At this stage I’d be happy with literally any meaningful racing development. I started this thread in March this year at the end of the last ‘Zwift season’ in the vain hope something might change by the time the Autumn rolled around again. It’s been so stagnant.
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I fear that any improvement was due to enforcing the categories and as you say, adding an extra pen. It’s a nice idea that you can carve people up by a more complex set of physiological data, but you are still limited by the number of pens, and ultimately end up, by the nature of the maths, with pretty much the same range of abilities in any one cat. I’m not saying it’s not an improvement, but it is minor and seems like a waste of effort that could be better placed working on a toolset for race organisers to determine their own pen split logic, and pen enforcement based on this.
Opening up: I don’t like categories. I don’t see the point in an online environment. Categories in real life offer 2 things - an incentive for improvement, and a way to split riders up in to separate races.
This isn’t necessary online. We can have better incentives with rankings (people can race more regularly, and everyone can improve in a more granular way) and we can split riders up in much more dynamic ways based on the desires of the organiser.
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This is quite true. I cannot believe how hard this drum has been pounded with little to no acknowledgement by ZHQ of how important it is to racing on Zwift. The lack of response for the last two years is completely absurd.
X1000. The WTRL Autocat algorithm was also absurd. If you ended up at the pointy end of the cat you were dropped into, it was great. For about 30% of us, it was reverse sandbagging. The back end of the category is was in for THE ENTIRE series was made up of the same low B to mid C riders and we would spend most of the events off the back talking about the weather. Or something.
Check it out, Western Australia C3 was ludicrous. I’m capable of 3.6w/kg, 238w for 20 minutes. I am then completely blown after that effort. With the selection of races, mostly YAC (Yet Another Crit) except for Baloney, we were outclassed by the solid A and high B racers populating the front of the field. It was extremely disappointing.
As I said in the closer the the Zwift Classic Series, I’m not interested in riding a WTRL managed event in the future based upon their complete dismissal of our feedback. If they’re going to do this in a “test” event with limited participation, how is it going to be different in a real event?
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That’s great to hear and hopefully see some of the development coming sooner rather than later.
One thing I would really suggest is don’t attempt to fix everything in one go. We don’t need intelligent cat enforcement day 1, a simple cat enforcement based on existing categories that organisers can turn on or off per event like any other setting would be a huge improvement which could be done fairly quickly.
A new house is great long term goal but putting some windows in the existing house is quick and provides massive benefits while you find a perfect new house 
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It’s not THAT simple, as many riders don’t even know what Zwift Power is, and don’t automatically have a category assigned. Sure you could use their FTP, but that is a manually entered number, it is not auto-calculated or stored as far as I am aware.
It would be easy enough to retrieve the ZP cat and store that in a field against each user for the majority of us, but for the casual user entering a race, there needs to be a way to determine the pen in the first place, and then communicate that to the end user so there is not a gazillion support requests asking why they can’t select a pen anymore.
This kind of thing is basically what I do for a living - turning real life user journeys in to functional specifications. It is usually best to start with the most basic possible ‘if’ statement - “If an event is marked as pen-enforced (determined by race organiser), the rider is automatically placed in the correct pen and no other pen can be selected”
In order to be able to achieve this, the following must be true:
- A flag can be applied when setting up an event to determine if it is pen controlled
- The appropriate pen can be established for any particular rider entering an event of this type
- The front end must communicate the enforced pen to the rider
- The front end must not present a choice of pens to the rider
Each of these can then be broken in to a number of work packages:
- Events team - add pen-controlled variable to event setup module
- ZwiftPower team - retrieve, calculate and store ZP category for all riders that have not opted in to Zwift Power. This data can not be publicly accessible. May require storage increase.
- ZwiftPower team - develop pen assignation for all riders that have entered an event and store this against the rider/event. To start with this can be the ZP category, but in the future this pen assignation could be calculated using alternative inputs
- Integrations team - develop API to retrieve pen assignation for a rider and event combination from ZP
- Front end team - develop new UI for pen-enforced races, that retrieves and displays the assigned pen from the ZP API. Communicate to the rider that this has taken place. Change UI so that there is no pen selection
- Testing - Create tests scripts and test across all impacted hardware combinations. Beta test with specific event organisers
- Marketing / Comms - create communication pack to explain this change to riders and race organisers
I hope ‘intelligently’ means constructed in a sensible way like above, but it’s really not fair to make it out to be as simple as some are suggesting. The frustration is that if this process is properly defined and managed we could have had it ages ago, but it feels like they’ve been beating around the bush a bit (WTRL pointless autocat work as evidence).
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it’s not that simple what they long term goal is but at the most basic level it is fairly easy to do with a massive benefit to the race community then they can look to progress it to make it more intelligent.
All the majority of us want right now is the enforcement of existing categories. which would mean.
- New event variable to turn on enforcement on or off (plenty other settings on events so seems simple)
- API call to ZP to get current cat (again not rocket science, WTRL are already doing this so the API is there)
- Restrict entry based on Cat (Restriction code for male/female is already there so just need to code in extra variables checks)
- If not on ZP then possibly redirect to support page to show reason why event can’t be entered.
Step 4 being the most awkward and potential disruptive for the casual race community but given pen enforcement I’m sure that casual users would understand and actually grow the race community rather than getting wiped out by sandbaggers in their first race and deciding racing is not for them (this is a big problem with low cats)
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There is no way that number 4 is going to fly for Zwift. The other points are just simplifications of what I put. It would be good to hear if this is actually the broad plan, as the WTRL work worries me that they will spend months trying to solve the wrong problem.
