It will be great if you write from who are these data. They dont come from me.
If I write who it comes from the post will likely get censored. I made it clear it wasnt you in my text.
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Bologna TTs have always been curiously popular with the “just a strong B cat” crowd. I’ve even seen some Cs who can sneak under 20 mins (with an over-limit effort). If the CE approach catches them, that’s no bad thing, though the whole concept of power limits is pretty hopeless really.
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Race series or CE cruise IQ test? Casse Pattes and Box Hill are MAP traps. Bologna TT? Don’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Happened last week to me - 3 of us ZP C’s got moved to “Almost B” or B, the winner stays C because he did it under 20mins (his 18min effort was 3.95w/kg . Bit of an oddity that course
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I think Bologna is very specific route where you can try specific strategies. My strategy for Bologna is go hard there where you go slow. It’s mean that I put a lot of watts only on a red % uphill - I go max/submax effort only in this short part to make a gap. Other riders are stronger as I that’s why I do all to make my chances better.
It’s enough to upgrade to higher category because of secret algorithm which put you in category where racing make no more sense for you.
Hopefully Zwift makes something another to make it better but it will be not from today to tomorrow.
I can agree, that you should avoid Bologna, Box Hill and other tracks where you can put MAP. So you must go slower or you become an upgrade.
I’m sure that there are some C riders who can put a lot of watts for a short time and they can receive through secret algorithm an upgrade to A cat by CE races.
Any C riders that can hold 5+ w/kg for 5-7 minutes are not C riders.
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But that doesn’t prevent riders under 40kg to race in C with +5W/kg for +20mins…speaking from experience with a TTT team member they all belong in B.
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Seems a lot of issues stem from lightweight riders being able to put out higher numbers (wkg) than those who are heavier
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Certainly, but there are also issues in upgrading lightweights who just cannot participate meaningfully among much heavier riders
Women have no absolute watts threshold and it completely kills racing for many younger and/or lighter riders who find they are simply not able to stay with a group of heavier riders. Of course there’s not such a predominance of really heavy powerful women, so it’s not as big an issue as it would be for men/mixed. But for those around/under 40kg, especially if they are relatively tall, it just ruins zwift for them. 35kg, 130W FTP and you’re in A cat!
Where does the FTP figure (estimated) shown in Zwiftpower come from anyway? And is it relevant or indicative at all to informing CE calculations? Just randomly came across one profile, and can’t figure out how this ‘estimated’ value was derived. Through entire history, highest 20min power value ever was about 220w a couple years ago.
zwift knows what your ftp is from the game values, zwiftpower you can essentially put anything in there
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Uses best 20 mins power; look at ‘Old Results’.
It has no value in CE.
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that’s why it needs a sliding scale as suggested by @DejanPresen i’d also see that apply to womans cats as well.
The wattage floor works well for a lot of Zwifters but those at the extremes get a massive advantage
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The wattage floors are odd, they are there so people can be competitive in a race when lightweight but we dont have categories based on people being competitive.
We dont give that same option to the 63-70kg rider who has just been promoted with a 2.6wkg or 3.3wkg CP or FTP or even the B guy going into A cat with 4.2 or 4.3wkg & 251w FTP\CP.
They get told tough you need to deal with it, but weigh just a little less and they can sandbag their category to their hearts content due to the wattage floors.
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If someone is confused on how the watt floors work now (in Red) and my suggestion on how they should work.
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So simple and easy to implement. really hoping this gets looked at.
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Yes it would be great for zwift to spend 6 months working to tweak this fundamentally broken system rather than just replacing it entirely with something based on results, that could actually have a chance of working.
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Well, they did say they are working on results based flow as well. Which will work great for folks who race enough to get and maintain an accurate ranking, but my guess is they are going to still need power based cat enforcement in some way for those riders that don’t have enough races to have a reasonable ranking otherwise the low categories will be wrecked by riders who just don’t race enough to be close to the ranking they really should be because the few races they rode were against low ranked riders etc…
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Yeah; results based still needs to have power tagged in with it.
Otherwise we end literally right back where we started; with Cat A cruisers in Cat C.
The lightweight vs heavyweight is a tough one to resolve on either end.
I’m near 60kg and have perhaps grown from crossing into Cat B to closer to mid B since enforcement started (literally went from C to B the first week of testing by hitting the wattage floor).
Did a ride (which was apparently a race) this past Sunday, and the second half was basically 2 others and myself trying to stay up near the lead while the leader just pulled away with huge power (less concerned about that).
Road to Ruins was the course; so hilly-ish (Hilly for Zwift at least)
What matters to me is a heavier rider, who has the ability to dump twice my power, had no issues keeping up with the 3 of us drafting each other at a solid late B race pace. We were able to get a solid 60 seconds away from him, he had no problems catching up to the three of us working together doing pulls.
I was trying to figure out how he kept catching us; went to spectator on him and noticed he was scooting along at 300w (100w over what I was doing).
My issue with the system is, even ZP says this guy is a Cat C, which is literally insane to think someone averaging 300w+ is a Cat C, that’s just hilarious that’s a possibility.But all of this, is because he has a very low w/kg.
Cat enforcement still has a long way to go; but some more numbers need to be in the mix; and I still think results based should be considered.
I don’t know if this is a weird use case or what, but… ZP absolutely makes things seriously confusing… The fact this guy has a sprint of 1100w+ and 20 minutes of over 300w… there’s just no way someone on my scale of things can keep up; and it’s true… three of us failed to keep him at bay!
Weight is making cats a bit wonky and confusing for the rest of us riding; as all we can see on our HUD is w/kg, which doesn’t tell us much. And it’s definitely confusing to people still relatively newish who are wondering why someone at 2w/kg just disappeared into the distance when they’re doing 3w/kg… BECAUSE it isn’t better explained (I have no solutions for this, just trying to make a case point).
This issue came up kind of recently on the subreddit; where new people were trying to figure out what the pace partners meant or group rides where leaders say “we’re going X w/kg,” which… is great when you’re the same weight as the pace partners or leaders; but outside of that it’s guess and check… or be dropped.
The only reason I bring this up is it just seems Zwift overly focuses on w/kg; and that doesn’t really tell but at best half the story.
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