I’m hoping someone from Zwift will see this, but it would be nice, while TdZ is going on, to have fewer event choices. For example, I want to do a race tonight at 8pm EST. There are currently four different races starting at 8pm with 17 riders, 12 riders, 8 riders, and 8 riders in total across the four events and across all categories. At my category this equates to 6, 0, 2, and 1 racers signed up currently in my category. This is sad and represents a significant drop in race attendance, which has coincided exactly with the TdZ. This is fine, I understand a lot of people are enjoying the TdZ (I am as well, but I ride every day, so I want some variety). It seems like the best thing to do is drop the number events while TdZ is going on. If there were only one race at 8pm to choose as an alternative to TdZ, we’d have 45 riders signed up for it and 9 in my category (assuming all those people just want to race, which I understand is a bit simplistic, but it would still be better). Even if it meant less choice of route / race type, I’d prefer to be racing with more people and only have one event to choose from at a given time slot. What do others think?
In general I think Zwift does too many events overall. I know they want to say one event every 5 minutes or whatever, but in practice its not good to have 8 events or so at the same time slot. Better to have one or two races and one or two group rides per hour, so events are less likely to get starved by other ones.
I agree @John_Bowers, but here is the hard part… which of the community run, all volunteer, no compensation, faithfully running, leading, and sweeping almost all of the events every week for years do you axe from the schedule? However, with proper planning and advanced communication while using data to drive your decisions this should be possible.
I would rather say that there should only run one big event at a time. Currently we have WTRL TTT, WTRL ZRL and the TdZ.
I would suggest only one of those run per week.
And while we are on the topic, I would say there should be at least one wheel per month where there is no big events to give the smaller organizers that also put in a lot of effort to have their races packed.
The number of community organisers seems to have increased and with what seems like increase in quantity of events, done nothing to help improve participation and/or quality in my timezone and seen a few others mention same issue in other timezones. I dont even like doing TdZ type events but have had to just to do something semi-competitive with fellow digital humans.
A half decent data scientist could determine a suitable dynamic schedule based on demand, bike seasons, weather, event type etc very very quickly.
We have this plan well documented internally but have chosen to not cull the calendar during the peak time to respect event organizers. We’re handling this Organizer by Organizer rather than hour by hour.
As FutureWorks Clubs rolls out to 100% of eligible Zwifters in the coming days and weeks, allowing Event Organizers who have Public events the ability to make Private events instead, we’re planning to remove many public events with low participation during overpopulated hours. This is in the interest of improving quality and field sizes.
Is it possible to revisit the amount of WTRL events. Those are very popular and distract from other races.
The only reason for the popularity is because they have pen enforcement something that should be available to all orginizers.
Currently they don’t cater for Morning usa times, so racers have to change their schedule and therefore there’s very few left to race in morning events. Most serious racers can only race once or twice a week.
Noted - this consideration is part of the scheduling efforts. At the moment WTRL’s autocategorization system can only be operated via their events. We are working on Category Enforcement as @xflintx has shared recently on the forums and our intention is to serve the racing organizers with a tool that helps with fairness and category/pen enforcement.
Robert, I have confirmed with Charlie - if you change your event name on Sunday/Monday so we know it’s always a ZRL Recon, we’ll remove the Zwift event from the same hour.
Our goal is to help Zwifters who want to recon to easily find an event to check it out. We very much support focusing the efforts towards community Recon rides.
This tells it’s own story. They are popular and should stay.
I disagree that the “only” reason they are popular is pen enforcement. One of the reason…yes… But not the only.
@Mike_Rowe1, I’m personally more concerned with races which don’t have leaders or sweepers and several of which seem to run themselves (Does an actual human do anything for the KISS races anymore? It’s unclear to me that they do.), but you raise an important point. I think, though, that Zwift could easily just cut out the ZHQ and crit city races that are overlapping with both community races AND a TdZ (in other words, non-community run races) and that would already alleviate the problem a bit. I don’t remember now which races I was looking at last night at 8pm in my OP, but at least one of them was a Zwift run race and I think it was two of them.
I would reevaluate my statement and say 95% of the success is because of pen enforcement. If you look back in Zwift racing history you will see that the most successful racing in Zwift had some sort of pen enforcement (KISS and CVRworldcup) .
Once people learn that it is a competitive fair racing league they attend it often.
WTRL is like the “best” Pizza in town when only they have a license to sell Pizza.
I’d still respectively disagree. Pen enforcement is a plus…but the reason WTRL events are popular is because they are always big events. Look at the TTT, quite clunky to get going, need a blooming stopwatch to countdown as zwift haven’t implemented the tools necessary but it’s still huge. Certainly in my team which has a huge presence in the ZRL… no-one is talking about how good pen enforcement is…more about how much fun it is riding with teammates.
Fully recognise the impact that TDZ/ToW/etc have on Community rides. But I don’t think the solution is to turn them off just because there’s a large event happening at the same time.
There’s a lot of people that will log on to Zwift just to take part in those events. How are you going to tell them that they can’t do their favourite ride just because we have a large series running.
I know my guys (Herd Racing) wouldn’t take to that too kindly.
I’m not saying to just turn them off. What I am saying is to have some sort of rotation.
ZRL does not run the whole year, so why not plan it so that ZRL and TdZ is not at the same time. Why not break the TTT into 4 seasons of 6 week blocks. Just thinking out of the box.
Or one week a month is rest week for all the big events or call it Zwift community week.
There was good racing before these big events and there will be good racing after they are gone.
Why are they big events? Because it is seen as fair because it has pen enforcement. Yes the TTT has “Pen enforcement” a bit backwards in the sense of real pen enforcement. No team will enter a team knowing one of the riders is a A riding in C. The whole team will get a DQ. So you end up with fair racing with all riders in the correct pen.
This part should go in the sandbagging thread
Not quite “no team”, but it’s a TT so the teams don’t affect each other’s racing that much (except if an overtaking situation goes wrong or something).
