Category Enforcement Changes

Yep agree.

I would love for all events to be CE but with the caveat that organisers can choose not to have it by setting their own boundaries.

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I’m waiting for custom boundaries USING CE… please, please? :smiley:

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But still CE with their own boundaries?

Hi All, since last week I upgraded my weight in profile, I’m not in shape let’s say, since that moment I can’t register in races in every categories, they’re shown as limited, does anybody knows what I should do?

Probably something to do with going from 1000kg’s to 71kg. @James_Zwift may be able to help you but if he doesn’t stop by, drop an email to zwiftpower@zwift.com - looks like its related to the issue of decimal points and Companion App bug.

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The issue with CE confusion isn’t people saying “my CP is xyz, why can’t I race in D?” it’s “what is my CP and why isn’t it shown anywhere? My FTP says I should be D!”

If you told them their CP was 201 (and how it was calculated) it would be obvious enough why they weren’t D!

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It would be really great if you could share some of the thinking on this. There are a wide range of experiences represented here, and it’s quite possible (IMO virtually certain, given past history…) that the collective knowledge and ideas of people here could help to debug and/or improve the details of any scheme, prior to it being set in stone.

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I agree, would be nice to see in advance of implementation.

If you do a ride with the correct weight, you should then be able to enter your correct category after that ride has completed.

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Ultimately not my decision, but I’ll pass your request to Flint.

I actually think the tweaks make sense.

As for the 20% thing, it depends on what is meant by it. A single +20% occurrence is not a cruise, it’s when it happens repeatedly, which, I presume, would still result in an upgrade. So it could pass for a crude glitch catcher. Cruisers won’t bite, it’s not exploitable the way you’d want it to be. So all good, no?

The 5% boundary increase is sound. There are two reasons for this. First, while not wrong perhaps, it still made little sense to suddenly shift from an assumed/projected FTP(60) to a hard CP(20). Apples and pears really, but since races are usually not 20 min, you’d still want to divide people into what they can or are assumed to be able to maintain for a longer time than 20 min. Regardless what people say about the importance of 3 min power, you don’t win races if you can’t keep up for longer than 3 min. Or 20 min for that matter.

Secondly, and more importantly, CE shifted the distribution of riders in the cats and killed cat D. CP is somewhat higher than FTP, so without the 5% rebate more people got pushed into cat C, and the few that were left in cat D were discouraged from participating since so few others did. It’s not good for racing/competition if you kill the entry level, that goes for any sport.

However, the most (or only) important thing is that this fabled anonymous product manager comes back from holiday, rested and energetic.

You know who Flint is. He is real and does exist.

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In Flint we trust!

(TBH I’ve had some trust issues in the past, but if you say he’s working on a results-based system, then I’m more than willing to keep the faith.)

At first glance this appeared to make sense - but does it. Please could you point out where my logic has gone wrong.

ZwiftPower uses FTP
ZwiftPower decides FTP is 95% of 20 min

Category Enforcement uses CP (and MAP and VO2 but irrelevant to my logic argument) but we don’t know how.

CP doesn’t use 95% of anything so that might be confusing as ZP does.

Depending on which Critical Power papers you read FTP and CP are broadly similar. ( some papers say CP higher by anything from 4-9% others say others say CP just less and generally depend on whether they believe CP is over 30-40 minutes or well past an hour)

So if FTP and CP are broadly similar why are you increasing CE criteria by 5%.

As you say, you are increasing by 5% because FTP is calculated using 95% 20 min - But it is still the correct FTP figure. You are trying to compare a correct FTP figure with a CP figure which nobody knows how it is calculated so people are looking at why they have been promoted up a group and come up with the reason that it must be the loss of this 5% in the 95% calculation.

I don’t see that as correct.

ZP uses the average of your best three FTP figures.
CP uses your best ride
If you wanted CE and ZP to be more in line you might have found it easier to make ZP just use a rider’s best one performance.

If however you have found that the method Zwift is using to calculate CP is generally producing a figure around 5% higher than FTP then that is a logical reason for increasing CE CP figures by 5%

Can I assume you have found no reason yet to increase VO2 and MAP criteria by this same 5% ?

I believe that CE is doing a good job of calculating an accurate CP for those riders putting in less than 20minute efforts.

I believe there is little reason to add this extra 5% and that the large numbers of CE questions probably being put to Zwift employees would be greatly reduced if the recently mention improving visibility of CP/MAP calculation was actioned straight away.

A final question - should CE become the norm in future (with or without a race ranking/scoring system) and ZP become slightly redundant would it be your intention to move these new CP boundaries back to 4.0, 3.2 and 2.5 or leave them at 2 decimal places forever?

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Pretty much spot on.

Though, if you are going to redefine the boundaries which it appears this has done go the whole hog & review the lot? Increase the D range to get more riders in there or introduce E to every race organiser to give you 5 pens over 4 pens.

My question on this, and I dont have an answer\opinion currently as im not sure how will it work, hence the question.

How will the pens be split pre race with a ranking system?
Would it continue to use wkg, would it be by race rank\division?

Its the one bit I cant get my head around.

Based on what I’ve seen, there have been a number of riders forced into the next category through no fault of their own based on the limits we had in place.

I feel that the increase to the category limits will result in a fairer and more easily understood experience for riders who have been pushed into the next category with the vast majority not having produced a ZP effort to do so.

It may not be perfect but IMHO an improvement.

I’ve mentioned earlier, the visibility of CP/MAP is next on our list.

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They must have produced the power or had their CP over the boundary for them to move?

It feels like the benefits of using CP have been nuke’d by this change just so less people complain about being upgraded.

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I think it’s just a change in the category limit to 105% of CP.
I don’t think it matters because the border can really be any value.
If FTP ≒ CP, isn’t there a possibility that some people will be disqualified on ZP from now on?
reversal phenomenon.

There will definitely be some low-A riders (on ZP) who are allowed into B under the CE system with the new threshold. And similar for other cats.

They’ll only be disqualified on ZP if the event is set up that way? I assume organisers can switch this off if they want (and remember) to do so.

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