I have to completely disagree on this - no one really cares about e-racing results that much, or they must spend all their time as stressed out as the people on the ZRL facebook group appear to be.
Make it better. Make categories change on results.
Hi Flint, this is long but please do read.
I hear you on this, and I hear everyone else on here, so my answer is “if you tried something, at least you’d be learning what works and what doesn’t, whereas what many Zwifters see right now makes them feel as though Zwift isn’t learning.”
I think I’m in line with Zwift in that I’d like a brilliant classification system based on ability rather than something like gender or age. And when people say “why should Zwift have a system based on something like w/kg when no other sport ever has,” I say "because no other sport ever had all the athlete data Zwift has.
But… I don’t believe, even if the best people in the world spend 18 months working on something, that you will create a system which works perfectly for everyone, first time - simply because you and the Zwift team are human, and it’s impossible to expect you to think of every variant which could happen.
I also don’t believe there can ever be ONE categorisation system which works for everyone. In real life people can choose different types of track and road cycling to find what suits them.
So the question is why not try something now. It could be something like the Crit City beta races, you could try a couple of different cat systems with different names, and get “Futureworks” feedback. It could even be that particular clubs test them and correlate feedback so you don’t have to. Some systems might favour lighter riders, some heavier, some climbers, some sprinters.
Just try something - fail fast and learn fast.
I think most people on here feel that if Zwift does nothing for the next 6 months, a whole load of new Zwifters will arrive saying “why aren’t race categories enforced?”
So the question for me is “what do you want us to say in 6 months’ time, and how are you going to help Zwift fans to answer that question without just saying ‘ask Flint’?”
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I’d say at least community race organizers care a lot, and some regular participants in community race series as well. Of course it also depends on how the transition is implemented
I should add that new year’s is another good time to introduce changes in categorization, both because it’s new year’s and because approx no race series continue through the holidays.
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I’d still say it’s a pretty minor concern. Lots of people are upgrading in the middle of series anyway, unless they’re sandbagging to stay in category. If it’s COMPLETELY different - I think most series organizers would be willing to cut a season short and start new. You’re right that how it’s implemented and how it’s communicated is really big - at least 3-4 weeks ahead of time to make any season wrap-up schedule changes I think would be lots though.
It doesn’t even have to be mandatory for all races. There are lots of settings today that race organisers can choose to turn on or off, so Cat enforcement could simply be another setting. If it works then organisers will use it, if it doesn’t *cough* Steering *cough* then it’ll sit on the shelf until it gets improved/binned.
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It has been requested several times in this nearly thousand post thread, and numerous times in many others. Start with the simplest possible change:
Enforce the existing categories.
This is actually hardly a change. It is simply automating the category selection process.
Do it today.
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It would have to be optional to allow things like the ZHR masters, the Thursday TTTs and some other unconventional races.
Of course category enforcement already exists in part, thanks to WTRL with ZRL races and the autocat system. It’s a kludge via 3rd party websites and secret events, but it exists and regardless of the debate over categories, the enforcement aspect seems to work fine. I’m a bit puzzled that Zwift seems happy to persist indefinitely with this state of affairs, and isn’t embarrassed that such basic functionality is not an intrinsic part of Zwift but has to be bolted on by others.
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This is the reason I got up at 3:30am on Tuedays and rode in the stupid WTRL Zwift Classic races: I’ve been banging the Category Enforcement drum for so long, I had to ride in them. As it turns out, the only difference between a regular Zwift race and the Zwift Classics is in the regular race the sandbaggers come down a category or two and in the Classics, I’m put in the category with them. It was remarkably idiotic and I mean that exactly how it sounds.
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+1 vote for just enforcing current cats is so much clearer the way to go after the Autocat classic series has completed
What the auto cat series fairly clearly and objectively looking at the results , proved to me is that predictive categorisation takes huge effort ( allegedly) to refine and delivers next to no value to end users . There will be some “winners” and “loosers” depending on the input parameters but by and large is just rearranging the deck chairs …
So surely if we have honest retrospectives going on in Zwift they must conclude the same and implement category enforcement as an option for ALL event organisers native in current process.
Then when the loose floorboards are sorted out and leaky roofs fixed they can then go messing about with all the various experiments to refine the predictive algorythm , we wont be here carping about the lack of the real problem being fixed so you can go play with that without being harrassed as I think by and large no one really cares about it at all …
We will be for sure happy customers again . We can then move on to the next simple ( quoting zwift and partners here ) improvement we actually want . (Category promotion and relegation from results both globally and for races series organisers to plug into)
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Zackly. And impressive performance in your Baloney race, Graham. Absolutely serious average event power for a geezer!
