Hi,
This game desperately needs a better way of tracking friends during event rides!
It can be a nightmare trying to find your friends, especially in busy group rides with positioning disabled. If they’re out of range of 100 riders around you, then you’re totally screwed.
Suggestions:
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A highlight or arrow pointing out friends
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The ability to “pin” their stats by yours on the right hand side of the screen
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Have their name show up on your screen constantly when they are visible on your screen
Yes, seeing your followers in large events can be very hard, especially when everyone is in the same jersey! I’m wondering if you have noticed the icons in the riders nearby list? Your friends will have a symbol next to their names that looks like a little person, if you have them set as a favorite they will also have an orange dot on them in the mini map on the corner of the screen.
On the Companion App, you can select the “Nearby Zwifters” screen from the menu at the bottom and then select “Zwifters I Follow” from the menu at the top. This will give you a list of nearby Zwifters that you follow (plus yourself). You can easily see who is ahead and who is behind. If your eyes are better than mine, you might be able to read the small text that says how far ahead or behind they are.
I haven’t ever noticed that followers have an orange dot on the mini map.
I’m mainly talking about heavily crowded events, so it may be possible that they are not within the 100 riders of you to show on the minimap. But even when they are nearby - I don’t recall noticing it recently - but I will look out for it.
I can see them on the companion app map if they are within 100 riders, but again all it takes is a short hill climb for them to go out of range and then I have no idea where they are.
I’ve found that the list moves around too much, so that I’m not able to keep it locked on to either myself or a specific rider. (Especially in large event rides).
luckily i recorded this event, here’s a short clip of what i mean:
riding with P.Draper who is follower and favourited, got absolutely 0 way of tracking where they are in relation to me during the ride which is a bit of a nightmare on a ride with 1000+ riders xD
The Nearby Zwifters/Friends feature sucks. In a big event like the L’Etape du Tour, friends that are only 30 meters away don’t show up at all. Zwift really needs to do a better job on issues like this.
How about enabling a view where the people ahead/behind you always has favourited people prioritised (so the top/bottom slot is reserved for a favourited person even if they are miles ahead or behind you)?This would help a lot, I think. You should really have a way of implementing it where you don’t have to modify anything on a per-race basis, or in the race itself. Having a static setting to enable reserving the top/bottom x slots of the nearby riders panel for favourited riders would be extremely helpful. If there aren’t any favourited riders, the functionality simply goes back to the normal display for all the slots.
I would add my support for this too. Having done the 3 x Etape du tour stages over the past 3 weekends, there was a friend of mine on the route that I was trying to ride alongside. However, in a mass of people like that, there is no way that you can see them. Would be good to have a way to pin their name to the top of the riders nearby list, or some other way such as keeping their name on screen when nearby that would help identify them.
