I would ask, not knowing the intricacies of how results-based works, why sandbaggers wouldn’t just start doing their zone 2 training rides within some throw-away races they don’t care about placing well in?
The way I have always read the custom cats on the backlog is related to current categories based on power.
Any new ways of splitting races in the new system would be incorporated into that whole feature… not sure why that 1 item would stand alone from the whole new system.
" @xflintx My biggest thing is, one size fit all, We are Do this and , only doing this in that way. if you dont like it go to RGT say Top is saying , if i am read your the post right."
there going to be die heart who Love w/kg , there going to guys die heart to Rank mode.
i would say have both running.
Love King bath salts.
As much as I disagree with performance based categories (and especially ones based on w/kg) I do think Zwift will need some sort of hybrid system.
A category system based purely on results is too easy to sandbag. There’s nothing stopping someone doing 4w/kg for a race and then stopping 100 metres from the finish line and waiting until everyone else has crossed before they finish.
Results based racing (and the old ZwiftPower 3 x 20 minutes system) relies heavily on participants riding in good faith. i.e. doing their best performances. We’ve seen how the ZwiftPower system was able to be exploited by bad faith riders and the one good thing I will say about Category Enforcement is that it has gone a long way to flushing out that sort of sandbagging.
I think the Category Enforcement system will need to be used to set a minimum category for riders and any riders with exceptional results can be upgraded from there otherwise bad faith riders will find ways to exploit a purely results based system.
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What does fairness in racing mean here?
For example, is the scope within one event or the entire racing system?
First of all, I think we need to clearly define and share fairness in racing.
If you don’t, you’ll probably get complaints again.
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I’m trying to wrap my head around whether it’s even possible to have both CE based on watts but with custom ranges (e.g. split cats), AND have results-based overlaid on top of this?
I (and Flint) would prefer to have a single category system for all to avoid a recurrence of the confusion we had around CE/ZP.
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A single system, but still able to customize? Conceivably organizers could do custom results-based cats? Would require ranking all the way down the through entire zwift user base. Without power layered into cat assignments, as suggested, easy to enter races and purposefully lose.
We’re not going to allow organiser to customise the category boundaries (as they’ll be relatively small anyway).
I would foresee the ability to combine categories though, eg 9+10, 7+8, etc.
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This sounds good. If the graduations are small and event/series organisers can combine them that would pretty much achieve the same thing I was thinking of where some types of events might benefit from “custom” categories.
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If it’s going to take a minimum of 6 months to deliver results based categories (as per the other thread) how long do custom cats take to implement?
If it’s a matter of weeks, deliver the quick win here and now…
In all likelihood 6 months will get extended anyway and your missing your busy season with no tangible improvements after nuking the cat enforcement change.
Or push hardware improvements down the list as very few people seem to be calling out for this and deliver post one of the above.
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Thank you Flint for your update with a lot of information! Because I was starting to think after the topic-opener by James that the “results based system” was not being worked on anymore, but instead the focus had gone to “allow scored results to influence category”, which sounded like slightly changing the current w/kg FTP system.
So once again thank you: very helpful! 
Looking forward to see how the “results based system” will work in the future.
Dean, there are a few races with half categories (they split the existing A/B/C/D categories into two simultaneous races to “low end” A/B/C/D categories and “high end” A/B/C/D categories). It sounds like you are a “Low end” just like me, so I think that would be a (temporary) solution for your problem! 
TFC’s Mad Monday races is one of them. New season is likely to start in 2 weeks. I believe SZR also had split categories, but haven’t checked on them in recent months.
I’ve been running my D Only races with 4 separate D Categories for a couple of years now…
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Thanks but these series dont work for kiwi timezone. Given the comments re dev time and what is being focused on, its time to lose some weight.
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Do you have any idea roughly are we talking this year?
If it’s going to take longer than the next few months then i would strongly suggest getting custom cats out there as it’s so simple do to and real benefit going into the peak winter season.
Custom cats is not just about reducing the category range it’s also adjusting the limit so that not all races are the same which currently allows a rider to monitor their power to be right at the top of cat across all races
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James alluded to “6 months”-ish earlier, which basically means not this season for the northern hemisphere folks.
Edit: Well maybe end of the season, but in April I would expect things are starting to shift to outside for a lot of the northern hemisphere.
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