When are you guys planning to take action against bots? At the very least, can you please prohibit them from entering any race events once it’s proven that they are using bots to farm?
This bot has 949 ZRS.
All you can do is keep trying to report them as much as possible with as much clear evidence as you can provide.
A large number of people had to report a running bot that was doing more than Olympic level pace for 900km per week. Eventually after weeks and weeks the account became “Watopian in Review”.
The following need to be stopped:
- weight dopers
- level / bike upgrade bots
- teleporting to mountain tops and dropping for distance (this is a big thing among the crowd going for greatest total distance).
It doesn’t seem to matter how much clear and irrefutable evidence you give, weeks pass by and they keep doing the same thing.
Maybe in racing if everyone else uses the same tricks as the bots/cheaters (everyone says it’s a game, so no harm right?) they will either give up and or fixing the problem will happen sooner.
I don’t know what else you can do, it’s frustrating and not very good for motivation. I often start a ride and then disable my WIFI connection for two reasons, I don’t see the cheaters/bots/teleporters and I don’t get the same folks every time trying to use coffee-stops against me.
There must be an existing topic about bots/cheating from years ago, so this will get merged into that I suspect.
The only way that Zwift will take action is when people start making comments about this publicly.
At the moment it is just a few here in the forum, and my guess is that at the moment it is just a financial choice to not do anything about it. Probably more paying customers who are botting than riders complaining and since no one outside this forum complains the problem isnt very visable.
If you get Zwift Insider to make a topic about this and have multiple youtubers with a big following base make videos about it and it becomes public, than it might turn the other way around, since Zwift doesnt like negative PR I would guess.
But if you get ZI and those YT that far I also doubt. They also kinda need Zwift for their content …
more public would be the “Riders” FB group, but I doubt it would be allowed there.
Seeing as the Zwift CEO, the Zwift main acount and an Zwift employee are admins/moderators there I doubt with you 
It is easy to try instead of doubt, isn’t it?
It could be. But I just gave my thoughts about why Zwift isnt doing much about bots. To be honest, I really dont care if someone if botting his way to many kilometers in free rides.
Its about money, why else would they buy Rouvy
Yesterday on Road to Sky was an account which did the entire route sprinting at up to 10w/kg then coasting, rinse and repeat for a 42 minute lap. No heart rate. I doubt a real person would have been pushing that effort for 1 hour.
Everyday you see someone doing something dubious. It really has to be cleaned up.
When it is destroying the big KOMs then it is a problem for those trying to do things honestly. And it says to others that nobody cares so they are fine to do the same. In racing too?
I used to care about trying to get up on the overall leaderboards in my early Zwift days.
Then I realized it was not worth my effort. I’ll try to get a 90 day PB once in a while.
Does that make bots and other similar things acceptable?
Does that make bots and other similar things acceptable?
Hey folks,
We do care if there are bots / cheating going on for nefarious (and other) reasons.
Most of you know how to get hold of me, just get in touch and we’ll “fix” it.
We take action against these sort of issues frequently, even if you don’t see it happening.
I really had to look up what nefarious meant but great news. I forsee many messages from Chris coming your way
James, appreciate your response. What exactly is Zwift doing about bots/cheaters? Part of the frustration from the community is that Zwift has not been communicating what systems have been put in place to catch this and prevent it. I don’t expect you to share the details of your systems, but I’d love to hear that you guys are doing more than relying on ad hoc reports from users to catch this sort of stuff. The guy I posted did a 9 hour ride at fixed heart rate and power. That shouldn’t require a report to elicit a ban.
As a user you cannot report everyone, and if you do not have companion app working at all then just not possible unless you do it manually later. I do what i can to report the obvious cheaters when I can with proof of what they are doing.
Not a popular thing to be doing. If you look at the race for the biggest riding distances in Zwift you can see interesting performances.
Frustration from some quarters, from others probably hoping everything stays just how it is.
It’s pretty clear that the user who produced the graph at the start of this topic does not need any reports to be detected and eliminated. If that power graph can’t be detected automatically, that’s the problem. I can see a place for people reporting misconduct but this isn’t a suitable example. Nobody should be spending time reporting, reviewing, or acting on a graph like that. It’s a job for the machines.
Where it gets more difficult are the ones that are trying not to look like a bot, or the 60 plus year olds doing massively high w/kg at 54kg. The latter is possible, but unlikely. That needs a human to chase up and verify.
The former I won’t give any examples - but there are numerous methods, some more clever than others. But a well trained AI should easily catch them (like the heart rate to power conversion apps) and reduce the burden on real staff.
I agree, rely on end-user reports for the stuff that isn’t completely obvious. I’m only talking about the example at the top of this thread. There is simply no way to shift responsibility for detecting that to the users.
For the last 6-9 months (ish?) we have been running automated checks against certain types of behaviour, most importantly to detect botting and completely unrealistic power outputs. This includes automated shadowbanning (and preventing them from gaining XP or levelling up bikes).
I can’t reveal details of course, but this is an ongoing process that we will continue to improve as it obviously doesn’t catch everyone.
I appreciate that sending me single examples isn’t going to fix everything but that combined with the automation we have in place plus iterations that we make to the process should make the situation better.