As seen on the Zwift Riders FB page…
I don’t doubt it, it happens in loads of games. Level up via botting and sell the account for profit.
Probably. Get the account shutdown to stop it?
It’s only at level 37 though so what’s the point?
I’ve got level 60 and 7,000,000 drops with a full garage nearly, how much do you want to pay?
Some people…
The seller doesn’t have anything on his Strava profile…
There’s a thread floating around talking about bots people have seen lately. One account doing around 6w/kg for 800km straight (no variation in watts) that I encountered the other week. Selling seems a reasonable explanation for that behavior.
I had that thought as well but didn’t have any evidence to call them out on it, so I omitted that thought process.
I mean, I reported that same user three different times, and nothing seems to have happened. So I feel okay speculating wildly
Just checked that same user’s account. The 800+km ride(s) is private, but his Lvl 1 ride is public. He’s gone from Lvl 1 to Lvl 19 in 14 days. Impressive for someone who’s other rides are 15-20km at 100w averages.
He’s still riding, so either he’s just waiting for it to sell, or he really did it for his own benefit.
The real question is “Are people really buying their Swift accounts”. It’s so easy to put anything up for sale that it’s no surprise someone’s trying.
It’s my impression that if you report something like this from the ZCA absolutely nothing happens…
Reporting using the contact form ( chat bot and reporting another user… ) on the homepage, those “riders” seems to disappear within a week.
But then again, money is money, and a lvl60 account will probably continue paying the monthly fee forever - just a thought
BooX
The second question is why does anyone care. It does not affect anyone else in any way.
And the third question is: does this violate Zwift’s Term of Service?
An 800km ride at a steady 5.7w/kg up the Epic KOM certainly affects anyone else’s ability to get the Epic KOM that day. (Insert your claim that KQOM jerseys are meaningless anyway, which is beside the point that it affects other people’s rides even if you don’t value it)
Everyone else is already losing out to the usual KOM holders who weigh 50kg and ride at 10W/kg.
There are real human beings who ride unassisted 10w/kg up the Epic KQOM? That’s news to me.
The point is if you are complaining about people being “robbed” of their KOMs in Zwift then instead of being worried about a few bots building up their stats to sell to pathetic individuals, you should be complaining about the forty-year-olds who, judging by their Zwift climbing performance, should be winning the TdF instead of riding indoors in their basements next to their dogs.
Why do I have to choose which ones to complain about? Why would wanting to have one kind of cheating stopped mean I can’t also want the other cheating to be stopped?
Why complain about riders manipulating weight, you should be complaining about people using EPO. Why complain about EPO, you should be complaining about blood doping. Why complain about blood doping, you should complain about human growth hormone. Why complain about human growth hormone, you should…
My question for you is this: why should we ignore one kind of cheating just because another kind exists?
I don’t understand why obvious bot rides aren’t automatically detected and the accounts banned.
…same… Any rider, riding for hours with less than 2 watts variation should be pretty easy to spot using even the simplest algorithm
BooX
We can pick them pretty easily even while slogging away up the ADZ.
At least the guy with the beagle as his avatar image has gone, he used to do 500km+ rides at 3.8w/kg.
A bot roaming around Zwift is “cheating” you? Or is it the dude who buys the account so he can have a level 30 jersey that is offending your sense of justice? Those are affecting your enjoyment and use of Zwift?
With Zwift you are talking about an company that cannot make the simplest of changes to the application despite the changes being requested for years and years, and you want them to waste resources on something as trivial as this?
Hikers say hike your own hike. Maybe when zwifting you should ride your own ride. You would be a lot happier than worrying someone may have bought an account with a route badge he didn’t earn.