Bounty Program. Lip service?

Luciano — the bounty program that I had committed earlier this year was right before a number of internal changes at Zwift. At this time, a bounty program is not our highest priority given all that we want to do for the community. It’s not to say we won’t implement one like many of the largest Internet companies but until it’s prioritised and properly resourced, we can’t commit to the program or a timeline. I know this is not what you want to hear but this is where we are right now. You’ve put a lot of energy into this and I appreciate your passion. Happy holidays.

@Eric I take note of your absolute lack of accountability. At least now it is visible that your word means close to nothing.
Not only you are not delivering up to your promise, one you made to me privately and publicly to the community you pretend to care about, but additionally you confirm that this is not a priority. Close to ten months after … All the changes you refer to did not impact the person committing to the bug bounty program: you.
The breach of trust is obvious, and after waiting for a long time in silence on the topic trusting your word, I feel manipulated, but also free as I am no longer binded to any commitment to you.
I will think carefully on how to move forward and the possiblity to disclose publicly and progressively all the information I have been exposed to and consolidating over the past months.

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Open season on community exposure.

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I would say fear of rampant community exposure is why Zwift Power is not required for racing.

We don’t want to hurt people’s feelings now.
If you have to ask if something is fair or ok, it isn’t.
If you don’t want everyone to see your data, stop doing what you are doing.

Fast is fun, Fair is boring.

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I don’t want to add to the heat level of this discussion, since there is plenty of that already, but your decision would be more understandable if you had communicated it much earlier. I assume the decision didn’t just happen this week. Cut once and cut deep. As soon as you decide to cut staff and projects, go ahead and share all the bad news at once. Not everyone will be satisfied, but at least it doesn’t look like hiding bad news and dispatching PR people to obfuscate what’s going on or present reasons why it’s not important. There is no reason why people would care less about cheating in Zwift than they would about cheating in an amateur criterium, so the level of disappointment is predictable.

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Exactly. The fact it comes so late and after dozens of reminders shows the manipulation in my opinion. Just hoping we would forget. And quite frankly, they almost managed. Thank God Eddy Hoole has revived my passion.
Mery Xmas all. Now we know it is only a game!

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Thanks Paul for your post. I agree we should have communicated this much earlier. This is on me. As for not caring about cheating or sandbagging, that’s simply not true. We have rolled out categorised events including equipment selection, and given those tools to event promoters. We are coming up with better ways of categorising riders than just based on threshold performance, which will improve competition. And for all the elite events we host, we invest heavily into performance analysis and have on many occasions disqualified riders. There is no other platform that offers this level of scrutiny. What’s really being discussed here is about rolling out a bounty program, which at this time, we don’t have the appropriates resources to implement and support. In hindsight, I made the mistake of committing to a program that required more resources than I initially believed and it also happened to come at a bad time. It doesn’t mean we won’t have one one day but this is generally offered only by the biggest tech companies, of which, we are not.

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Hey @Eric cheers for engaging. I’m sure you fully understand the frustration of end users who have been promised an action and then that action rescinded on Xmas eve almost to bury the news…

Are you fully behind the article that @Chris_Snook undertook where he tried to associate Luciano highlighting an exploit that zwift had been aware of for a number of months to an increase in cheating with that being Lucianos fault/responsibility?

Recently, we have seen a comms from @xflintx where he says they were unaware of an issue which had been called out multiple times over the last 10months… (thread: Category Enforcement Update - Weight Changes [December 2022])

Have you just created a culture in zwift to ignore what is being said and not to act on it?

Merry Xmas btw…

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years. i think i remarked at the time that it was so old that i assumed it had just been patched out already and forgotten about

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How can you pretend that you are controlling elite races when your own head of comms and PR has recognized publicly last week that you don’t even check the weigh-in videos required at elite level because of the lack of resources (they are too many to check)?

You just need to setup a Mail Account like bugreport@zwift.com and one person to read the mails and write adequate memos to the programmers.

Or do you fear a huge overwhelming flood of emails and bugreports because you “feel” that there is a huge amount of bugs in your software?
Sounds like it. :joy::sob:

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What do you believe Andre Greipel thought of after this race?
'Wow, the guy in first place is well trained with 5.3w/kg and 125 HR average, i should exercise more!
Zwift is really great for racing!"
:skull:

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@Cris_To All in all the guy arriving first is not that bad!
This screenshot is a collector. The one with 86HR average is, in my opinion, even more a superhero.
Plus you have the classic one that does not even bother to have a HR monitor.
The only one who seems fair there is Greipel.
I guess that in this race even Scotty the Squirrel had a miscalibrated assioma !

It’s not just categorising riders, but weeding out those who consistently use dodgy trainer equipment to get unrealistic power levels or those who game the system with bad data.

The guys flying up ADZ with 45kg weight also.

I want more transparency of rider data too. I don’t see the point of hiding the weight of a rider when you can work out this with watts divided by watts/kg.

May as well just put it there for all to see at an easy glance along with power.

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Surprising that discussion here seems to end a slow death.

Zwift does not want bugs/cheats to be mentioned publicly.
Whenever it is done privately nothing seems to happen (Luciano’s bug/cheat was far from new and was reported). Massive black hole as many that report riders will acknowledge (with seemingly no action taken), with Zwift playing the privacy defense. Thank you GDPR for giving Zwift an easy way out.

When something is made public widely action is taken relatively quickly. Downside is a shadow ban and multiple months later still chastised while good actually came out of it.

You get what you want and it’s clear Zwift does not want transparency nor actually solving bugs and stopping cheats. Instead it’s all play pretend that everything is perfect. A teenager dreaming with their “fake it till you make it”. Maybe that’s why they don’t mind the cheats actually, bit of the same adage they have.

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Other than Zwift I only play one other computer game. The company involved will not allow ANY discussion of cheating on their official forum.

They used to publish a monthly list of banned users but that stopped a couple of years ago too.

Do they actually deal with the cheating that does occur or do they bury their head in the sand aswell?

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They seem unwilling / unable to do much about it.

Hello @Eric. I’ve just sent an important email about this to the elite race team and copied you in. It might go to your junk Mail as I have a hotmail account so just notifying you here.

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I just want to point out to Zwift that if there is a bounty program, then there’s a lot less impetus to publicly discuss bugs and exploits.

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