I think if you ask 10 people, you get 10 different numbers …
I do love were this post is going.
For me it all starts with ‘who’ is inviting me!
I’ve got some invitations in my Q but have no clue whom they’re from.
I’m already in 3 clubs where I am sweeper or backup leader.
The idea of splitting up clubs to ‘big clubs’ as they already are (krt, zzrc, dirt, szr, …) and the ‘new breathe clubs’ wouldn’t be that bad.
This way you could keep limits tight enough like saying 3 clubs of each kind.
An other approach would be like 3 active clubs and a Q of passive clubs (or clubs you follow). Instead of having to leave a club every time, you can make a club active or inactive.
You could limit the switching for example to max 3 switches a month.
200, 400, 500 for members, perhaps even more. Even better have some structure of clubs/sub clubs or clubs/teams. If I think about IRL club there’s one single club but lots of sub groups within it…youths, race team, off road etc. Each has their own communication channel and events but we’re all joined under one single club umbrella and get their communication and events too. At the moment all those individual groups are quite disjointed in clubs, we have a main and youth group but they should really be able to be connected in some way.
As for number we can join. For me 3 seems fine. But I’m seeing this as like joining a cycle club irl and not similar to, for example, just joining groups of stuff I’m interested in on Facebook. To reference some examples above, I’ve no interest in joining GP Llama club even though I like him and follow him on various social media channels, he’s not my cycling club. Seems others might feel differently, but for me joining a small number is fine.
From the standpoint of how many members per club, I think Zwift may want to think about how this can become a marketing means to entice and enroll IRL clubs and their members. Start thinking about or determining how many members belong to cycling clubs, especially metropolitan-based ones, and ones based in areas where outdoor club-organized rides aren’t practical for the majority. Examples Twin Cities Bicycling club, NYCC, Cascade Bicycle Club (8000+ members?), etc
Maybe go so far as to offer reduced 1st year costs/person membership if signing up for Zwift through their IRL club. Just some food for thought.
1 club for me to use for group rides (workouts when it comes)
1 for my primary Zwift club.
1 for one of my IRL clubs. There is a few clubs that I ride with.
That leaves no room for the two clubs I got invited to already.
This partly depends on where the feature goes, and how people use it.
I’m a member of two local cycling clubs and a triathlon club. All three have people active on Zwift and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that any or all of them will create Zwift clubs. If, for example, organisers put on “club only” rides and events, then I would additionally want to be able join several clubs in order to take part in club activities.
And that’s before I consider any groups I’m affiliated with in a more virtual sense, such as DIRT, WSR or Backpedal.
This wish might be even stronger if club size or “contribution” confers any additional benefits. Would a club with 20 monthly active users be different from one with 50 monthly active users? I don’t know yet, but if it is I can see that I’d want to do my part to help the club.
If, say, clubs develops to the extent that they get in-game representation (the long-awaited jerseys for people other than the chosen few, for example), then again I’d want to be able to join those clubs so I can represent them in game. The Zwift jerseys I wear most tend to be those that are representative of a club or team. Some required a “ride unlock”, such as the Vegan Cyclist one, or Team Vegan one. But it’s possible future similar kits might be something that’s only available to members of the Zwift club.
Of course, those are speculative reasons for things that might happen. But right now I just want to be able to join several clubs even if it doesn’t confer additional benefits, simply because I enjoy the sense of belonging, merely being a member and associating myself with a group.
I see no reason to limit the number of clubs you can join. I regularly ride with different groups/clubs/teams, some small and some large, and would like to be able to be in their club for access to their events and community. In practice any number lower than 10 would feel restrictive.
I was in 5 ‘legacy’ clubs, would like to be in 2-5 smaller of the new clubs for people I regularly ride with (replacing meetup), and run 1 club myself to host events.
I want to be able to have the whole of our existing Zwift club into the “Zwift club” functionality. It’s so tiny now that it’s basically just the admins & rider leaders. The Herd is 2 orders of magnitude bigger than your 100 limit. There needs to be a better management system than manual one-by-one invite though.
I don’t really have any desire to join a second club, and I’ve yet to find an IRL road club I’m interested in joining.
I don’t really see any reason to limit the number of Clubs one can be a member of, or members in a Club. The limitations come from the intended capabilities:
Without implementing a multichannel messaging system, chat will very quickly become unusable for Clubs of any size for anything other than broadcast announcements. If we subdivide into ‘Teams‘ as a smaller unit, 5–15 riders or so, the chat could be enough for simple comms if it also worked in-game — but folks will still need to talk one on one and that will move conversations off-platform anyway. Can you build a full-fledged comms platform? Maybe, though it probably needs a web component and voice would be a benefit. Should you build one? Maybe not, unless it ties into in-game chat and voice. Discord is stiff competition.
Creating events seems like a no-brainer, and it does require creating some kind of an official Club entity, as well as roster mangement so that you can appoint leaders, sweeps, and so on. So this bit seems useful to those who create the events, and on the other hand it’s easy to get the invites to members. Subdivision might be useful here, but not strictly necessary — different people can handle setting up different kinds of events, and events can easily enough indicate if they’re e.g. just for the race team.
Association is also an easy way to offer customization. You could have the kit, club decal, etc. granted based on association… but here, too, subdivision into Teams could be valuable both in terms of further customization, and…
In-game, Club (or better, Team) association could be used to restrict entry to race pens — for TTTs, ZRL… — but definitely want it to be easy to switch between a number of teams.
