There’s a large thread at the Garmin forums concerning this:
From my point of view they did a dumb descision. I thought badges should motivate people doing more sports. Every user of Garmin Connect owns at least one Garmin device. As long as they treat Garmin Connect as a central plattform for all activities their users did, it should not matter which device is used for recording.
I’m using a Texc Neo (means: a Garmin device), Vecor pedals (Garmin device), a Fenix Watch (guess what) and several other Garmin stuff. If I decide to record an activity by Zwift I’m still using Garmin devices. But I’m not RECORDING the activity with any. From my point of view those rides should count for the Badges.
Maybe we should flood the forums and the Garmin support with the request of letting Zwift rides count again (they say it was a bug that rides counted in the past).
For the ones of us who don’t want to wait if they will change the rules, there’s a simple solution:
- Disconnect Zwift from Garmin that the activities aren’t uploaded automatically anymore
- Do your ride
- Download the ride data from Zwift (The at Home Cycling & Running Virtual Training App)
- Go to https://www.fitfiletools.com/#/changer#view and upload your file
- Select any Garmin device as new device (I’m using one of the Edge devices for example)
- Download the generated file
- Manually upload the new file (fitfiletools.fit) to Garmin
Now you have the complete data from Zwift, including HR, slope, GPS… in Garmin and Garmin Connect says “recorded by xxxx” (where xxx is the device you’ve chosen before) instead of “uploaded by Zwift” - and your ride is counted for the badges.
From my point of you they are simply dumb. Every experienced user knows how to modify fit files. Now we have a lot of work to do instead to simply connect Zwift with Garmin and everything’s fine like it was in the past 