4.7wkg 20 min power has no business in B category. Can we please do something about this nonsense?
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Ya, I experienced this user in another race as well,… looking at their profile they should be an A imo
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This is a watt floor problem rider. It’s a CE design problem.
and/or a height problem. 5’4" and 112lbs is a good formula for success. And lost a couple pounds in the last year, but hasn’t grown a cm. So must be an adult
Can we dismiss the idea that only absolute watts, and not watts/kg matter on flat routes?
Event ID: 3806487
That’s nothing:
Top 3 finished with around 5w/kg but only 2 of them are on ZwiftPower. The first placed rider has since been upgraded to A cat but the 2nd rider is remarkably somehow still in B cat despite doing 20 minutes at 355w at 5.01w/kg (so it’s not a watt floor issue). Mind you, their 355w is about 100w higher than their usual with around the same HR.
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No problem, just send them down to the Ds. We got 4.5 w/kg 20 min power riders down here already. Let’s see how much faster is a 4.7…
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The Watt Floors are problem because organizers are using it…it can be removed from CE.
We have done it at our VirtuSlo Races.
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my condolences to p2, 6, 7, 13, 16, 19, 26, 28 etc
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he just turned 21 not too long ago if i remember right
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Just get rid of category’s completely and let everybody race in the same category 
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The watt floor definitely needs to be looked at or removed, they say its to protect the lightweight riders but frankly many of them just take the piss out of the categories limits by saying that they are classed as x cat so they’ll race there and balls to everyone else, guess a little gold trophy means a lot to them
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i cant say i feel bad for the other people doing 4.5-4.6 in that race who were unfairly robbed of a cup or whatever. i think i lost a race to that kid earlier this year too. i did not lose sleep over it
What was the reason again, A category was to wide, so some users had to be moved down to B.
So you now have people with less than 3.2wkg zftp & upgraded due to zMap having to race against guys with a 4.7wkg zFTP or 20 min effort. All because it wasnt ‘fair’ on some A cat riders.
The watt floor is ridiculous cop out which zwift are (to take a wild guess) frankly to scared of the push back from female riders to look at fixing.
Its a broken system, multiple attempts to fix it have not worked and the latest changes seem to have made it worse for everyone bar the A cat riders. Its bonkers this has not been resolved with a system that works.
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zwift racing score will fix all of this…
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No wonder I have been finding B hard - top 13 in that race all over 4w/kg for 20 mins! I’ve not ever hit that, even at my fittest when I troubled the podium a couple of times (a couple of years ago).
It’s categorised racing, there will always be those at the extremes (I was the highest placed rider under 4wkg btw).
I’m not sure that A category being to wide was the initial reason [it may have been an additional reason later but I don’t remember seeing that, but probably missed it]
Reason given initially was
- All category boundaries have been increased by 5%, to make the difference between Zwiftpower and CE less apparent and confusing (because Zwiftpower uses 95% of your best effort over 20 minutes).
This thread
from August 2022 highlighted some of the potential issues and a year on I think they mostly still remain.
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This is Zwift. It was never great racing wise but the community made it work somewhat. Zwift got more involved and managed to make it worse and less transparent.
Been discussed several times but new categorisation is a mess and lacks transparancy. Boundaries also got extended significantly compared to old ZP categories but also compared to boundaries when new categorisation was first rolled out, people with 3.7wkg got upgraded to A (which wasn’t that bad to be honest, better than this). Now people far above 4 are in B without upgrading. This is, my biased perspective with few races under my belt recently, made more apparent with new dynamics that are more like TT efforts (higher average power) than before.
So, it sucks. A lot. With Zwifts track record I don’t expect improvement as they seem to be on track to make these things worse instead.
Simplifying categorisation would be better but also especially a longer look back window for category determination.
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Yeah don’t disagree with that, but it’s certainly evident that there are now more former As hitting (former) A numbers in B now.