There will be ton of tiny packs in ZRL race one. Breaks will happen.
Like those with high ftp values, never know if they are sprinting
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Except that’s down down to the massive disparity in ability in ZRL races.
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Yeah, the draft works well until it stops working all together. Riding in the front 1/3 of a pack of 50+ and get the message to close the gap tells me that the draft isn’t working…3 seconds later being off the back confirms it. Coffee stops only work about half the time because not even it can hold the draft. Why you had to break something that was working pretty well a year ago I’ll never know. Also, the churn is terrible and I spend minutes riding beside the group and not even in the pack…and I am NOT buying steering to avoid that problem.
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In order of most likely to exist to least likely to exist:
- UFOs
- Bigfoot
- Loch Ness Monster
- Zwift Draft
At least that is my experience. Took 2.7 to ride with Coco yesterday and 2.8 this morning.
ArtV
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The 100% solution to PD is whatever each person requires to give themselves the greatest advantage and negatively affects their rivals.
Am I correct? 
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ZHQ would be best to create Bots ranging from 50-100kg to run internal testing to see how changes to PD affects different weights of riders within a pack.
Surely this wouldn’t be that hard and the results would be easy to quantify.
If you want to test with the community getting consistent feedback from a wide range of riders is very difficult as in it may suit a certain range of riders but not others so how do you interpret the data to improve.
David did mention they did a lot of testing on bots, and the issue is people within the pack behave much differently than bots. The bots were able to keep relatively consistent power in the pack in earlier pack dynamics bot testing yet in practice people were thrashing at the back, continuously trying to move up and wasting watts.
But as far as we are aware all the bots are the same weight 75kg and height so this is why i don’t think it can replicate Zwifter’s as there will be multiple different weights and heights within a group.
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Yeah, I don’t know what bot weights they tested with since he didn’t go into any details, but I presume they tested a bunch of scenarios. Not sure though.
"The 100% solution to PD is whatever each person requires to give themselves the greatest advantage and negatively affects their rivals.
Am I correct? "
Well, you certainly aren’t incorrect!
Bumping this thread to see if PD will see love at any point? Been using IV and the pack dynamics/draft feel perfect. Being able to sit in and recover makes racing far more enjoyable and strategic.
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Having to maintain a relatively high effort just to sit in is an intentional design choice
And it’s a poor one (at least for racing). The last time on this merry-go-round someone raised an idea to split PD into two forms for general riding/group rides and racing. I think it is worth revisiting… it’s impressive to see how well-executed it is on IV by a one-man band.
That might have been me. I remember suggesting it which looking back was stupidity. Never going to happen.
I switched to another cycling app where all that stuff isn’t an issue.
Zwift release 1.69 mentions Pack Dynamics changes (PD5). @DavidP can you share what those changes are?
Auto-Steering Changes
Zwift’s update notes say, “Optimized automatic steering when riding in groups to take better advantage of the draft.” This update, which Zwift is calling Pack Dynamics v5, actually includes multiple changes to the game’s pack dynamics.
These changes will be rolling out to Zwifters in the coming days as Zwift enables them on the server side, but the changes will not be in effect for races. Our sources tell us Zwift wants to see what the community thinks of the changes first.
Here’s a quick video showing some of the PD v5 changes, as well as the pairing screen change explained below:
Edit: added description from Zwiftinsider post. There is also a video (which I cannot link here).
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Very interesting, great catch. I can predict at least some of the feedback: if it slows packs down it will get shredded by the community at large. But in all seriousness I don’t think this will impact much unless there are other changes.
I can’t share much more than what was shared in the ZwiftInsider article because that’s basically what I know as well. I haven’t worked on the most recent changes.
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That is a bummer to hear. I know you were between a rock and a hard place with sorting out PD, but you always listened to everyone’s feedback and tried to find a middle ground. Hopefully they still have you on rider-facing stuff.
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That is a shame. So really it’s just collision stuff and nothing to do with speed/draft/Cda