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1100+ posts in this thread alone , 6 months (and make that years because this thread is just a continuation of previous discussions about this ) . Result , pretty much we are where we started , just older , more frustrated and more incredulous at failing to do anything at all. Do you honestly think that anything good is going to come out of it when despite all that there is no release date or at least a clear and shareable direction of travel .
Dead Horses can only be flogged for so long before you are just scattering the bones .
Zwift clearly have there focus on other things and not this . We know this because they got a load of investment and that was NOT for existing customer experience but for something else (oh and for a high level of very expensive advertising and sponsorships ) .
The former looks like its also failing to deliver and thus time will be called soon enough and not sure when the bean counters are going to start looking at the return for the other expenditure . Experience tells me that those failures when they come to inevitable conclusion seldom lead to some sort of apocalyptic reassessment to do things better as we might want it .
So carry on believing we are soon going to get something here but frankly everything points to that being just fantasy .
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Surely it is stored somewhere or how else does Zwift know you’ve got an FTP increase?
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Step 1: Enforce the existing categories.
Step 2: Develop a categorization system based on race results.
Offer both systems to race organizers. And more: age, weight, handicap, open…
We do not need a more complicated FTP/power curve based algorithm for assigning categories.
There is no need to use ZP at all. Zwift has all of our data. Use the most recent 40 hours (or, for new riders, whatever is available) of ALL rides to calculate ftp. Perhaps the assigned category is low for a new Zwifter with little ride history, but that resolves after one race.
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It’s stored, but only as a number, the performance data itself is not stored. I could put my ftp as 150 and get an ftp increase the next ride. Therefore it’s useless for pen assignment.
If I log in to zwift.com and look at my activity feed, all of my power data for every ride dating back many months is displayed.
Is it? That’s not what I see. Maybe Zwift stores the actual detail needed to calculate an FTP from previous rides, or maybe that data needs to be stored in the Zwift Power database to have it granular enough, but it’s kind of irrelevant - it still needs to be digested and calculated and have that value stored (not user adjustable whenever you fancy it) for it to be of any use.
I do think pen enforcement is relatively low hanging fruit, but it’s not as simple as you are making out, although I would like it to be - especially for Zwift. If you think pen enforcement is easy, consider how look how long it took to be able change routes without exiting, or to see how long is left on a route.
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I get what you’re saying about how it actually takes a bit of process and workflow to do, but compared to say boost mode or changing the drafting dynamics, it is about as trivial a change as it’s possible to make to the game.
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I think you are just blowing far to much complexity into this situation and thus helping to justify the myths that this is complex and that is why we haven’t had it delivered .
Myth 1 : Somehow we need Zwiftpower to do anything . Incorrect because recent zwift sponsored events don’t use it at all . Data is taken directly from zwift.
Myth 2 : The calculations required are problematic. Only if you are not familiar with the most basic of arithmetic that is taught to 6 year old children.
Myth 3: : The fact Zwift have failed to deliver it is evidence of it not being simple. Do we have to list out all the trivial issues that have languished unaddressed for years to debunk this ?
The simple fact is Zwift are commercially off on other tangents and everyone who contributes here is not important to that ( sadly I would include those from ZwiftHQ who must be more frustrated than all of us I am sure and you guys have my utmost sympathy) .
I believe this thread is no longer helpful or constructive and just endless repeating the same things round and round and I can see as a result the conversations about this have taken on a life of there own as important. How many times do we need to repeat the same thing to realize this is a pointless endeavor zwift are not interested / capable of moving forward here .
You all know what is going to happen , Even if something will be released ( and I think personally that’s a big big if ) its going to have all the issues you would expect of the most giant waterfall of a project , not shared with any of us , that will be a million miles from what is needed and off we go again . The velocity of change here is glacial and sometimes (often) not even in the right direction and to that extent if you are sensible you will accept what we have is all we will get and just ride it out until a better thing comes along ( or not ).
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I would like to see Zwift do This for every user on there Zwift profile (Later they can add Ranking)
this will mean running thru the database for every user checking every race finding the max 20min power and populating the data fields.
If a rider did not do any races then pull the best 20 min power from the last 90 days for any ride. We will except that now and then a rider will be in a lower pen but that will only happen once for every rider.
All of this can be reused when they add ranking.
While they do this they can write code to check Cat and place the rider in the correct pen.
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@Gerrie_Delport_ODZ I would so like to see that too . And the implicated structural improvements this could bring. I vote to put you in charge 
Head unfortunately is saying , it hasn’t happened in the last two years when Zwift had a captive audience of enthusiastic riders , its unlikely to happen now when we have I think all but given up in the face of any honesty , progress and credibility . I think most , like me , are just putting up with what we have while it remains use-able and relatively engaging but investing our energy into offering feedback to other solutions that are actually interested in listening, improving and more importantly engaging with there users.
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I have for the most part given up on racing on Zwift and I think I am not the only one. WTRL is the only events that are like racing but they don’t care about racers in the USA. Also organizing a team every week is more effort than needed. I just want to look at the race options for the week and pick a race and do it knowing that 95% of the racers is in the correct pen.
More organizers need tools to make racing interesting.
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Agreed, this ‘you’ve got to be in ZRL’ thing annoys me. Not wanting to do that series (multiple reasons) shouldn’t mean I have to accept a lower quality experience from a race.
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Exactly so, Dave. I could not agree more.
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