Since 1.79 or some time in the past two weeks when Zwift unofficially threw PD5 beta testing into Watopia and failed to inform everyone.
So far I’ve yet to hear any positive comments; but lots of people are beginning to notice that something is off in Watopia.
I would say so, I just did 1/3 of a race not in the draft,… I should have left my steering on but didn’t want it to affect my non steer riders,… boy was I wrong,… Zwift did it for me.
I’m somewhat surprised there isn’t a specific thread on this behavior change yet. It seems to be somewhat impactful to people. Personally I haven’t noticed a big change in power, mostly a change in my positioning on screen, where it seems I’m split off out of the middle more than usual, but some are noticing bigger differences.
Is it the same metric, just with another name? Was there a reason for that (i.e. is TSS copyrighted in some way?)
TSS is copyrighted by TrainingPeaks.
Yes and yes.
I rode a workout (Zwift Camp: Baseline #2) on Zwift 1.80 on a Tacx Neo 2T earlier today and erg mode did not work - all of the steps of the workout seemed to be as if they were in incline mode. Toggling between erg and incline modes, disconnecting and reconnecting the trainer, pausing/unpausing the workout made no difference. I’ve never had this happen before. Possible bug in 1.80?
Possibly relating to TrainingPeaks buying indieVelo and now being a direct competitor to virtual-cycling-3D-world-type-things. Bit more sensitivity on using a Training Peaks metric maybe?
I LIKE IT…Sorry. Before in PD4 you had avatars inside one another at least now you have to go around a rider…we want more exciting racing and this will provide it as Groups are again much slower.
Everyone please note.
It’s not that I don’t like it, though I haven’t had a chance to toy with it.
It does seem the space an avatar consumes with steering enabled is now “fixed”, where up until now, with steering enabled you could go within riders ala PD3.
The issue I, and majority of people are having issues with; is the lack of control over their avatar, and ending up going into lanes with less draft.
When a blob is fat, the tail should be V shaped; not | | shaped with nobody in the middle…
I’m more surprised they threw on such a major change and failed to inform their customerbase, but here we are…
I considered starting one; but I don’t know what good it would do. It genuinely needs to be coming from someone who actually knows what the heck PD5 is and has changed.
I shared this image previously, but it depicts the real issue with PD5 and group rides right now (RP’s as well), where avatars just seem to not want to help each other out the back… and thus more riders just get dropped for seemingly no fault of our own.
And those with steering… all they do is seem to get magnetically attached to other riders with steering; so it’s not even interesting anymore, and swerving out of the way doesn’t appear to be a function of the system as it stands.
There are 3 lanes here in front of me (me being in blue hat near the double yellow line).
why.
This is what’s wrong with PD5.
Tonight’s TTT PD5 experience be like:
(nobody had steering)
And yes; RIP my teammate who forgot to swap bikes lol. Managed to hang on the whole time though!
They need to learn how to save watts…i see this all the time they are pushing same power not matter if you have descent and you accelerate past your rider infront and hit the wind…this is exactly why groups are now slower.
It has to be like this otherwise we get artificial acceleration when you can ride inside avatars.
I fully second John’s complaints. Even Zwift Play is wasted money with regard to steering. Furthermore, large groups have started to ride close at the midline. I don’t need the feeling of a pro riding on the oncoming lane.
The middle image is absolutely not this.
When we lose control over where our avatars end up and are all over the road despite spreading out to get in line and they… choose not to.
I had a MULTITUDE of pulls where I had to give up pulling because the team wouldn’t fall in-line with my avatar.
For no reason, my guy would ride off to one side of the road and the whole team on the other side.
Getting into a pace line was far more difficult than it previously has been; can it happen? Yes.
But it was more rare, and nearly half the race was spent being split in two separate lanes… and obviously no control over that.
I get the argument you want to make, but it doesn’t matter when we have no control here other than complaining to ZHQ.
A pace line can’t be made when some riders are going left and others right, and we are being forced to make additional lanes and everyone is getting jumbled around.
This isn’t our first TTT, and our other teams struggled with it greatly as well; folks with well over 100 TTT’s experience.
When you’re trying to make a pace line but the line splits into two lanes in the middle of every single pull except when the strongest person on the team goes… something is just plain wrong.
I keep getting this, I was able to get into the game an do a ride after clicking no, and then getting another warning that I’m not connected to the internet (I am).
When we did the ZRL TTT the other week, it was the first time I felt the PD drafting worked as intended. If you let off the power a little and let a small gap form, a rider would slot into that space naturally and you had a lovely lined up group, if you kept the power down that rider was forced to stay out wide, you literally had to have confidence the system would move the rider into position, and tbf it did.
Was that due to PD5, or does this new version now make this a better or worse experience?
Sounds like a normal TTT PD4 experience to me.
But what my team were experiencing last night was far from normal!
As said; when we could get a paceline, it was great… but it wasn’t even 50% of the time…
It was just more aggravating when we were getting split in lanes; or like I said, my one character would decide to sling off to one side completely alone.
Some experiences with the WTRL TTT on Watopia last night may also be greatly varied due to how balanced a team is… ours… was extremely imbalanced:
ZP: avg w/kg, avg w, NP, weight, height
I’ve had this screen on my PC before.
I just close Zwift down. Close the little Z in the action bar area and then reboot the PC.
Log back into zwift and works fine after that.
That’s exactly how my experience was as well, it was even like this on the KOM’s
