Another issue I had this morning and have had all this week is the group I’m riding with disappearing and reappearing. This was happening every 2 minutes or so this morning.
I’ll be riding along with the Coco group in Watopia. All of a sudden everyone disappears. No error messages on screen. Within a second, everyone re-appears. If the bot is in view, it stays present but it jumps position slightly when everyone comes back. While this sounds like a network dropout it doesn’t behave like one as I don’t get any disconnection messages, and my companion app keeps working throughout. In a 1.5 hour ride this morning I’d estimate this happened easily 40 times. I have in the past rebooted my router mid-ride, and I know that when I do this my ATV will report that the WIFI connection is lost. I saw no such messages this morning.
There’s was a hint something wasn’t quite right this morning as when I sent my “hello” message to the group after first joining it took maybe 10 seconds to appear on screen. It’s usually immediate.
In addition to this, I had 3 occasions where the “Connection Disconnected” message appeared. Each time this happened I was fully disconnected for anything up to 5 minutes (estimated). During this period I checked my WIFI using my phone and it was all up an running with full internet access, and again no reports on ATV of WIFI lost.
I know it’s tempting to say this is a network issue, but it really doesn’t feel like one to me. I have a mesh network, but the second access point is switched off at the moment.
There was also one occasion where the group I was with all suddenly turned off the route at the point where the exit of the volcano loop can go either left toward downtown or right towards the village. I was with a group of maybe 10 riders, all slightly ahead of Coco but on the same route. They all turned left, my avatar turned right (the correct way), and then they all suddenly reapppeared on the correct route next to me.
These issues with the group disappearing and reappearing started around the 1.40 update and are not specific to 1.42. But today I had a lot of them. I have waited to report it as someone else online said that there had been server issues when I first started seeing it, so I just waited for those to be addressed.
Put aside the ones with “connection disconnected” for a moment and concentrate on the other 40+ instances of the group disappearing. I have not made any network changes and my WIFI signal is strong. If it’s a connection issue, then this is odd as I am not seeing any messages about connection issues on screen. Just the whole group disappears and then immediately comes back. I won’t speculate as to the cause as I don’t know what your implementation is, but it really feels like something is happening on the server side to me.
My point is that the disappearing riders is almost always caused by an internet connection.
I’m afraid there isn’t much on that front that I can look into for you, but if you contact support and asttach logs of a ride where this seemed prevalent in, they should be able to help you out.
I’m not seeing any more reports of this than is normal.
Riders disappearing entirely is typically related to losing network connectivity to Zwift. The problem can be anywhere between your client and the back end: home network, ISP, transit to Zwift, data center hosting the back end. If this were a general problem with the back end service connectivity we would almost certainly be getting a lot of reports here. These problems are more likely to come up the farther you are from Zwift’s equipment on the west coast of the US. If I were experiencing this, I would upload logs to zwiftalizer.com and look at the graphs for network errors, timeouts, and latency. There is also a ping test you can run on zwiftalizer.com
Username scrolling is still a problem in events. I ended up at the top of the list stuck there and couldn’t see the people listed ahead of me. Clicking on someone else then going back to me reset my position in the list but the problem quickly repeats itself.
In that case apologies. Was freeriding Scotland after finishing the hill climb event and definitely no ca turn prompts (visible on pc). Might always be the case after finishing an event and I’ve never noticed before. Will test again and report back
“Completely random” is a bit of a cop-out. How about rewarding loyalty. I’ve been with Zwift from very early on and now wait days to weeks for recent upgrades.
I don’t want to put words in @shooj 's mouth, but I’m pretty sure he’d recommend the Zwift Play controller (as launched today) over Elite’s Sterzo Smart.
As a user of the Sterzo Smart since its launch some years back, I’d say it’s been a good steering device on the whole. I definitely like having a ‘free’ front end on the bike and I don’t plan to stop using it.
The only real drawback that I’ve come across was highlighted just a few days ago on the Repack Rush route, where I found I had to turn the bars fully left and fully right (within the Sterzo’s roughly 40° range of motion) to achieve the movement necessary to ‘play the game’ as required. As I have some toe overlap on my set-up, this made pedaling throughout difficult or impossible. The whole thing felt a bit weird.
Usually when steering in Zwift with the Sterzo Smart, I’ve been able to keep to a more subtle steering movement that became intuitive. Nevertheless, turning the bars to steer, without any of the leaning to the left or right that we do on the bike outside has never felt that natural.
I suppose that this new controller from Zwift signals that they are removing any pretense at mimicking natural steering, going all in with thumb button presses.
