Hey Zwifters, today we’ve got an update for one of our favorite times of year on Zwift - Halloween. We’ve added a totally optional mini-challenge on Watopia to find 4 locations that unlock pieces of a Halloween costume. The costume is only usable for Halloween, and will be gone once the day has come and gone.
Additionally, while we continue work on some of our big projects (ie, things that are taking 6+ months to complete) we’ve made a few changes in this update and a recent patch, such as:
- Reworked ‘lead-in’ system for events. This should improve the lead-in countdown before lap based events, as well as resolve some of the other discrepancies we saw in the user interface during those events.
- Fixed screen-size issue due to an Apple change in tvOS 13 on certain Apple TV’s, when used with 720p televisions
- Fixed WatchOS 6 support
- Fixed crash on iOS 13.1 + iPhones
- Added Movember mission for November
- Added content for Zwift Tri Academy
- Tweaked speeds for meetups with the ‘Keep Everyone Together’ feature
- Added Cannondale SuperSix Evo
- Added additional variant of new user tutorial
I also wanted to touch on the rolling resistance changes that we made earlier in the month. Up until recently road and TT bikes went unrealistically fast on rough surfaces. As we start to think about adding other bike types such as gravel, cx, mountain bikes, fat bikes, etc in the future it made sense to start taking into consideration surface roughness vs tire/bike type. We don’t allow drafting on TT bikes. Some bikes are kilograms heavier than others and are bad for climbing. And now, road bikes can’t pretend dirt is tarmac. Dirt now acts more like dirt.
Now, with that out of the way, much of the negative feedback from some of our most outspoken Zwifters really stemmed from the fact the transition wasn’t handled very gracefully. We did a poor job of ensuring everybody got that specific update at the same time causing group rides to get blown apart as well as races being won unfairly. We’ll now be building some simple restrictions to events to ensure a more level playing field for the future (ie, requirements on equipment, up-to-date software, etc). We regret that some of the competitiveness of some group rides and races was ruined. As we continue to deprecate the older clients this issue should become mostly resolved. Additionally we’ll soon try and ensure everybody riding on events specifically on the jungle circuit will be doing so on the same class of bike (ie, MTB).
Finally, I want to thank the community for all the feedback on the steering test we launched earlier in the month. While the early skeptics were certainly vocal about it in the “Whats new” post previous to this one, in the end we’ve had almost 20,000 test rides fully completed start to finish and overwhelmingly positive feedback. While it was meant to be a low volume test, I think it could end up as a permanent addition to Watopia in the future. Who knows - maybe a whole network of single track trails can spread through the wilderness of Watopia one day.
I’ll end on a note saying we do read the feedback in this thread (and elsewhere) - even if we can’t respond to everything. I’ll personally try to check in a little more often with replies
With that, Ride on!