power-ups, or turn notifications etc. It’s a feature that RGT Cycling has; you can individually turn off the whole HUD or the riders list and some other things.
True WoW-style customisation would be fantastic. Even something like Garmin VIRB software gauges. Personally, I’d like to be able to tweak the font sizes and colours in places where I struggle to see the information. From an accessibility perspective the UI is definitely lacking.
Clubs & Features
Just gotta quote this bit simply because I read it in Trump’s voice.
Joking aside, I do think clubs have huge potential. But there are so many aspects of Zwift that have huge potential. It’s clear feature prioritisation has to factor heavily into the equation, and you don’t want to flag all your ideas to competitors.
But I’m sure most people would really appreciate a bit more tangible information. Not a vague “great work”, but some examples of features being developed. Maybe not the whole roadmap, but some nuggets at least. Or a faster feature pipeline where things are trickled out when they’re individually ready rather than being saved up for a big one-off feature launch.
FutureWorks is definitely a step in the right direction on that front.
A bit more on features that aren’t planned, rather than silence on those features. There are some very long-standing and popular feature requests that have had little to no official response even years after they were first suggested.
TTT - You’ve already got an ITT start system that’s based on rows and columns. Shouldn’t be too hard to tweak the code so an entire row or column gets started at once. Add drafting to the TT bikes when in a TTT event and you’re golden. Even better, make it only work for people in the same team, so overtaking doesn’t become an issue like the ZRL final race last week.
Yeah, I know what’s there already (for those included in the FutureWorks test), I was more thinking of what else might come for clubs. Being able to run events is one thing (although I’m not sure it includes TTs), but having competition over a season could add value. Of course, people can handle that using spreadsheets outside of Zwift.
As a member of several IRL clubs it’s not having the club jersey in the game that I personally miss.
I get your position and annoyance though. Given how long the Clubs functionality has been around now, I’d have thought it could be opened up to everyone.
@Anna_Ronkainen I think Zwift should not try to make a perfect solution before releasing an anti-sandbagging solution. Just lock the in-Zwift FTP for manual modification and use that to disable the categories the rider is not allowed to enter. It is not perfect but should be MUCH better than nothing.
The FTP will have to have a sliding expiration though.
Even allowing for manual modifications of the stored FTP value (which seems unavoidable considering what it is primarily used for), it would be much better than nothing.
I hope there’s also some work going on to look into (and drastically improve) the update situation, where right now each update seems to introduce two new bugs for everyone one that is fixed.
For example, the improvements to workouts broke some other workout stuff. Improvements to pairing broke some other bits of pairing. And so on.
Why should I not expect my PC to be as powerful a headunit as my small, very lower power, Garmin? Or as powerful as the Cyclemeter app on my phone? The math to calculate stats such as average lap power or normalized power or intensity factor is neither complicated nor proprietary.
