Nope. Until Zwift figures out a better way of parsing power, weight and speed, it’s what we got. It’s just time acknowledge bigger riders have an advantage in the lower categories of Zwift racing. If you don’t understand why that is, that’s entirely on you.
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Indeed! And it is very unfortunate that we are turned against each other when the problem actually lies with Zwift management. It is actually surprisingly similar to the sandbagger issue (although a little different).
Sandbaggers provoke. People get angry and call them names and theorize over their personalities and moral integrity. But the problem is not the individual sandbaggers at all. The problem is just that you are allowed to enter any race you like and that this can ruin the experience for the other participants, i.e. a Zwift management level problem, not a subscriber problem. Just auto-enforce categories, how hard can it be?
Is it provoking to me that someone my weight can’t win against a heavy rider in a crit, not even when cruising/cheating (not without getting DQ’d)? Yes and no. The heavy rider isn’t provoking. He is just doing his best like everyone else. Not even the W/kg system is provoking. It is just stupid. What is provoking is Zwift’s negligence and reluctance to do anything about the flaws regardless of what we say and what proofs of its flaws we present, that they have so far simply refused to listen and care. That is very provoking. AutoCat shows a weak promise that could potentially make me much much less provoked in the future, but that is only under the interpretation of AutoCat as a tool for initial seeding. In any other future use I am still as provoked as ever.
That is a different argument entirely - we were on the verge of using rankings categories on ZwiftPower before it was taken over. All we needed - and still do - was enforcement.
My point is that comments like “heavy riders benefit” are idiotic. Assumptions are still being made that the heavier the rider, the more power they’ll output and their p/w ratio remains constant. If that were truly the case, I’d double my weight my eating junk food and race the Tour. Likewise for the comments that light riders have it easy.
Also, I notice nobody ever mentions height, which is a huge influencing factor.
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I know whynit is, because in order to carry my heavier frame around, my legs have developed stronger. That’s just life.
As for the benefit… heavier riders have advantage on flats, lighter on climbs. Race within your ability.
You wouldn’t see a scrum-half trying to prop would you?!
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No , just 3 words … You are wrong 
(They are not disadvantaged in Zwift , just in Zwift racing due to the kg part of the categorisation system that has not yet matured from the understanding that there is initial value for using this for starters , but no value after that )
All this heavy vs. light debate has been very very interesting, but I’m sure we can all agree that current categories should at least be enforced as an interim measure eh? @shooj @xflintx @Wes
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Righto. Looking forward to turning up and smashing every race then… I have all the advantages!
All heavy people need to do is turn up… don’t bother training as zwift already sees them as much better!
The “advantage” is grossly exaggerated by people on here.
It’s boring reading it time and time again. But if anybody dares suggest these people are exaggerating, wow… the over the top responses are hilarious and exactly the same month after month.
There’s more to the world than Zwift.
if you have a huge 1-2 minute power and an ftp anywhere within .2wkg of the cat limits then you can pretty much win any zwift race at any weight. on the other hand i wouldn’t even bother trying to compare it to real world cycling. it’s not the same and it’ll never even be close
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No.
The point being made is that for two riders with an identical w/kg, the heavier rider is producing more watts. That’s a fact due to the maths involved (weight being on the bottom of the fraction).
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Sorry if I find that one a little hard to swallow.
When ZP was taken over threads like this one didn’t exist in here. I merely jumped in here and there whenever there was opportunity to turn a thread around, did so mostly alone and faced mainly just opposition. I had got banned from Zwift Racers group on FB for being too outspoken about the flaws of the ZP rule set, and discussions on cheating in the Zwift Riders group typically were either completely disregarded or resulted in ****storms of memes from the IBTL crowd.
Just a year ago people still believed in W/kg cats. All they ever saw was the sandbaggers, which they hated to no end. I participated in races where the organizers openly insulted sandbagger signups and then proceeded to cruise the race themselves, take the entire podium on ZP and pat each other on the backs afterwards.
And now you say that you were in fact secretly scheming on a results-based system at the time? Nobody would have seen that coming back then.
It’s not a different argument. It is THE argument. This was never about weight, HR, physics or the like. They are just symptoms that something is awfully rotten in the state of Denmark and I discuss them as such. It was always about Zwift, what they should do, what they don’t do. But then people take it personally, just like people get personally offended by a sandbagger. What a constant waste of energy that could have been directed elsewhere, into the heart of the matter and those responsible for it.
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This was definitely the case, I have discussed it with the original ZP guys. Using different methods to split pens is relatively simply code in ZP itself, they had already done it for different event types like Masters racing.
The issue is that if you cannot enforce the pen in the client, you are only doing the split after the fact, hoping that people following what is set out in the event description - and therefore the law of CI=CO applies.
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That is not what is being said. It may be the intent and what we understand it to be but when it is said as a closed sentence it leaves no room for inferring otherwise.
I couldn’t care less what you find hard to swallow. It was and it would’ve happened.
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Exactly. Without enforcement, you could have the best ranking system and end up with the same hopeless state we have now.
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@gloscherrybomb , @MRBaldi_T-ZHR Ok, I see. A shame then. And we still don’t have cat enforcement. (People still wouldn’t have seen it coming at the time but I do appreciate that you tried.)
I know the seed to something better was already in place in ZP since way back. The ranking is from US Cycling Fed and is already tried and tested in RL conditions. It would have worked. Given cat enforcement. Things would have been much better. And we wouldn’t be sitting here today in this thread.
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Yes quite, you could pull one of 20 rankings systems off the shelf and they would have worked pretty well - at the end of the day it’s just a bit of maths to give people a score after a race. There are also many interesting ways that we can come up with to split pens - on the rankings themselves, by age, by shoe size, by favourite colour. But all of it is a waste of time if the rider is not locked to a certain pen - and the rankings themselves are then also shot.
I’m glad we are back to repeating this point over and over, I couldn’t bring myself to get involved in the ridiculous weight debate.
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That has probably been an unfortunate PR problem. I think many people have found it hard to believe that the ZP rankings could ever be a valid measure of rider ability since they are ruined today by the open cats and by the distortions created by the W/kg division (sandbagging, cruising, weight…) and show you very little of value as they stand. But they wouldn’t look the way they do with a different rule set and people need to remind themselves of that.
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To touch on one of the original other points in my OP, has there been any noise about TTTs being given the ITT start pen treatment?
New WTRL season approaching and the current manual countdown way of doing it is so so shoddy.
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I would have liked to see some TTT specific development considering how successful it has been and the number of new users it has brought to the platform, particularly during lockdown. However on the scale of Zwift complexity versus achievable deliverables (route progress, checkbox when you complete a route, not having to exit the game etc) the concept of being a part of a specific team within the game and that team going off together at the same time is a long way off I would imagine.