General feedback for ZRL

I thought I would start a discussion on ZRL now that we are in season 4. What do you like or dislike about it? What would you like to see changed, if anything?

I’ll go first.

Like:

  • Tracking team standings
  • Points provided to pretty much anyone that finishes the race
  • Courses are generally mixed up to provide variety
  • Prime points available each week
  • Playoff system
  • Private invite links to avoid random A’s joining D cat

Dislike:

  • TTTs are not ready for prime time. Not a fan of all the manual workarounds and lack of rule enforcement
  • Courses are generally designed for those with elite 1 to 5 minute power. Same handful of riders do well each week.
  • Prime points are over-indexed. This makes those same people mentioned above get most of the prime points each week.
  • Need to add one very long climb each season, at a minimum (e.g., Epic KOM, Alpe)
  • Results can be pretty slow on the WTRL site

Changes I’d like to see:

  • Get rid of TTTs until Zwift addresses this functionality
  • Introduce at least one route with a very long climb each season
  • Reduce prime points so that finishing points count more (e.g, 1st place for FAL maybe only 5 pts)
  • Track GC standings for the season
  • Consider split categories like TFC’s Mad Monday series. Currently, only top 3 or 4 teams in each division seem to be competitive to make the playoffs
  • Consider not allowing Tron or Disc wheels to make things more strategic
  • Make the playoff the following week, on the same day of the week that regular season races are
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Most of those are valid points, though I don’t think they’ll get much traction here. I would keep TTTs, I think they are one of the most interesting aspects, although I agree in-built functionality to support it is much needed. That is complex though - it would require Zwift to understand teams, which it doesn’t today.

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I think we all know going directly to the source normally doesn’t go well. Thought we could just chat here as racing enthusiasts.

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Do you think it would be that complex got TTTs? In my mind you would almost code it so that there are x totally separate ‘races’ going on for each team but you see all the other teams on the same course. Therefore you can draft and communicate with those in your ‘race’ (your team mates) but the other teams are effectively solid ghosts.

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My take:

Like:

NA

Dislike:
No morning timeslots for Central and Western USA

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You could set up 1 team per pen, which would be 5 teams per race, which would be a crraazzyyy number of manually set up events…

Ideally Zwift would understand the concept of a team, and they would be given identical release slots in the conveyor system.

Add to that, the ability to draft with TT bikes for these events only.

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Ha yes, didn’t mean set up events manually - more from a coding perspective. Or what you said. Basically it needs to be sorted as is very shoddy just now for an event type that is really fun, but could be so much more (as is the case for many things on Zwift!).

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With you on dropping the TTT . Especially 2 of them per season , 1 too many . What about replacing one of those with a standard individual TT . They have not done one of those and that would mix it up . It would certainly give those of us who are not sprinters a chance .

Yes to adding one climbers event because all the routes are pretty much geared as you say to the same rider profile so same riders win every week and you can pretty much garantee what place you will get. Even rides like next week that some might say are “climb focused” and still going to be decided on short sprint efforts up pot bank (maybe the false flat might proove me wrong , lets see) . And of course the finish is downhill so that is where race will be decided end of.

We are all aware however that this request will go down like a lead balloon with organisers .

Prime points do appear superficially to be too inflated but there is counter argument that it mixes up tactics.

+1 … Love to see Tron and Disc Wheels inhibited . I think that is supportable too . Would as you say make things more strategic and “realistic”.

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I’d like to see the Tron bike banned just because it’s so boring seeing so many of them. I say that as a Tron bike rider - can just never be arsed changing it!

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I wasn’t a fan of the TTT when it was alternate weeks in the first season(s?), I thought it was too much and after all we can do them on Thursday if we want. But I do think they have a role to play. It is a team event after all and there is very limited scope for team tactics in the points racing.

I think the courses this season have been rather disappointing with the dominance of sprinting, Previous two seasons were a better mix with Innsbruck and Surrey Hills and the extra TTTs. Added to that, I agree the prime points are too dominant. I’d like to see more discrimination in the finish points, 30th only gets 3 points less than 11th which seems crazy for the difference in achievement. You can fight and fight to beat three others guys in a small group and all end up with the same score anyway.

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Also, random shout-out to TFC. I wish they’d move the Mad Monday series to Thursday, Friday or Saturday. I think it’s a great series it’s just too hard for me to race back-to-back with ZRL.

