Category Enforcement Changes

Hi all,

I’m almost back from holiday :slight_smile: Just wanted to highlight a couple of changes that we’ve made to Category Enforcement.

  • Any ride that would caused an increase of 20% or more to the riders CP will not be included in the power curve that we use to assign a category. These are normally caused by a trainer miscalibration or someone sharing their account.
  • All category boundaries have been increased by 5%, to make the difference between Zwiftpower and CE less apparent and confusing (because Zwiftpower uses 95% of your best effort over 20 minutes).

These are now 2.62, 3.36 and 4.2w/kg.

How will new riders be handled? That is, if they start off just cruising around for a few casual rides, and then try a race or two, couldn’t those race efforts likely be +20%?

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So someone can heavily sandbag, and then go wild in a race while being safe from being upgraded?

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20% is pretty excessive sandbagging.

I’ll flag your feedback.

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Does this exclude all data for that ride?

As far as Category Enforcement, yes.

thank you.
It is an additional question. Will the excluded data be judged again at the next update?

No, the data is excluded.

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So we have new category boundaries?

Step backwards and only benefits sandbaggers

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I see. Thank you for your kindness.

If that happened, aside from disregarding the data, shouldn’t the rider also therefore be DQ’d somehow?

I would hope so. But they’ve still interfered with the race.

The 20% thing sounds reasonable in some respects but will cause problems for returning riders.

Eg: an A cat rider takes the summer off zwift, comes back and does a steady warm-up ride at C cat pace, around 3W/kg say.

They then enter races at any A/B/C level, and so long as they are over 4W/kg (in fact over 3.6W/kg, depending on the exact details of the power curve) these rides will never be counted and they will remain classified as C indefinitely.

Is this far-fetched? Well, maybe, maybe not.

The whole idea of tweaking CE to make it a bit better is fundamentally wrong of course. It needs replacing not tweaking.

How much progress has been made on the long-awaited results-based system?

As for the 5% thing, that will just cause more confusion and upset when hordes of ZP-A cat riders are allowed to ride in CE-B races etc. What problem is this supposed to solve? It’s just fiddling with a fundamentally broken system.

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As per the post in this thread: Please, promote light and non-competitive racers with Category Enforcement

3.33wkg for 30mins no longer promotes the user to B category.

I’d suggest it needs a further review…

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Yes please, review the full ladder in Tour of HISP with category enforcement activated. I did it, I watched the C and B races and checked the races results.

The competition is getting better thanks to Catergory Enforcement. At least from the first 6 races, let’s see in the 7 to come.

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Yep, noted. I’ll have a chat.

Bit extreme :slight_smile: There’s very little devepment work involve in the tweak and if it makes it a better experience / reduces load on our support team, then it’s definitely worth doing.

It’s in a design phase - this may or may not have been completed yet, but I’ve been on holiday and the Product Manager is now on holiday, so I’m not sure what the status is currently. I do know that we were planning on implementing visibility of CP/MAP prior to developing results based though.

Disagree. I think not having the 5% extra causes more confusion. This will align, to an extent, with the Zwiftpower categories, rather than being say 80kg, with a CP of 201w and not understanding why they can’t race in D anymore, whereas with the extra 5%, they can.

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The 20% thing makes sense but surely should be a one time only thing, if the rider repeatedly puts in efforts at that level they should be counted

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Probably changing to 70% to avoid scenarios like outlined above - roder comes back from oitdoor season, does a group ride, then a race.

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Can we not just move all racing to CE and be done with it. People will always compare ZP to CE and not understand. Surely the root cause of people’s confusion is not the ZP 20min vs CP, but actually having two systems that they will constantly compare?

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i support the idea but right now i dont think it’s fair to community organisers to do that just yet because you have to account for the event leaders who rely on custom pens like TFC and ZHR

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