Exactly. The organisers should be DQing such riders and allocating the points to those riders/teams who finish within the cutoff time. Just like IRL.
There are numerous opportunities for cheating in ZRL, this is one of the most obvious.
Another race last night, a chase style race where there were 4 A riders in B, 9 B riders in C and 7 C riders in D. Its pointless due to the sandbaggers, all 20 of them, where they have the power to pull ahead and not get caught, now granted these types of races the lower groups do not always get caught but at least let those in the lower cats not be forced to try to keep up with the pace of the sandbaggers
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it’s not cheating if the organisers accept that as a valid tactic. I do fully agree with you though a cutoff would be good and ideally make the events less prime heavy to discourage such behaviour.
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They did say there was a cut-off in ZRL races actually, but it was about 2h or something. And they only announced this rule deep a comment thread somewhere on FB part-way through the season so probably 99% of riders didn’t know about it. I don’t know if it was actually applied to any riders.
The primacy of primes does of course give an even bigger bias towards sandbaggers than in a usual zwift race, and it was noticeable how high a proportion of the top scorers had dropped a category over the summer.
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It was definitely 2 hours and I know of at least one person who it was applied to.
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This has been one of the issues, WTRL were very naïve if they thought riders and team managers would be honest due to the system being open to be “gamed”. In that sense you cannot allow a rider who was a C a few months earlier to race as a D (because over the summer they raced outside and used Zwift for recovery rides) and then we will allow them to “manage their power” to stay in Cat, but a rider who may have just stepped in to make up the numbers and learn about racing who is trying their hardest will then be penalised for not going quick enough.
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agreed but how to automatically enforce it with the current tools is the hard part. Obviously looking back at cats from older than then last couple months would be good first step but you will always have the problem of cruisers when there is a cat limit based on a single 20 min metric. I don’t blame WTRL for that, having inherited the cat system it’s just a question how we move forward whether than be autocat for all or whatever system zwift is coming up with which we might or might not see sometime zoooon.
Get your zwift activity monitor ready if you want to make the playoffs for ZRL is the only way 
Honesty means different things to different people. If your recorded 20 min power in events is under 3.2/0.95 = 3.37W/kg then you are a legitimate C cat in the eyes of WTRL and Zwift, regardless of what your actual 20 min power might be in a test where you tried your best.
Probably all riders could do more for a 20 min test than they ever get in a normal race. I have reached 4.4 in a 20 min test when on top form but have only once or twice inched over the B cat limit of 4.21 in an event by a couple of watts. And I only did that after starting to race in A cat, the pace in B just isn’t high enough. That’s a gap of a full 0.2W/kg or more between potential and observed performance on zwiftpower. Would I be a cheat if I raced B?
The problem is as much with the stupid basis for categorising riders, as it is with the riders who game it. It doesn’t work even if people don’t deliberately game it. I genuinely wouldn’t have known I could do 4.4 if I hadn’t specifically tried!
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Very good point @_JamesA_ZSUNR
I will son be downgraded to C because the lack of short races. But I have been training just as hard as I did before. What Zwift should do is look at all you do on the platform, they know your set FTP and they know if you do workouts and get stars for those workouts that should be one way to set the limits.
But people will always try to game the system.
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We’ve been here before (and no doubt will be again) but IMO the whole concept of trying to rank people based on biophysical metrics is just wrong in principle.
If the ranking doesn’t match actual race performance, it is unfair and will be gamed, even if just accidentally.
If the ranking does match actual race performance, then you might as well have used race performance anyway.
The only real problem with using race performance is that there will be insufficient data for some riders some of the time and they will probably be incorrectly ranked until sufficient data are obtained. Biophysical performance will also rank some riders incorrectly some of the time when there is insufficient data, but worse than that, it ranks some riders incorrectly all of the time even when loads of data is available.
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I don’t know about can’t allow. I realise you’re not talking about quite the same thing as I’m about to, but I’d guess rules for degrading race category would apply across different events and types of races.
I raced in the ZRL in April as a C, racing at an average 2.9W/kg, or 3.0W/kg for 20 minutes at 76-77kg. Around 230W NP, 225W avg. HR averaging around 158bpm.
WTRL refused to assign me an AutoCat category last week as I’d done no races since one in July, so I did a race on Friday. I’ve not ridden a lot in the past few months, and am 4-5kg heavier. I averaged 2.5W/kg for that race with a 207W NP/206W avg - 13th/13 in the C group and 4 minutes down on the winner with an avg HR of 156, so a comparatively taxing effort to those in April.
