Zwift game version 1.66 begins phased rollout today to Windows / macOS / Android machines.
Phased rollout to iOS / tvOS begins tomorrow. Here’s what in this release:
Fixed an issue that could cause the “Weekly Goal Met!” banner image to be blank.
Fixed an issue where the route progress bar could disappear on the Zwift Games Epic 2024 route.
Rider shadows and fire sock trails are no longer visible when using the Ghost power-up.
Corrected the cadence target in one of the Spaded Sweetie workout blocks.
TrainingPeaks workouts now include the next seven days of workouts, which are available in the TrainingPeaks custom workouts folder.
Fixed an issue that could cause some BH Fitness treadmills to not send speed data.
Changed the name of the Pause menu to just Menu as we are not technically pausing the game.
Apple TV, iOS
Fixed an issue where some Apple TV or iOS users may have to re-enter their login credentials after a Zwift game update.
UPDATE MAY 29
Phased rollout to Windows / macOS / Android continues today.
Phased rollout to iOS / tvOS has begun.
UPDATE MAY 30
Phased rollout to all OS platforms is complete.
Do you have questions or issues to report? Let us know below.
Surprised not to see the new roads mentioned! … so my best guess is that, due to the phased rollout, the new roads (teased last week), will be live once everyone has the latest game version?
… or will there be a seperare announcement on these (i.e. we have to wait longer than Thursday this week?)
Yes I’m talking about @Jon ’s poorly thought out smudge he decided to add to ultra profile a couple months ago. That it still exists is more evidence that ZHQ hates its users.
This isn’t the thread to go deep into it but a handful of the many issues:
Few UI/UX options and removing what exists
Awful user-hostile UI/UX
No QA
Claiming QA exists and is good at what they do
Implementing universally hated features that no one asked for
Promising features then pretending they never were supposed to exist
Intentionally kneecapping community events
Banning users instead of fixing bugs
If you don’t like the statement “ZHQ hates its users” then feel free to pick a slightly softer word. “Disdains” would work.
They make some decisions that I don’t like, though I often understand the reasoning behind the choice and I can imagine a user who likes what they did. Sometimes I can’t figure it out and it just seems like a bad choice, but in that case I don’t ascribe any negative motivation to it on their part. I just try to give them straight feedback about it (sometimes very persistently) without being insulting. If you want to motivate them to fix it, I doubt they are any more likely to address users’ unhappiness with the shadow change if you tell them how awful they are. That’s more likely to result in concluding that you can’t be satisfied so why bother trying?
From the QA perspective I sympathize with the QA team. My guess is it’s not a big team, they need to run test passes every two weeks, these probably come in hot, and their support matrix is really large because it contains at the minimum:
Many UX form factors (From a 10’ apple TV experience to a phone experience), but also every possible PC display config/setting.
Many platforms (PC, Android, Web, AppleTV, iPhone)
Multiple apps/sites (In addition to the main Zwift app they have the companion app across iOS/Android, Zwiftpower, Zwift.com, and probably other things).
A large hardware matrix for third party trainers, HR monitors, and power meters (you would think these would all be standard but we’ve seen bugs specific to specific trainers so they are not all consistent).
A hardware matrix for other control devices (steering, Zwift Play)
Their own game engine: The Zwift game is not built on Unity or Unreal, where there’s an entire company devoted to improving/fixing the game engine over time. If an iOS update breaks all of unity’s iOS apps I imagine Apple is more likely to prioritize fixing it than if it breaks the Zwift game engine. So I imagine Zwift has to work around a lot of OS issues on each platform etc.
Anyhow, my guess is just trying to run the P0 scenarios across this whole matrix would take a long time, and given the game engine is custom it’s probably not got all the automation and tools associated with the other engines, but who knows.
Given my nature of being overflowing with optimism and positivity, I am assuming competence on the part of everyone there. Which unfortunately leaves malice as the most likely explanation for so many choices.
You are lacking some imagination. Competence doesn’t mean making the right choice all the time, and what we perceive as the right choice might be constrained by a variety of other factors - technical, organizational, financial, or perhaps the desires of other stakeholders who don’t share our views. As a customer I try to act like a manager of the team doing the work, because that’s the groove I fall into because of my work background. In the case of the bad shadows, we’ve already heard that they made the decision because they thought it looked better. I put that in the category of “competent person who is not right all the time”. In other words, a human. If I were the boss of Zwift and I had a manager who was telling their team that they are malicious idiots when they make mistakes or choices that turn out to be incorrect, I know who I would fire first.
I see the smudge shadows as a symptom of a deeper issue with zwift. They were added to make the bike-road interface look better, but the fundamental problem is that the bottom of the tyre doesn’t align with the road surface. Sometimes the wheel is buried in the road, sometimes the bike is hovering off the ground. So instead of fixing that underlying problem, they added a quick patch hoping to mask the issue. And of course that patch had more bugs.
Yes, the task of fixing the foundation without destroying everything that’s been built on top is much harder than patching and painting. But with a shoddy foundation the cracks will just keep appearing.
Any update on the zoomed in mini map? This automatically happened for a short period on makuri40. Otherwise I keep the map 2D zoomed out.
I am using v1.65 on a W10 PC
