On the rankings system, anyone remember the original CVR races? Not the utter farce when it became its own platform.
If Im being honest, it was those original race series that got me into Zwift racing, and they managed to produce their own ranking system, website and everything else in a pretty short time.
Just how is it taking so long to provide any real movement and progress to a system that is needed.
Either someone is out of their depth or someone is being loyal to someone who is holding progress back - Delays this long are people led, not hardware led.
O yes Frank did an awesome job with the CVR racing ranking. I really enjoy those races. Frank wanted to do some awesome things with racing but I think he was getting so much pushback that he decided to build CVRcade
I don’t think Zwift can expect their users to have a headunit, but I think most of their users will find headunit-metrics useful and inspiring. It seems strange that they don’t see the Companion App as the headunit for their users.
ZwiftPower has rankings already, no need to create new ones and then wait several months before they have any relevance.
The hard part is meshing those into the game. I’m told by coders that it wouldn’t be too difficult now that Zwift has ownership of the ZP code. If that is indeed the case, the next step is enforcement: preventing riders from entering a category below their ranking or penalise them for doing so (as in chess).
Without the ability to enforce or penalise sandbaggers, any ranking system will suffer most of the same pitfalls of the current w/kg categories.
It should only be the rider category that the Zwift server will have to ask the ZwiftPower (API) for, to prevent users from entering a category below their ranking. It shouldn’t be that hard but what do I know
Ranking-based categories would of course be much better and the current ZP rankings while maybe not ideal would also be just fine, but apart from the integration work between two very different systems it would basically also require a complete overhaul of the entire race calendar to accommodate the new categories. Plus one might hope for a still more stable ZP before giving it such a new role…
Enforcing the current categories as a stopgap, on the other hand, would be trivial.
But using any ZP categories still requires the whole integration thing, which is why I advocate for simply using the in-game FTP and weight settings in the first version.
Yes I agree organizers should still have the option to choose.
With rankings I was thinking of dynamic grouping. Divide the start group into multiple smaller groups seconds before the Go. That way you may be top of the group one race and bottom the other , luck of the draw.
It could be solved by everyone entering cat E and, as you say, gets dynamically assigned right before the race. It should be a fairly lightweight query to ZP to get the dynamic rider category for a race.
We’ve been banging on this drum so long my head hurts. Sh*t, if they would just do this, the Absa Cape Epic TT wouldn’t have been such a cluster for the lower cat riders to get into.
