Avatar rendering not consistently shown to every user

Bugs and Support
1

I have noticed and at least partially verified some quite interesting anomalies of late that I (and some team mates) are trying to further diagnose and understand but am posting here to see

If others have found same or Its a known issue

The issue in a nutshell is

I am viewing and riding beleiving I am in the draft of a specific rider . That rider beleives that he is in my draft .

I beleive this,if not appeared since I appreciate this can never be 100%, has become significantly more the case in the last 3 or 4 weeks . It has degraded IMO to the point where UX is unacceptably bad.

There was lot of anecdotal experiences that made me think there was an issue .

Aparrently far too sticky drafting scenarios
Riders breaking draft and apparently going off the front doing very low w/kg
In really extreme situations I have seen riders doing hugely unexpected things such as passing doing vastly lower w/kg and rolling up the road even in the front . Without any change to there w/kg or mine and on (as far as this can be the case) broadly equal terrain shortly later I will pass them again and drop them as I would expect i.e with the exact same paramters .
In some extreme cases these events show me riders doing such things ( we are talking doing sub 2 w/kg when I am doing 4 rolling off into the distance as if they were doing far far more ).

Often these events in particular the last one will coincide with riders appearing to ride off the road path limitations as I would be able to do ( I have steering so know the limits quite well) .

That is not always the case however but it did get me to thinking that this was not some zwift physics algorythm or some “exploit” or “game playing” but was something to do with the simple rendering of users on the screen.

We rider the WTRL TTT , and it is there for obvious reasons this problem has proved the most impacting since knowing where everyone is on screen really matters. It also because we are a team gives us an opportuntity to test thsi and it seems to indicate that the problem ( maybe not for all those ) but for some anyway , IS the rendering of riders around you .

So what did we do .
We called out not just who was going to the front but took time to call the order we saw on the screen.
What we found was that for very significant periods of time each of us saw different ordering of the team .

What this led too examples Someone wanting to pull on the front was putting in more and more watts taht requiremed because they though they were not in the front yet ( still suck in draft) . For everyone eles we saw them rolling off the front and then we had to power up to hold there wheel . That led of course to them seeing our watts and thinking we were being idiots and not respecting the pace line . In other cases when we started to understand this issue we were finding that if we operated a good pace line a lead rider might think he was way off the front , but in fact others saw a good paceline .

Anyone else seeing this or similar ?

Just riding around Zwift this is just a annoying degrading of user experience ( which has defiantely got significantly worse as I said in the last month) , but in racing and in particular this TTT it makes the experience far less fun if you cannot rely on what you see on the screen is infact shared.

Feedback anyone ?

2

Here is another thread on this matter in Racing Category.

In particular the evidence collected already on this . It looks pretty damning and completely undermines any credibility in Zwift racing as it currently performs . The proof positive provided here (and seems to be expected ) is that two users will see competely different versions of a race and there is no quality or resilience on this at all . In a case shown the person who crossed the line first ( by a decent margin) was actually 2nd :frowning:

There is no “game” that can expect to be taken seriously in a Multi-player competitive aspect that cannot guatantee some degree of consistency here . Take any MMO shoot em up where the players you were targetting were not even there , quite rightly no one would play that game . This is the same here .

This has without doubt increased as an issue in the last few weeks . But lets be clear is this just pushing an already flawed approach (which would need a complete rethink ) to multi user interaction or has it been introduced and can be bug fixed .

We would like some answers on this please @ZwiftHQ .

Silence on this can only suggest to me the former is the case . Tell us we are wrong .

3

And just in case anyone ( including zwift ) want to try and suggest that this issue is down to our systems or network . The bug/flaw is undisputedly been duly demonstrated and broadcast by zwift themselves in the ZRL race channel (more than once ) but here is the best example , as the winner … didnt win :frowning:

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4

And another one showing this time that screen rendering is all over the place . Have a look at the rider nearby position on this .

https://fb.watch/3RT4XwiuiN/

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We have also noticed this and found it to completely ruin the experience. And we don’t even ride TTT. But we do often ride in a group for long rides. The group has different skill levels and now its really hard to see the actual way we ride. Makes it very hard to do this together. Doing races have also changed drastically and not fun.

Has anyone found out if Zwift has rolled this out intentionally for some reason? As someone who has been using Zwift since they had “ghosts” on the screen I really hope this is just a bug they will fix soon.

6

The new pack dynamics in the latest (March) update are supposed to help with this.

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