WTRL put me in the D group for today’s chase race. I finished second in the D group but after the C and B groups that had caught us. I feel it was the correct category for me, as I still only managed 2.5W/kg at 80.8kg, 203W NO and 198W avg.
I averaged 157bpm and peaked at 175. At 53 years old, that’s still a significant effort for me. Garmin scored it a 4.1 on Aerobic Training Effect - and my WHOOP says I’m overreaching.
All in all, IMO it’s perfectly reasonable to allow a previously C rider to race as a D. Notwithstanding the fact we don’t know why they’re now a D, I think it would be unfair to say “we don’t care how unfit you are now, you have to race in your old category and get dropped from the gun.”
(I realise 2.5W/kg is the start of the standard ZP C category despite where AutoCat put me - I’m just trying to illustrate that a big drop in performance can be legitimate. Edit: FWIW ZP does have me as a D in my profile - I was forgetting that the ZP categories are based on 95% of 20 min power, which would be 2.4W/kg for today’s race.)
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Are you saying we are going in circles… NO!
LOL
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the B rider D1 playoffs were pretty funny. the top 20 got a huge WKG dq for doing 4.4-4.6 for 20 up innsbruck. apparently there’s a live stream out there where everyone stops pedalling about 50m from the line but i haven’t seen it
it is what it is. i still would have won that race by approximately 2 minutes if i was in it, just because the genetic lottery decided to make me 55kg, because i can, and have, ridden 20 minute climbs at 4.8wkg and remained a solid B. now there’s a real argument for changing the cat limits, if there ever was one.
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I agree that there has to be a ranking system which has been mentioned many times on here and other places.
How that is acheived and what system would be used is the next question which needs to be answered.
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it’s pretty obvious to see with power graphs like this what people are up to.
Struggling to find a decent stream of it but certainly spotted a few that finish pretty slowly
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There’s no point trying to apply reason to the WTRL ZRL races as half the team who got DQ’d for cheating in last years series were in the play offs again this year.
If that is the standard then worrying about massaging 20min figures is kind of pointless.
The fault for this sits strongly with Zwift HQ not having the backbone to DQ riders who were cheating in their flagship event.
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the two simplest solutions, well, band aids really, that i can think of using the current frameworks, would be to amend zwiftpower to
1: drop the raw FTP limit for B —> A by a small but significant 5w. This reduces the raw 20 min power required to follow a lightweight climber riding a stead pace up a 20 min climb to something actually achievable by person with a normal weight without breaking their own cat limit, without really impacting racing in general. I’m sure C would have an equivalent too, the numbers they decided on originally were pretty arbitrary, honestly. I’ve thought this for years and I will happily make an argument in favour of doing this, even though it means putting me in A.
2: change it from 20 minutes to 15 minutes. this is still a mostly aerobic effort, but to game a 15 minute effort you would have to slow down massively on your approach also, even on something like the volkom or keith hill. right now, only climbs like the epic kom and innsbruck really expose this kind of riding
no ingame coding necessary, although i wonder if there is anyone working at zwift right now who even change anything on ZP without breaking it at this point
these are just my opinions as a ~55kg rider. because even if i am capable of moving back up to A, the only way i’m ever going to be forced to do that is if a B race somehow forces me to put out 4.9wkg+ for 20 minutes, and that’s pretty absurd
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agreed,
Point 1 I’ve always felt the power floors were about 10w too generous.
Point 2 As you say unlikely I get the impression zp is just being left to die as bugs are going un-fixed. Hopefully there is a roadmap to replace it some point soon as it’s what Zwift desperately needs.
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If anyone from Zwift is reading, then starting the next series with 3 laps of Volcano climb circuit (with points for the KOM) could go a long way, the lead in plus climb is a solid 18/20mins of hard riding for strong B’s \ C’s. That is going to highlight those sandbaggers in race 1.
Alongside things like Innsbruck after party.
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Zwift have made a conscious effort to separate themselves from the WTRL organised ZRL. It is not their flagship event. Case in point - contact ZADA about a suspect performance - not their remit. Prem = Zwift, community = WTRL.
I don’t get emotional about sandbaggers/cruisers now. I’ve learnt to stop hating the player and start hating the game.
Fix the system not the symptoms of the existing broken one.
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