Yeah after being dropped on the first climb by youngsters charging up full of beans , found myself highly motivated for some Time trialling between climbs to close down 2 groups pretty much solo and thought I would get dropped again on the climb but looks like others more out of gas than me . Another couple of laps and who knows what could have happened 
I definately had my best result of the series .
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Spot on. We can argue between ourselves until we’re blue in the face about how those categories are formed, but the absolute minimum is enforcing what we have already. The ZwiftPower categories are not perfect but they are well understood by the racing community (no super secret fancy formula that takes eight weeks to establish… Bs are faster than Cs, no honest), and I’d say they are generally respected by the racing community. Because they were created and honed by the racing community, in the void provided by Zwift’s inaction over YEARS.
It’s even more daft when you consider they took ZP in-house yonks ago now and have full access to the data it contains; on the majority of people that take racing seriously and value those more realistic results. You couldn’t make it up.
It’s really frustrating that in finally getting HQ to acknowledge racing as requiring some thought, we seem to have jumped from absolutely nothing directly to ‘it needs to be really complex’. Completely bypassing a massive yet easy win that they could add into the game in a matter of days if they wanted to. And I mean into the game proper, not via a convoluted sign up process through a third party company.
The proof?
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Certainly nobody in the event scheduling team, considering the upcoming group ride I just noticed with a certain professional goalkeeper. Literally celebrating people who openly cheat, for promotional purposes. 
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he has done them before. But agree giving a platform for somebody that so openly sandbags because he likes to win easy races is far from ideal.
Add to that the last two events were over pace. Zwifters will get a far better experience riding with the experienced community groups…anyway going off topic i’ll stick to try beating the cat drum 
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Spot on Dave. How much more evidence that this is the case , open and shut , do we need for it to be impossible to avoid or dispute what action is needed and wanted.
Sooner or later the vaccuous marketing mantra of “Fun is Fast” will come back to haunt Zwift as sorting this out is anything but fast, How much longer will user churn no longer sustain the model that promises so much but delivers so little . Zwifr more that superficially , trades a little bit on the coattails of bike racing with a string of celebrities pro riders riding ro rthe tune of you cant catch them but you can try , but then openly saying we are not really a priority concern for them
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Another annoying factor is that the events that have had have category enforcement - whatever form that takes - tend to attract higher than average field sizes, and I strongly suspect a much higher than average proportion of people who would always enter the right category anyway. Both of which are obviously a good thing, but it means all the other races (of which there are now hundreds every month) are by definition of lower class, and thus exploited by sandbaggers and spoilt. They aren’t given the same importance, so for example I feel like I ought to be doing the ZRL rather than being able to choose what’s convenient for me knowing it’ll still be fair.
Zwift rightly promote and celebrate the various WTRL events but don’t appear to want to spread that level of prestige and high quality racing around a bit, which must feel like a kick in the teeth for the many other event organisers who are just as much a part of the racing foundation on the platform.
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That might have been an adequate response if made back in about 2018. Possibly maybe in 2019.
By 2020 it would have been found to be less than adequate.
In 2021 leading into the fall season of racing, it is totally inadequate. Sorry, cannot sugar coat it.
Something needed to be done years ago and now you discover you cannot do it yet again.
If Zwift doesn’t want to do the enforcement themselves, then how about letting other organizers use the same private event signup that WTRL is using and give us permission to access ZwiftPower to fetch category information.
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Also, to emphasize, it doesn’t matter what changes you might make in six months to categories, or switch to a ranking system.
All of those will require you (Zwift) to enforce categories. Enforcing the existing categories, NOW, will not introduce a technical dead end or require a huge change to the user experience in six months when how you set up categories changes.
What it will do is keep people happy NOW. And will get people used to the idea that you are limited to joining your minimum or a higher category.
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I think this is a very constructive response.
I think what @xflintx is trying to tell us is that what seems easy for us to implement is not so easy for those who know the state of the Zwift code base. They will not touch the code for fear of destroying it, but will rather build it from scratch.
Going through the WTRL registration system to get category enforcement would be a satisfactory temporary solution for some races. The problem is that there must be one event per category as it is today. If WTRL could get the user registered in the correct category automatically, via e.g. a Zwift API, it would be enough with one event and the process would be a little smoother.
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I don’t read Flint’s response quite the same way, but I’ll leave it to Flint to clarify.
What does seem clear is that Zwift is completely bogged down by the prospect of redefining the racing categories. That may indeed be a tough project if only in the challenge of gathering enough support for any single approach to get it into development.
But that’s a separate issue from enforcing categories. Right now, just auto-assign categories using the existing criteria. Maybe down the road think about redefining them (with auto-assigned categories). Or maybe just skip that debate altogether and move to a results based system (with auto-assigned categories).
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