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Exactly so… X1000

In ITT events Zwift has the conveyor belt programed each rider start time with start boost. Teams have a set delay already positions from prereg/series rankings. Put all the team members in one row across the start pen using each of the columns needed. Then a row/team moves up closer to start line each time team goes off. I know it will be some work to program it. If can be done as for an ITT, it can be done for TTT. There is even race clock programed with delay counted already that shows end result so less work in results processing. It will make WTRL work a whole lot easier post race.

In agreement with almost all you suggest, particularly enthusiastic about a better course mix with more climbing (sorry Charlie but the course choices were not the best this season), no tron (it’s boring) and rebalancing the points mix away from primes. With regards the primes, I really do think something needs done to stop it being possible for a rider to trundle round in the gruppeto picking up more FTS points than someone busting a gut for a high finish line position. That just doesn’t seem like racing to me and actively encourages sandbagging.

I am fine with the TTT to be honest, while I’m not a big fan personally I do like what it brings to the series and 2/8 rounds as TTT feels a much better balance to me than previous seasons.

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The TTTs are one of the best bits for me! It would be even better if Zwift actually had proper in-game support for them though.

Like anything on here it is trying to find a time slot… Thurs… WTRL TTT… TFC have over 15 teams per week and others have more. Friday is already very crowded and we have a TFC series then. Sunday is TFC group ride which we need to run for various reasons and it gives the team a chance to chat on a chill ride. It is always very difficult to please everybody and every race organiser faces the same issues so we do the best we can.

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A number of people rightly focused on my TTT comments. I would definitely welcome them and admit they add to the series. I just think the current iteration is very flawed.

Personal anecdote: Our team a couple of seasons back was battling for a playoff spot with another team. It came down to the final week, a TTT. We just missed out by 1 point and did not make the playoffs. The problem though was that the team that beat us apparently cheated, at least in our eyes. They kept leapfrogging with 2 other teams during the last 5 minutes of the TTT. It appeared to us that they gained an unfair advantage going back and forth with these other teams, with each of them being able to benefit from the draft in this scenario and having a higher pack speed. Who’s to say it was intentional or not, we just knew it was against the spirit of the rules. A team must slow down and let an approaching team pass. We filed a complaint but it’s just 1 guy policing hundreds of races and not watching any of this in real-time, it went nowhere. That’s why I think the TTT should be implemented once proper automation and controls can be leveraged.

I’m broadly in agreement with all your points.

The problem with that is zwift being global it’s very hard to find a timeslot to suit all unless we restrict playoffs per zone. I think this season the TTT is the same day and time then the scratch race the weekend which hopefully suits a few more people.

Changes i’d like to see.

Keep TTT but would like to see some variation in courses with more climbs to reward good teamwork rather than who can smash out the most watts on a flat TTT course. (obviously a proper TTT mode with team only drafting would be great)

Remove finishing points bracketing. make every position count even if that means you need to go from 100 points down to 0

Remove the league system and run qualification each season. There are far too many personal and ability changes season to season to assume a team will be at the same level so i think it would give a better balance to races if teams were resorted each season. More so in the lower cats C/D, i can understand maybe Cat A teams are a bit static.

Well certainly the TTTs are a bit of a mess at times, having teams going off at 30s intervals in reverse order seems designed to maximise the problem…but the points racing is also pretty arbitrary, yesterday we lost sprint points because our rider wasn’t listed in the last two primes, despite being clearly shown on the ZCL live stream as 3rd and 5th respectively and having no dropout problems. That also cost us a place in the results. “API problem” or some such. I don’t blame WTRL for that, they can’t really piece together results from video evidence but it was disappointing that the game simply failed to register parts of the ride. (The rider got his finish position fine and was listed in earlier sprints but not the last two).

Previous week another of our riders was demoted a place, he was a bike length clear of the following rider and again video evidence supported his finish position. It’s just a bit flaky all round. But at least that was only one place lost, not the complete sprint segment result. Never mind, there’s always another race along in a minute.

Yeah, I can understand why they do that, because that’s how TTTs work in the real world with the strongest team going last, but in Zwift it would actually be better to do it the OTHER way round.

If the fastest team went out first and the slowest last, then there would be much fewer issues with teams tripping over each other and allegations of “you didn’t slow to let us through” or “you hung onto our draft after we passed you” etc.

Having said that, I actually like the TTTs (maybe cause I’m a rider who will never feature in the top 10 in a points race, so primes aren’t a thing for me) and enjoyed the days when it was more than 2 races a season. Probably in a minority of one on that though!