I was on the Tour of Watopia last week, and while we were at the pointy end, riding hard and racing, I noticed that there were riders using the coffee stop function on the harder parts, on climbs or particularly intense efforts.
It is officially a group ride, but a lot of people race it, and it was disappointing to see that this is effectively cheating the system to get a better result. Anyone else noticed this happen on rides or whats peoples thoughts?
I know I could just join an official race, but on the nights when I can it’s better to ride group rides like this, and to do all the stages.
Nope, that’s a silly answer - power-ups are available to all as part of the racing - you still have to ride for example, not just magically carry on at the same speed up a climb without doing anything.
They’re training rides for me so if someone wants to take a coffee break on a tough section it doesn’t bother me. What I do find annoying though is how much screen real estate the coffee break symbol takes up. One event we hit the volcano KOM and between coffee breaks and feather powerups (plus the leaderboard), almost my entire screen was taken up.
No this was the ToW hence my point about yes it is officially a group ride, but a lot of people race it as well, so it didn’t seem fair to be racing people using the coffee stop as a power up essentially.
You just have to go into it with the expectation of people using coffee break. There is zero chance they will disable that. There’s nothing wrong with your preferences, they’re just not going to be met by this type of event.
Thanks but don’t think I did get mixed up, it was definitely the ToW and not the Race Watopia I joined! And deliberately so, to complete all the stages.
I somewhat understand for TdW why someone might care. We know some people race the group rides, some don’t (probably most don’t). The ones that do probably are trying to get as high as they can on Zwift Power - so maybe they have a goal to be top, top 10, or top 20, top 100, etc.
Now, if that is their goal, and they are on track to hit that goal, and they see a bunch of people around them using coffee stop and their goal is slipping away, I can see why that might be a bummer for them as they know that person is going to be more fresh than them for the remainder of the ride and will probably do better at the end of the day.
Personally, I just go into the TdW rides expecting people to use coffee stops, so I just try to ignore them since it’s just part of the game for group rides. But based on the usage pattern I’ve seen in TdW, a lot of people happen to want to find their towels or get a drink during one of the bigger climbs
Maybe if Zwift didn’t enable rankings for the TdW group rides on Zwift Power fewer people would care about the coffee stops? Not sure.