What else might there be that Clubs would help with?
I believe that when the next few functions (Club chat notification, new Club ride created/upcoming notification) is implemented, the 100 member limit is very low. We are not a big community in Hungary (2400 members online, about 1!4th or 1/5th active) but already reached the 100 member limit. The member limit should be at or above 500 for “non-confirmed communities”, and for “confirmed”, like Ascenders, Vikings, etc. way higher, as they attract more.
On the question of how many clubs one could join, I believe limitless is not good, but 10 is the lowest I’d go for as a limit. Let’s see… I would join the local Hungarian group, Vikings, Ascenders, Velocity Vixen Fox, 3R, that’s already six. And not even talking about creating a Club for Team purposes.
Maybe I am an exception here but I would LOVE the ability to join more than 3 clubs. I am on two e-racing teams, a local IRL club, and actively involved in my local cycling community, which has also expanded into the Zwift community. Thus, I have several clubs on Zwift to which I have been invited. I would LOVE to be able to join all of them to stay connected with all of my friends and teammates.
Thanks, this is a great new feature.
Thank you all for providing all the great feedback. A lot of this feedback has been discussed internally so it is great to have some feedback from the community to help us identify the right problems to solve. I recapped some of the themes from this thread below:
Competitive teams haven’t been figured out in the current state and how it will fit in the larger Clubs platform.
Leader and sweeper requirements to be in the club are limiting
Current limits don’t reflect how many groups between real life and Zwift clubs.
Real life clubs can be huge, Zwift doesn’t enable those identities and communities to come on the platform easily.
Some are already hitting member limits
Sense of belonging to more than just 3. You want to represent Clubs depending on the day and what you are doing.
Distinction between someone like GP Lama and other social outlets vs. groups you want to “belong” to.
I think I’d like to see a distinction between social and race clubs with race having a much smaller limit maybe 500 max and proper integration to zwift power teams could be a real benefit to racing.
Social clubs can be huge and probably need to be likes of gplama and others will have huge numbers. It’s similar to followers rather than membrship really
The limit on clubs has the potential to lessen my Zwift usage and satisfaction. I ride with about 5 different groups on Zwift, and now I have to choose only 3 of them? Ridiculous…
Gordon, I know you’ve got a gripe with a specific bigger club because of history, but why are you constantly on limiting team size? Rhino is now one of the big teams on ZwiftPower, and we’ve had the discussion before that all limiting team size will do is push out D (and lower C) riders and make it hard for them to find teams - teams aren’t going to kick out their best ranked riders to make numbers.
My only gripe as you know why I left was the club was trying to control how and who I could race with. That’s long past now and I have no issues with such club or their racers . Sure I find it disappointing that they still don’t engage with the race community and rarely get involved with other clubs events but that does appear to be starting to change which I think is a massive positive for racing in general and the riders being able to compete in the best events organisers have to offer.
As for the limit that’s purely down to producing a more competitive racing scene. it’s great having team mates in a race but when a team dominates the league/race I don’t think it’s the best solution for a fair and balanced racing environment. First for competitive reasons and second similar to point above big teams tend to only promote their own events.
You are right for the huge clubs that might mean some d/c riders could get squeezed out which in the short term is disappointing but there are plenty clubs out there looking for members. I know all to well how hard it is to recruit D riders. Maybe category enforcement might get a few more of them racing.
I fully agree the 100 limit is too restrictive but would not want to see an unlimited club for racing.
Could be right could be wrong it’s just a opinion but I think racing would be better with more teams.
Unless you are also going to be the owner or moderator of all 5 clubs, I’m not sure how this really impacts your experience. Club events can be configured to allow anyone to join via a link to the event sign up. If all 5 clubs make their events open to everyone, then you can join all their rides regardless of being in the club.
There is very little advantage to being a “member” of a club at this point. Once they get the notifications pushed out that will be one advantage, knowing when events are created or chat is used. Other than that, what are you missing?
To be fully transparent with everyone, I agree that 100 limit and belonging to 3 clubs is overly restrictive. I have been working through all the feedback and coming up with a plan to really solve this problem. Generally, it’s just shy of 1 month of clubs being out and there is a lot that I have learned.
Before I share where I currently am, I want to give a BIG disclaimer that this is my current perspective and most likely will change. I am working on a plan that addresses the shorter term needs in the next 6-12 months but also thinking about what clubs can look like in 2-5 years. I only mention this because I want to get your thoughts on what I am thinking to really help me shape what it should look like.
My Dilemma
Taking a look at how team racing has evolved on Zwift and also how IRL racing is done, competition won’t really be something all clubs will be interested nor will they be 100’s in size and most likely be a smaller squads of <15/20 riders. Also, building a cooperative / leveling / mission mode will be difficult as well to build 1000+ people clubs and also smaller clubs.
The needs between being goal based (whether that is cooperative play or competition) are vastly different from the way clubs are currently being used as more of an event creation and group organization / social tool.
What is the solution?
Truth is, I don’t have a solution. I am thinking think these will end up as two different types of groups:
Social Clubs focusing on enabling the community to imagine, create and ride with each other. Also enabling club owners and members to decide how big or how many they want to join.
Competitive or cooperative teams will be very small and restrictive but goal oriented and highly focused on a specific outcome.
