Is it that the organizers mistakenly turned on rubber-banding, or don’t know what rubber-banding is? Why have categories and specified paces, when this shouldn’t matter? Some of these even mention that they have sweeps and leaders.
it does seem illogical, but there are reasons. For example, if you have a ride leader with a group doing say 1.8 to 2 watts and this is what you are looking for then you can join the ride and stay with the leader and get the ride you wanted - the banding will not affect you. Not sure why they would have sweeps though.
But you could join that same ride and go at 1w/kg or 3w/kg and still stay with the leader. Most rubberbanded group rides are set as Cat E (1-5wkg), so just wondering what the thought process is for the rest of these?
Iirc the Zwift Insider article on rubberbanding discovered the speed of the group is dependent on the power average of some or all of the group.
An event organizer can turn rubber banding on or off for their events. But they can’t add events to the schedule without approval from the Zwift events team. For this reason you may find regular recurring events that are changed from rubber banding or not because it’s convenient and does not require engaging the events team. They can’t change the event date/time, title, starting pens, or description without engaging support (and quite a few other aspects as well).
So you’re saying the events are created with rubberbanding, but the organizer can choose to turn it off, or maybe they won’t. So you really don’t know if ride will be banded or not?
More often the event operates regularly without rubberbanding but occasionally they decide to turn it on. To know for sure you’d have to look at the event on ZwiftHacks and parse the settings.
Sorry, I’m not getting it. I was on Zwifthacks, looking for banded events and using that rule (“Rubberband”) to find them. Sometimes I flip it and use this rule to likewise confirm an event does not rubberband.
Sounds like this is not adequate? I could find that a ride is not banded when I expected it to be, or that I excluded entering a ride because I thought it was banded, but wasn’t.
I figured that’s what you’d done, had a look there with the same setting to confirm. The one that really stands out is not only 4 categories, it’s a race. No idea how that’s supposed to work.
ahh… so maybe there’s an argument to be made for CE enforced rubberbanded rides, so nobody throws off the average speed too much 
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