O I am not on the fence. I think it is bad of a race organizer to use CE and then DQ on ZP. If they don’t like what CE is doing then don’t use it.
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We weren’t applying the upg rules but 1 rider was then causing issues for the rest and we had to.
That 1 rider was avg 3.5wkg in C and winning, other racers were asking what is going on - CE should have bumped him to B but it wasn’t doing it and something had to be done and there is limited other options…
If they could get pen enforcement with ZP categories, I bet some of them would not use CE.
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That will never happen ZP is to easy to sandbag. ZP categories is so 2021. LOL
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I think CE is a better categorization system, but that doesn’t explain why so many races don’t use it. I assume organizers are not choosing ZP categories for their races because of the lack of pen enforcement. And I assume that they’re using ZP WKG/UPG DQs because they think CE categories are flawed.
I don’t know why they would think that. So far we have not seen any proof of this.
I suspect they’re trying to avoid an outcome like @Bike_Links just described above, but organizers using ZP options on CE events would need to be surveyed to know for sure (I’m not one of them so I’m just speculating).
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I think that was a extreme edge case and should be investigated.
To say that it doesn’t work because of one rider vs thousands that abuse ZP.
Now I’ve seen this post my profile numbers on my.zwift.com finally make sense.
I’m a definite C-cat rider (ftp ~266 at currently 92.4kg). My weight was 99kg when I started Zwifting in 2020, dropped down to ~90 in 2021. Got up to almost 97 in the beginning of this year due to illness and unable to ride, and been dropping back again to 92.4 now. Backstory: had surgery in 2018 which got me to drop my weight of 165Kg back to where I’m now.
Then my current CP numbers in my profile… I’ve been free riding with some friends in Zwift, and in order to keep up and not use the ridiculous rubber band, I dropped my weight when riding with them. Just free rides, not racing. When racing (see my Zwiftpower profile) I use my correct weight. But now I’m getting punished for wanting to ride with my friends by having my numbers skewed towards crazyness.
The best thing is that the 1, 3, 5, and 12min are from ZRL races, and the 20 and 30min from a 4x 8min FTP session (activity: The at Home Cycling & Running Virtual Training App ). You can clearly see from the speed that there was no way I was doing 5wkg up the volcano.
Thanks Zwift for ruining the experience just because I was audacious enough to drop my weight to freeride with friends…
I won’t be freeriding on Zwift again that’s for sure. I’ll go to FulGaz, RGT or Rouvy to do that. And there I can also ride on other well-known roads instead of always the same boring stuff here.
This raises a somewhat longstanding issue – namely that Zwift is not at all good about providing any sort of warning messages about consequences of changing game weights. Should be a popup checkbox/verify “are you sure…” type of thing before users are changing weight.
Unfortunately your changes in weight was not to gain an advantage but there are riders who do this to gain an advantage for racing. As post above states there should be warnings when weight is reduced by a large amount personally I think this should be limited to + / - 3% to stop dishonest racers. The best option is to use meet-ups I understand the rubber band can be a nuisance but at least you can ride as a group as opposed to IRL which wouldn’t be possible.
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If it helps, you can probably still race ZRL as they use a different metric
I’ve come full circle about changing weight.
I previously believed it was ok to change wt in free rides in order to stay with friends.
I see how that makes the game / race results very confusing and definitely opens a Pandora’s box for cheating.
You never decrease your wt in real life on a daily basis to ride with friends.
You either ride fast, get dropped or your friends ride slower
You say, " my friends want a good workout in Zwift therefore I must increase my speed".
That may be true but there is another option in Zwift that is not open on real life.
Your friends have the option to ride a different bike or wheel set.
It would be nice if Zwift would develop a handicap or speed assist bias to do this.
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Create a meetup in the companion app, and invite your friends. Choose the option “keep riders together.” Done.
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It either is or is not an extreme edge case, and luckily Zwift has data that would answer this: if they select all of the WKG/UPG DQs in CE events, they’ll know the rate at which it happens. If they review those cases, they’ll know why. The question of whether those are edge cases is an interesting one. Some might say that with limited data, there is an expected cost of people showing up in their CE category and blowing the field out of the water, and we should just accept that because they’ll be upgraded. Perhaps the organizers who overlay ZP rules on CE events simply don’t accept that cost.
This is the miss understanding, ZP and CP are two totally different things.
You are still on this?
How many riders are in a higher category in CE than in ZP? A few. How many are in a lower category? A few. Why do you think those in ZP are abusing ZP? Based on absolutely nothing except an argument against power based metrics, which both are.
CE is mostly better because of the enforcement. Not because of the different categorization. Hence organisers rightfully have to use both to have enforcement and a more transparent categorization (and not one, CE, whereby those that are more likely to win are more likely to end up in a lower category given the same 20m power).
I think we still need a facility to be able to report erroneous weight patterns in riders… ZRL is full of people increasing their weight to keep them in a category
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This is true but DQing someone in one system because they exceeded another system is just wrong. If you want to DQ then you need to use the same parameters as what was used to enter the event.
We need to start using the CE system as it is meant to be used.
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Is it wrong though if the organizer and event description say that it’s exactly what they’re going to do? Is it much different than custom events which split to pens/results after the race is finished?