Hi…i’m just organiser of VirtuSlo Tour Fight for GC and VirtuSlo 4Endurance League.
I have been following CE since the introduction…but since we found out that CP calculations can be manipulated i also included ZP Categories. This way anyone over the Category Treshold can’t return to lower category.
Ah good stuff. We might try use that in the next season we run. Which option is it in Zwiftpower?
Not been on here for a while after months of the same questions being asked week after week I’ve lost interest.
I do wonder at what point ZHQ would be better off throwing out CE as it’s quite clearly a mess. If they are not going to spend any more development time on it I wonder if there is an option to move back to ZP pen enforced cats until such a time a ranking solution is available.
it’s that or we will be going in circles for the next few months answering the same questions that have been asked for the last 6 months.
…i’ll go back to putting this thread on ignore 
This… or the extent of their FAQ should be along the lines of “Zwift has assigned you your category based on proprietary algorithms based on your past riding history; you don’t need to know how we determined your category, only know that you’ll be racing against comparably capable competitors in whatever CE race you join.”
Some info here:
Whaaaaaatttt?!!!
Surely you’re not agreeing with those who said from the start that CE was a complete waste of development effort, and that Zwift would have been much better off doing the simpler enforcement of the existing pen categories?!!!
Say it ain’t so!
In lieu of rankings, CE is a good concept very badly executed.
I’m not sure many said CE was a bad thing or waste of development when we finally got it but that was on the assumption that it was ZHQ attempt at a better category system and it would evolve to fix some of the main issues with ZP like the ability to add custom cats or variable wattage floors.
But what we have got is a system that has not been developed and left to rot add on top of that the mass confusion on why a rider is what category it’s worse than what ZP with cat enforcement would of been.
@xflintx is there any update on the roadmap for CE development, integration with Zwiftpower (or replacement), and rankings?
If only someone could have predicted that, eh?
When it was launched I thought it was a step in the right direction and there was a decent idea in there… Currently il put my hand up and say I was wrong.
Im not sure if its failing as its a bad idea or been a shambles of an implementation. But ownership or focus seems to be lacking, so its unlikely to improve any time soon.
If there is no commitment to the roll out of a scoring system (both short & long term) and its follows all the other deployments im not sure its going to be saviour people think it is.
If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from the ZwiftRacing.app work it’s that there is no silver bullet. The biggest win would simply be passing the onus on creating great race experiences to the community. Give them the toolkit to define how races are organised, to be able to communicate that structure in game, and to enforce the pens in the way that the organiser has prescribed. A ranking system is a cool way to split riders, but there are many other ways too. That’s the not the crux of the problem. Static,. poorly understood, miscommunicated boundaries are the problem.
It think the idea of the CE system is great. Not using just one power number is a huge win. CE probably need some refinement after some of the found limitations.
The thing is, they have been refining it. Secretly. And now no-one really knows where they stand any more and it’s a confusing mess.
A simple webpage that shows your calculated CP and MAP and where you sit within the current boundaries would solve all the problems. Any query you just point the person there. Simples.
They have not been refining it to improve the system, its been to reduce workload and complaints. As soon as you give up on the principle you started with you might aswell pack it all in & go back to the drawing board.
That makes sense, also two systems does not help either. ZP limits should have been removed and updated with CE.
But one thing that I am thinking is while there is tweeking behind the scenes it is probably better not to publish the data until they have a lot more confidence.
This is an issue, Zwift is not aggressive enough to handle a racing system with strict rules. That is why ZP is so popular, there was a set of rules and it was enforced.
Category Enforcement FAQ was a link given in Flint’s recent Competitive & AI Tech Update: September/October 2022 Recap post, showing the current thresholds for VO2, MAP and CP.
However, unless I’m blind, it doesn’t say what time durations are being looked at for VO2 and MAP.
Am I right in thinking MAP is basically 5min?
“VO2 Max” at https://intervals.icu/ suggests it is also typically based on 5min efforts.
Pen allocation by Compound Score (W/Kg for 5mins multiplied by raw Watts), with no fudges like these silly minimum Watt floors, no +5% buffer would be a good way to use power and everyone can clearly see where they are.
But bring on ELO ranking based on results, CE has been a messy ~9 months.
As does the fact that they pointed us all to intervals.icu in the original CE post to calculate it
(Edit to say: the above is not correct. It’s just the way I remembered it.)
