Clubs are huge. Racing is big. We need full 1st party support.
- Club Chat - look at how bigger clubs split up their Discord into smaller, more manageable channels. Give us global channels, and smaller ones. Heck, give us some defaults and let the club leaders create/delete them. Give us chat options like they have in WoW, where you can select Public, Club, Category, Channel.
- Club Flags - To rep a club, we get jerseys to race in.. but we also almost always put the team name at the end of our own name. …sometimes we also mark ourselves with numbers to declare what number we are in the TTT order.. bake this stuff in: we shouldn’t ever have to rename ourselves just ‘cause we joined a team or are participating in a race! Make it easy to do - give the team a flag and give us the option to show it always, or group rides + races, or just races.. …and give us the option to show/hide other people’s flags - some people just don’t want to see that stuff, too.
- Club Activity - In WoW there’s a window that shows you who’s online and who’s offline, what they’re doing, etc.. here.. show who’s online and where they’re riding.. and if they’re offline, show us what they last did when they were online. Sort it by most recently active. Give me the opportunity to chat to all of them (provided by the Chat part above - Club Chat), to reach out and say something direct to that person, or just plain give ‘em a Ride On. Also let us opt out if we would individually prefer the privacy. Not everyone wants their activity/presence known, even within their club (some clubs are reallllly big).
- Voice Chat - Every race a club attends should have voice chat available. Just.. make it automatic. That said, I race on a club that has two teams in the same division of the same category (two teams in ZRL, Cat D1).. so if you put us all in the same channel.. that’d kinda suck. Gotta hook in with ZRL and such to give each team its own channel automatically. Feel free to enable live chat channels all day every day, too. Definitely need it for group rides.
I presume that much of the above would be handled within the companion app.. but yeah, any/all of it would improve my Zwift experience. I never thought I would get into racing, personally.. but here I am: it’s an absolute blast and it was not an intuitive process to get connected. Make it intuitive.
All in all, consider Clubs in Zwift the equivalent of Guilds in World of Warcraft. Races are essentially Raids. Clubs are the heart of Zwift. They host tons of group rides for thousands of zwifters each week. …Heck, the financial benefit should make this suggestion rise to the top: the more you shine up the social element of Zwift, the more people will stick around and stay subscribed.