Cat A racers almost alone in most of the races

I don’t see any downside in returning the CE back to the w/kg figures advertised in the companion app. 4.00w/kg gets you upgraded to A. Should move a load of top B’s up to A and spread the fast riders out a bit more evenly across the top 2 cats.

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When Zwift change to CE it makes a lot of bottom A’s rider join B which destroyed the B Cat.

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I understand your point. What I meant was that in series like FRR there is 1°) a lot of racers in the pack; 2°) a reduced amount of cheater (maybe none); 3°) using the Zwift racing cat which is -in my opinion- the most accurate one.
Then, of course, we can have many different races (short, long, flat, mountain, etc.).

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Even the Zwift epic races of this weekend were poorly populated. This and the weather made me to go to ride outside.

Not even an “almost alone” situation:
ht tps://zwiftpower.com/events.php?zid=4310723

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They scheduled way too many of them to get a decent field in the smaller categories.

no disrespect to any league organiser out there as it really is not their fault, but, i’d argue it was actually more common in league racing. they’re just a little more slick about it than your average old guy on a cycleops hammer. and the organisers do their best to catch it, i suppose.

yeah. i appreciate people actually giving me the time of day on this one, so thanks

It was more the changing of the limits that caused the issues rather than CE itself, when they put that additional few % increase in that’s when it all went to pot

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I wait with baited breath any changes to the cats. Most evening races it is C heavily populated, then B, D then A. Have looked at a few races and was almost tempted to join the A cat just to get an easy podium spinning (too fast for me even if I attempted to wheel suck the entire time)! and I’m a C!
As it is, think the cats are way off the mark. Especially when you can have light riders pushing out 5w/kg in a C cat. The formula of w/kg AND watts as a category limit as opposed to OR seems a little wide!

For podium hunting you can get some 1st place and last place simultaneously in cat A races. A few of them have 0 riders.

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Not that there aren’t other factors (number of races and such), but it’s not surprising that there are few racers in A, just given the fact of how many people we see complaining that they got bumped up a Cat. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Everyone is upset that they got bumped up to A, so they either try (and succeed) in gaming the system to drop back down, or they apparently (judging again by comments here) wait until the system drops them back down before they race again.

“I don’t want to be an A, I won’t win” → they don’t race in A → A races are sparsely populated → Other people don’t want to race in A either → they also don’t race in A → etc.

It doesn’t matter why people don’t want to cat up. But if getting upgraded means riders disappear or stop using Zwift it becomes a material impact on Zwift bottom line.

You can see the number of people catting up after ZRL and at the same time you can see the number of people disappearing off Zwift.

Every year after ZRL a good chunk wait to drop by down come next fall.

If you’re trying to get more people to race in A, and there are reasons why people don’t want to race in A or be in A, I’d sure think those reasons would matter. But whatever, this doesn’t affect me personally so I’ll go the usual route of not caring.

C group is now racing like B group most times.

If you’re talking about C category, sure, but if you’re talking about A category, I suspect it has very little material impact because there aren’t enough of them to affect the bottom line in a significant way.

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most zwifter are D riders, just D riders dont do zwift racing.

I don’t fully agree with this explanation. I am a “weak” A (in comparison to the A+), but I try to do my best and staying in the front group the longer time possible before being ejected … Many other A racers do the same. Most of the racer race even if they are complaining about the cat system because they won’t stop racing for 3 month. My point is that there’s almost no racer in the A cat. That’s why I am suggesting that all categories start at the same time and every body rides in the pack that suits him (like IRL in the “cyclosoportives”). I don’t care about winning, but i do care about not being alone. And I believe it’s the same for most of us…

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My claim is just that what I talked about was one factor of many. So when you say you don’t fully agree, if you mean that you think there are other factors at play, then in fact you completely agree with me :slight_smile: If you don’t think what I was talking about is a factor at all, then we don’t agree.

So I agree with you since I consider that your proposal is one factor among many others :wink:

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