Cash Upgrades

Would you pay for upgrades or a tron bike?
Mywhoosh now has neon wheels for purchase.

Also, a 90 day “season pass” introduced but no price given.

possibly but not for performance upgrades that is just wrong.

But plenty games have skins and things that people pay for although with the price increase it’s probably not the best time to start thinking about such things.

Zwift need to deliver on the core product upgrades we have been waiting years for as a priority.

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That’s what drops are for, right?
Upgrades in game.

They should stop meddling with XP and drops and do more of the fundamental upgrades and improvements of the product people have been asking for.

More expansions for existing worlds, blocking spam in chat, etc.

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Wont stop the spam chat but its a start. hopefully with future development.

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haha. oh, man.

I wouldn’t pay for upgrades. I don’t think the gamification in zwift works that well.

As I’ve said many years ago, my dad pretended to be excited about getting socks when I gave him some for his birthday or fathers day as a kid. I can’t believe someone was given $120 million on the basis of telling investors “…and then when you get to level 27 you get these socks!”

Although I note on cycling subreddits whenever someone says “I have a BF / Partner / Friend into cycling what should I buy him for christmas / birthday?” at least 25 people suggest socks.

I’m just using first person anyway and can’t see the items I have let alone care about them.

The fact you appear to have to go into the settings every time to start the game to choose ‘first person’ would be a better bug to fix than ‘upgrades to a tron bike’ imo. It might seem a small thing, just a button press, but when you consider the hoops many of us have to jump through to get zwift running, every little bit that improved and reduced the steps would help.

It’s kind of like sim racing, for many the process of getting into the game, getting their wheel setup etc etc eventually becomes “meh, I’ll play something else, something I can just double click” and they stop playing.

Now to play zwift I have to first of all make sure that steam is running in admin mode - for no good reason other than zwift’s launcher. Charge my phone fully, get changed, grab a drink / snacks - grab all this stuff and the key to the garage and walk around the house to the garage.

Setup, turn on the laptop fans etc, do whatever the trainer needs in terms of setting it up, configuring it, calibration etc, and then I fire up steam on the laptop, run wordpad (?) if it runs then I hit F1 close or minimise the browser and wordpad, find zwift and launch it - and if that works, I then start pairing and picking where I want to ride.

If it doesn’t work then I have to unclip and start running back and forth between the garage and the room with the desktop computer trying to figure out why. Some days I’ve got more exercise from the running back and forth than riding the bike - and then I end up digging out ethernet cables and powerlink adapters because wifi is flakey.

So, at the end of all that faffing and fussing around when I sit on the bike start pedalling and, now I have to start messing around with other apps or unclipping and hitting number keys on the laptop every time to pick the first person view it mars the experience every time.

And these things which zwift could undoubtedly and easily improve and streamline aren’t new. People have been posting for years and years repeating over and over.

It’s like the option to hide the hud. You’d think that would be easy and little could go wrong. But, no choosing that option means you get another hud saying “Press H to show the hud” on it? Like what? The user wanted to hide the hud, not show a different one. You must really have a low opinion of your customers if you think they are too slow to figure out how get the hud back that you have to put a hud on your ‘no hud’ option. Not a message that appears if you wiggle the mouse, no a constant “We hate you for using zwift and choosing not to have a hud and viewing in 3rd person like our boss said everyone should, so we’re going to display this ‘up yours’ message telling you to press H”

A tron bike? What is that about? The film is 42 years old. I’d suggest anyone old enough to get the reference is unlikely to be excited by virtual items or upgrades. Even if they’re one of the millions of cyclists who is apparently wildly excited about the giving and receiving of socks.

Most companies have these things because the business model for games was pay £30-50 or whatever once and keep it forever. With maybe a couple of expansions. All of these got ever decreasing amounts of revenue until it wasn’t worth the developers time improving the game - and most of the time newer games were a big leap anyway and everyone wanted to play them.

As games reached a point where the improvements graphically were only incremental at best, they lived longer and needed a business model to match that and in game items is one such idea - not one, it has to be said, that has much love amongst the gaming community.

Since zwift has subscriptions anyway they already have a constant income stream. They’ve had more than enough VC to have developed the game (and maybe landed someone in orbit too) If they hadn’t had peloton envy and wahoo envy etc they’d probably be in a much better position, not only in terms of subscriber numbers but in terms of the software base they’d have developed.

I can’t believe strava or zwift - they had the easiest companies in the world to run but didn’t.

Yes, if people are trying to put in hundreds of hour climbing 50000 meter to get a tron bike to go a little faster, imagine how much they would be willing to spend for a slightly better bike that gives them an advantage.

Look at Zwift Play $99, what does it do? Give you a slight advantage while racing.

Season Pass can be a full access service. $29.99

Premium workouts.
Best and fastest bikes.
Premium exclusive power ups or extended power ups.
2x level and drops
Premium badges
Early access to new worlds

And add 1 more level to payment. Super Club access $499 one time for 90 days

12 super bikes that you can give to your friends. Give your buddy the advantage in the next ZRL!

