I realise it’s just one day, but in that window tonight there are 38 races, of which 10 are WTRL. So 3 of 28 have category enforcement, spanning four hours of what must surely be the peak time for Zwift in the UK during the week. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a great deal of take-up, and it’d be interesting to know why. I thought the community organisers would be all for making racing fairer, ASAP.
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I would like to see all Races use the cat enforcement and for Zwift power to use the same category limits.
I think a lot of them still want their team have a place to ride and not trigger any limits so they can stay competitive in the WTRL series.
Well that would be a depressing state of affairs, and I hope it’s not the case.
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In an ideal world you would be right.
But we currently have a system that is, average 3 of 95% of your best 20min effort in the last 90 days, as long as you meet the raw watts boundary - That has never been explained or communicated well, in fact as far I can see, officially Zwift have hidden from race categories & boundaries for as long as possible.
This one is fairly simple.
We review your power profile across a number of data points based on all your time within Zwift - You are currently ranked A/B/C/D with X watts over Y time frame - This effort was produced on this data.
These are thresholds which move you between the standard* categories. Insert nice graphic here.
Not that difficult to communicate, be transparent and clear (I might have found where this will fall down)
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Dont Zwift just allow them to error the result from zwiftpower so they can continue riding?
Nothing did happen with those in the end did they… Fair racing 
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Just because you didn’t see something happen does not mean nothing did.
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They still raced in WTRL for that season and still impacted a number of other (fair & paying) users & continue to do so. As I said, transparency goes a long way. Almost like it would give confidence you mean what you say, and you do what you say you will.
Currently its based on Zwift staff words, you can see why these things get questioned?
Edit - No need to delete it, It was seen… You wrote it before even considering the response
I’m done here for today.
I do believe there are a lot of race organisers who believe that “The Category Enforcement Trial” is not applicable to them, probably because they do not read forums etc. they are unaware it is an option if asked for.
There will also be the WTRL teams who “Game” the system so they will be very reluctant to use it.
It will happen over time but it will take a while to get the information to everybody.
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Doesn’t mean it did either. It’s a black hole. All I know is that there are still plenty of Kirchmair organised events, so they haven’t had their event hosting privileges revoked.
Anyway, I think it would be good to have cat enforcement made a default setting, and race organisers can opt out in their dashboard. Easiest way to hit all races. Then again, maybe at least displaying the calculated CP values somewhere needs to come first.
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Over the last couple of months since this trial began, I’ve improved a little from a bottom of the barrel B to somewhere around a mid tier B for sub 25min races/TTs.
Generally speaking, my experience has been far more positive in category enforced events, than those where it’s a free for all where some might get DQed after the event.
This morning I know at least one rider downgraded themselves to B to finish ahead of me in a non enforced race, but I saw they were an A a few minutes later in a category enforced event.
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Totally agree. Why wouldn’t they want to do that 
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Yep, that’s the end goal.
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Making cat enforcement the default but enabling organisers to opt out?
If so that’s great news, because I got the impression that previously you’ve only talked about it being an opt-in situation.
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Yep, but there’s a few things we want to get in place first. Namely:
- Riders without data automatically go into E (rather than A)
- Better information presented when signing up for an event, rather than just being told that you can’t
- Ability for Support to “forget” an effort when it’s been caused by a miscalibrated trainer, or similar
- Adding CE for Women’s races
- Support documentation that isn’t “ask James or Flint”
I don’t have timescales on these yet, but once I do, I’ll share.
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Sounds good. With regard to the documentation and information provided for those who aren’t already aware of the changes etc, it might be worth having a shortcut or snipped URL (say zwift.com/catenforcement or similar, that redirects the user to a FAQs page) in the description of the event. I say this because at present each event with CE active seems to have the same lengthy description irrespective of the organiser - as though it’s been pasted in. That’s fine for now, but it’s pretty wordy and relegates the organiser’s intended description to way down the bottom. It’s hard enough getting people to read event descriptions as it is, so streamlining the CE info to one line at the top would be useful.
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I’d give 100 likes to that post if I could. But one will have to suffice.
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Will someone be able to forget their top performance if it pushes them into a category they don’t want to be in? It would be bad if all this work is done to get people into the correct cat, but someone can simply remove any effort that pushes them up… Is there a way the software can distinguish between miscalibrated trainer vs. “I did enough to go up a cat therefore I want to erase that effort”?
Edit to add: And what if the miscalibrated effort is during a workout or other non-ZP ride? They won’t know which effort would need to be forgotten I imagine.
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No
They’ll know.
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