Hey no offense here at all, also not from me to you. 
Guess time will tell
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He will be crushed in Cat D as well, Petr has similiar stats to me, first hill and he will be out the back.
With these racing scores I have no chance at any form of competitiveness or near the front.
In Cat C, from October time last year, I worked my way up from midpack C to sometimes fighting for podiums by April. That means going from 2.9 avg to 3.1 og 3.2 avg. Enough to be competitive.
My racing score now is 370 and slowly dropping but not nearly enough to be ârelegatedâ. It will take months? The top pack got 510-520? Bringing out like 3.6 wkg or whateever. I will never ever be able to reach anywhere near this score. I am constantly being dropped, brutally, like never before. I used to able to hang on for a while at 2.9 wkg and have a good time but this is just off the charts being brutally abused and dropped. I end up from mid pack to basically dead last every time. These scores need to be revised. They might be fine to bring these oddities out of the races, but they are punishing me - an honest C rider . like nothing else.
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This is the example of why encouraging users to drop a category undermines the solution and makes it a poor solution. Categories need to be filled through the entire range so people have similar riders to ride with, allowing & encouraging bloating at the top of category makes it a worse experience for a large percentage of users who are not gaming the system.
@Nick_ZHQ This needs to be resolved or you are making a worse experience for those who are not gaming the system. Il take a flyer and presume that wasnt the intention.
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Iâm certainly not gaming the system and it feels like I am screwed, and I experience being screwed. I canât work my form up against B-riders. I know my limits and my age. I can increase my w/kg by 0.4 (maximum) in a fall-winter-spring season by doing three races a week. I fear itâs not gonna cut it - AT ALL - the way the 350-520 score is calculated. Iâm therefore doomed to low-mid-pack to dead last finishes in every race. Unless I stroll around not giving a f. until I am degraded into the lower category? I donât wanna do that. I always put in my maximum effort.
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Just for clarity. I wasnt suggesting you were gaming the system.Honest riders like yourself are getting screwed.
Zwift seem to want to preach fairness, but overlook it all the time over supporting those gaming the system.
Yes, I got that. No worries. At the moment, I am quite frustrated with this, and motivation took a hit.
The solution to this is not to change the score calculation, because in any race someone is going to be lower dowm the pack, unless.we have a huge number of pens with only a few riders in each pen (the extreme example being one rider in each pen, meaning that youâre always going to âwinâ).
The solution is dynamic pens, i.e. you sign up for a race not knowing which pen youâre going to be until the start, with the pens divided based on who is signed up. That will give different pen boundaries for each race, meaning you will likely be in a different pack position for each race.
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I like this solution. It makes sense. Iâm not looking to win anything, all the time. Iâm just looking to be competitive at some point.
With the ZRS pens being fixed there should be some stickiness (variable pens might be better but that sucks for series) around pen you end up in, with a bias upwards. Letâs say the upper pen limit is 100, there are simple ways to reduce flipping around (but depends on variability of the scores). For instance: Only when you reach 105 you get promoted to the higher pen. Only when you drop below 95 you drop to the pen below.
This is a common technique to reduce turnover. The 5% proposed above should be dependent on variability of the scores (but picked once so its transparent). Then you canât flip back and forth but also dropping down on purposes is made harder.
Aside from dynamic pens, which would be nice, there are events perhaps youâd fit better. HerD Beginner where youâd be a Cat B (325-400) or Tiny Races where youâd be a D within a 280-410 group. More organizers have to start doing more focused events to different parts of the ability spectrum.
I agree, but my time is limited and I can only race between 2pm and 3:45pm CET on weekdays. Sadly. Very sadly. The scores you mention would be a much better fit.
Former cat B rider, now 3rd cat with low ish (legit) weight, too much height to be aero or descend competitively (Iâll be moaning about that on another thread), relatively high w/kg and a laughable sprint here.
My experience of ZRS so far has been that it has put me in competitive races where these are on largely flat courses and are likely to end in a sprint (I still canât win sprints but thatâs nothing new). For races that end in a relatively long climb (e.g Climbers Gambit a few days ago), it hasnât delivered one competitive event yet. Maybe others would find this a nice problem to have but I find riding away to win by minutes has a similar effect on my motivation (maybe after the first win!) as being dropped and riding alone for 20 mins. Next time I do a similar race, Iâll put myself in the 2nd cat. However, a little look at the results from the Climbers Gambit race I did a few days ago suggests I might not find many people to ride with. The gaps were huge and the winner of the 2nd cat was an A+ rider with 20 mins at 5.15w/kg on ZwiftPower. Maybe his experiences of ZRS are similar to mine.
Itâs almost like some races skew more towards being w/kg tests and others towards 30s absolute power tests!
I appreciate more complexity rather than less wouldnât be everyoneâs cup of tea but it feels to me like thereâs no way of making one set of race categories work for all types of races. Perhaps working towards different race scores etc for sprint, classics and mountain-top finish style races is where Zwift needs to go? Should be possible with all the data on our individual power curves, route information and previous race data!
So youâre a former Cat B rider facing me, a mid-pack Cat C rider.
Agree with you my friend. This is exactly the same feeling as I have.
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Would that not only work with well populated races ?
If per example 1 Cat 1 riders, 3 Cat 2 riders and 2 Cat 3 riders, 1 Cat 4 rider and 4 Cat 5 riders sign up. Would that not cause the same problems ? Or would there still be some kind of boundery where people cant go below ? But than it would not be a pen devided based on sign up anymore
Even a mass start race (single pen) doesnât provide an ideal solution for very low sign-up numbers, so dynamic pens wouldnât be worse than the current system for very low sign-ups.
Thereâs no great solution there - perhaps the number of pens used depends on sign-ups, e.g. one pen for less than x racers total, two pens for >x <=y, then all five pens for >y. Something like that.
So drasticly remove 70% of the races would help a lot.
Just move the boundaries to each category on a per week or month basis.
Full race series can still run on static boundaries, just dont confine yourself that every zwift owned event has to run with the same boundaries.
Also introduce max 30/60/90 day Race Score for organisers to use if they so wish.
It doesnt stop people crashing their score or gaming it, just makes it a little more difficult to land in a specific spot.
I believe and im happy for someone to tell me im wrong, there is nothing technical stopping this from happening now - Its workload or process for the events creation team. Which when you consider the man hours that has gone into creating ZRS seems an awful thing to let it fail on.
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Dynamic pens would of worked better with CE IMO, Dynamic pens with ZRS does not solve the problem of the wider range of abilities in each race we have now, my solution would be to have FTP w/kg ceiling on each pen.