Custom Jerseys!

Exclusive race organizational tools to create the next hot series!

1 Time Zwift push marketing materials for your event.

only 2 types of games run their sht like that: mobile games and NFT metaverse games running an exit scam

and EA but they can afford to have 100 lawsuits against them in 100 countries at once. not sure why everyone on this site likes to LARP as a business mogul these days but whatever

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League of Legend / Pax Twisted Fate skin
Dota 2 / draft assistance
Fortnight / Lamborghini Huracan STO

Plenty of big name games been selling slightest advantage for a premium.

Zwift play “cough cough”

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Oh and we live in a universe of pay to win. It is the accepted norm.

Anyone pay for the fast lane?
Or go to the amusement park and pay to skip the line?

Ever pay for TSA prep check or global entry to get pass airport check point fast?

Paying to get an advantage is the norm!

Why are you running Zwift through Steam?

well i still don’t own a pair of zwift plays. so you might be pitching those rhetorical questions to the wrong guy

i press the power button, type in my windows password which is also my bank pin because “password1234” uses too many characters, press “let’s go” on the zwift launcher (which opens automatically if you set it up in windows) and then by the time my shoes are on i’m already past the pairing screen. from “computer off” to “main menu” while putting my shoes on takes about a minute

so i tend to think he runs his apps through steam just so he can make that post longer. either that or he needs the native PS4 controller compatibility feature

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Because it’s the only reasonable way to get the picture to where my bicycle and trainer are with a reasonable quality.

Phone - UI useless because you can’t read it or customise it in a way that can be read
Tablet - quality is terrible no matter how good the tablet you buy.

So that leaves me with the choice of gaming PC or apple TV. The PC I own, but it isn’t going to live outside in a garage 24/7, and I’m not going to carry a desktop gaming PC back and forth to my garage every time I want to use zwift.

Therefore I use a cheap laptop I’ve got laying around. That can be running any OS that supports Steam link, (could even use a small smart TV that had steam link - something I can carry back and forth and use steam to remote zwift from my gaming PC to it. In fact if you have steam link running on a tablet then you’d get a better quality than running zwift natively. This company had $400 million? The office parties must have been good or something. Because they didn’t spent it on the product.

Unfortunately they’ve made it as difficult as possible to use zwift through steam or even natively for many of the platforms. Zwift doesn’t even run well on half or more of the platforms they claim to support.

it’s telling that when anyone asks about running zwift on a tablet mostly they get people with high end ipads saying it works (well of course it does because it runs on the original iphone SE too - but, if you could see it you’d see that it looks awful) but mostly the advice is to forget about zwift’s supposed supported platforms and to get apple TV. Which translated means “It sucks on tablets, always has and we think it always will”

Apple TV needs a TV and I’ve already got a laptop that has a screen. If I didn’t have the laptop I’d probably still buy a small smart TV that had steam link over apple TV. I’ve more to connect to zwift than apple TV supports and I’m not 100% sure here but I think the FPS is limited too? If so, it’s still not a good solution.

Obviously the sane thing to buy to put in front of you when you’re on your bike would be a tablet - look at the promotional photos of smart bikes like the wattbike atom and they have a holder for a tablet and someone sat on the bike pretending to exercise looking at it. Please someone show Eric Min one of these pictures.

You know, I expected after a decade of zwift existing and a few years gap from when I last used it, that you’d be able to buy any of a number of differently priced tablets, running android or ios and a stand that connects to your bars and you’d be able to get a high quality, high fps version of zwift running right in front of your bike needing only a good wifi link - and the resolution, fps and graphically quality would be selectable by the user and you could pick based on how much you wanted to spend on your tablet. You know, the basic model for computer gaming for the past few decades - the game gives you settings and you pick based on price and performance how much you want to spend and how smoothly you want the game to run.

-The fact you can’t do that with zwift is, frankly ridiculous. It’s too stupid for words - because zwift is a software company with one piece of software and they’ve had 10 years and nearly half a billion in investment.

the phone and tablet industries are worth a combined total of probably $600 billion. it’s not zwift who is responsible for the processing power of your 8 year old dual core iphone se with 2gb of ram and probably 400mb of actual headroom

actually it’s a miracle they’ve even managed to get and keep it running on that at all

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Absolutely not! That’s something Gen Z might go for, but if it isn’t earned through my brain or muscle, it’s just not worth it!

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hahahaha, Zwift is struggling to sell even a yearly membership to stay afloat, and you think they can pull off selling season passes? That’s hilarious, completely out of touch with reality!

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I’ve used zwift on both Android phones and tablets without any problem, whatever I use I generally just cast to the TV, no steam of any sort involved, mind you my goto is my laptop, and then use companion app on the phone

Btw, I’m assuming you’re just trolling… How many miles do you actually ride indoors? Zwift shows you’ve ridden zero miles—LOL!
It would be nice if only people with active accounts can post here…

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