I feel your pain! That was me today. The thought of doing this route again is demoralizing 
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True, but most of us don’t have a lot of days where we can dedicate 5-6 hours to a ride.
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As a professional software engineering consultant, this is unbelievable customer treatment (i.e. a complete lack of information at the most basic level). If I hinted at this level of customer interaction with any of the clients I work with they’d be off to find a new consultant in a flash.
I’ve contemplated writing my own version of zwift purely beause of a complete lack of innovation from zwift. For example, zwift spent enourmous amounts of time and effort (money) making steering a thing - when the vast majority of users couldn’t care less about steering; but whilst at the same time breaking their legacy features! Even more annoyingly, these “unwanted” features are always favoured over the real features users want (improved menu system, not having to quit zwift when finishing a route, being able to see your badge acheivements from the main menu, proper race results pages etc… The fact there are so many third party zwift websites you can use to do what zwift should do is beyond belief.
Coming back to the issue at hand; at the most basic level zwift is a platform that makes indoor training more bearable - the more you ride, the more XP and drops you earn. Most people get their motivation merely by unlocking and “buying” pointless digital assets (kit, bikes, wheels), it’s those silly digital rewards that keep us “hooked”. Fundamentally, this psycology works for most people, if you work hard on the bike you get a reward - even if that something is merely some digital kudos or a bunch of XP points used to unlock new kit/frames/wheels it’s enough to satisfy that work=reward psycology and keep users motivated. Loose the XP/rewards system and what do you have? An online workout system, of which there are probably better ones than zwift.
The fact that zwift are happy to break their most fundamental feature and not care one bit is simply incomprehensible.
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well said!! regression testing not too hard to perform? hopefully with the 450 million of new investment can improve zwift’s overall features, graphics, UI, CS, and QA etc.
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You know Zwift had steering even before it was called Zwift?
You think any programmer break stuff on purpose and be happy about that?
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Looks like they are looking for a QA manager (finally, dare I say):
Seems to be numerous really quite senior roles being advertised there.
I haven’t read this whole thread but I’m just complted 100KM (of 89.1KM) and no badge or XP on Four Horsemen. It is 9/21/2020. I did not deviate from route, and of course I’ll well beyond any “lead in” mileage. This is the first time this has happened to me, badgewise.
hi @S119
The update from Sept 4-5 appeared to have caused an issue with both the 4 Horsemen Route and Uber Pretzel route. Zwift have acknowledged this and apparently will be implementing a fix in the next month or so. However it will require us to re-ride the route again. Why the badge can’t be awarded “after the fact” is apparrentl beyond the technical limitations of the staff of Zwift 
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Same here! Just completed it, no badge. Went to 92km and was toast.
I’m fully aware of the companion app steering which was obviously a hacky quick thing they did to add a new feature… I was referring to the fact they have just released the steering hardware (made by Elite), which is not a trivial thing to acheive, a lot of time and effort would have gone into that when there are - in the opinion of most zwift users - more pressing matters they should address first.
As a programmer of many years, I know the programmers will not be happy with the fact that something has been broken, and most probably are facing tremendous amounts of pressure from upper layers of management to fix numerous problems. I’ve worked for startups that have expanded faster than they could cope, they’ve tended to try and fix problems by throwing lots of layers of management, programme managers, project managers, product owners, technical authorities, etc… at their organisation which leads to bloat and slows everything down… I assume the level of engineering staff is probably less than it should be, but also more than the current process/sw architecture can cope with (i.e. lots of developers working on a project is not always a good thing if it hasn’t been designed to cope with parallel development). There’s lots of issues they could be facing; I’m merely speculating but offering some insight into my own experiences - from working for and with various startups. To get back on point, the programmers have very little say when it comes to innovation, they just get told what to do by the product ownership team, and those are the guys that decide what is important and what needs to be done next… In communication with their marketing teams who should be feeding back into development to inform them which features they want based on customer feedback and/or research programs. Customer liasion employees should be collecting opinions from their user base and reporting back any issues. Once an issue such as this has been discovered, it should be acted on, i.e. as a minimum they should communicate the problem so other users are aware, not doing so clearly shows the company (not an individual employee or group of employees) simply doesn’t care, and that doesn’t reflect well.
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Thanks for the info. That was a long ride for me personally, but OK. I did notch another “up the Alpe” 
Do you happen to know if the “25 times up the Alpe” badge is in the same situation? I saw a post in this thread that seemed to say that. That is also one of the few badges I haven’t yet been awarded and I haven’t kept track…
Here is how to find how many times you have gone up the Alpe Du Zwift.
Open Strava on your phone in the feed click on “You” to show only your rides then scroll down to a ride
that has the Alpe Du Zwift climb in it click on the name of the ride scroll down to Results click on “View All Results”. This will bring up all the segments for the ride scroll down till you find the segment called “Alpe du Zwift (Zwift insider verified)” click on the segment and the number of Efforts will be shown under the segment map.
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Well, I can 100% verify that the last “fix” did not fix this issue. Just finished “Four Horseman” plus and no badge. Very frustrating.
How do we get this addressed?
Looking at this forum it look like they have found and squashed the bug for the uber Pretzel, so I assume it is the same bug in the Four Horseman .
Seems like total BS and the route should be removed from the available route menu while they KNOW there is a bug
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@xflintx - clearly I am annoyed that I did not earn the Four Horseman badge after finishing it today.
But I am more annoyed that after researching and finding this thread that it has been a known issue for 2-3 weeks and Zwift has not issued any warning such as “there is a known issue with XYZ routes…while it is fine to ride them, if you are looking for a completion badge, we recommend not using this routes at this time”…
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Nial: wow thanks for the tip! much appreciated.
I don’t believe the 25 times up the Alpe is affected.
My understanding is there was something wrong with the checkpoints around the Radio tower climb section specific to the Uber Pretzel and Four Horsemen routes. Other routes up the Radio Tower (eg Muir and the Mountain) were not affected
100% this