I would like to request 2 things that I think would make races a lot more fair then they are now:
Seperate the event start for each category: cat A starts on the hour, cat B: 1 minute after, C: 2 minutes, D: 3 minutes. This will ensure the events are as fair as possible.
Right now you often get cat D riders making a quick start and sitting in the wheels of a cat C group for example. This drafting effect from a pack of better riders, makes sure that anyone not in that “front” group has no chance of ever getting back into the race. Often the riders making a “quick start” are riders that entered events below their true category but they stay below the radar and avoid DQ’s by drafting along and not doing any work.
Which sort of brings me to my second request:
Have some sort of enforcing mechanism in game that bans riders from entering any race events below their true category. For example if you’ve done an FTP test or did a race event in the last month where your FTP turns out to be 3,5W/kg or something, you’d only be able to select cat B or A for the next month or something along those lines.
It’s a bit ridiculous right now seeing 3,5W/kg riders entering race events in cat D using the “but this is gonna be an easy ride for me” excuse. It’s a race event… if people want an easy ride there’s plenty of other events on the calender.
Even if they take it easy during the race and stick with the other riders in their cat, their final sprint will be much stronger thus decreasing the chance for cat C and D riders to win “their own” events.
I understand the second item to be something that would be hard to implement, the 1st item however should be done quite easily and I don’t think there’s any cons to splitting the events up.
This seems good but for young riders like me my FTP is 205 so i fall back on the flat but w/kg is 5.7 IRL and 4.5 in zwift but this makes it so that a flat cat a would be horrible for me.
I agree. But making it optional would be good as well so someone starting a race event has the possibility to choose between w/kg restrictions for cat. A, B, C, D and is not forced to have the restriction.
But seperate riders by weight does make a lot more sense to me!
Well basically if Zwift would offer a variety of options the event would be quite interesting especially because people could play with the options … over time a tendency, trend would raise and zwift could also implement automatic events like online games do it! So you have a automatic event every 1 or 2 hours where you enter based on your FTP and weight. No matter which w/kg you push because ligher rider with enormous Watts are quite rare if not to say genetic peaks in populations … someone with 350 W/h and 60 kg … race events should also work seperatly to the current map so is free to choose which map and route you wanna race on man i wonder if zwift ever checked what other online games offer the last 20 years …
Is there a way we can just ride with our own age group. It would even reduce processing loads if riders on my screen were filtered to show me only those in my age group. It seems kind of pointless for 64 year old recreational riders to be mixed in with the whole population of younger riders and seriously competitive riders. It seems kind of silly to have so many riders you only ever see once go zooming by. I assume they may be 30 year olds or semi-pro riders but even then it seems at times they must be going over 70 kmh. Is that partly because their trainers aren’t correctly calibrated. I can be going 40 kmh at times and still get passed by riders that seem to be going almost twice as fast. :-)
Why don’t Zwift just use FTP as criteria for entering. I’m a true D category rider and my group is often won with people in 3.75+ w/kg. makes a mockery of the categories?