Thanks for the update, @Eric. To answer your question:
Given the difficulties with chat currently, I think all messages to everyone is the way to go right now.
It is a good default, and should always remain available as an option for event organizers if it’s possible to do the selection on a per-event basis.
From that base, it may be worth it to re-examine whether limiting chat reach can be implemented in a way that doesn’t cause issues, especially for racing.
And yes, as detailed by others above, bugs remain in the current implementation. There’s still:
Yellow/Red not visible to all (or each other)
All messages not visible to Yellow/Red
All messages within a bunch of riders not visible to everyone
Other event chats bleeding into chat (especially run events, especially Watopia Pier…)
By design, we keep the messages to the folks around you with the exception of the ride leaders / sweepers (which was fixed recently).
Just to be clear, this is not the observed behavior of chat prior to the TDZ changes that introduced the bug.
As someone who rode mid-pack, let’s say position 250 out of 500, I could easily communicate with someone who rode at the rear of the group (a “sweep”). This was how Zwift worked from the point I joined in late 2019 until this bug.
At no point was there any filtering of chat among a group ride based on proximity. I’m not sure if that was your teams intention or not, but it worked well and is our expectation of how things should be. Since these messages are being sent from server to client regardless, and the client is filtering, this is not a technical issue but a design decision. It’s not one that we want.
For whatever it is worth, prior to the late January update there was a proximity cutoff. On our long BMTR Fundos a faster group can get pretty far ahead of a slower group, and at some point the two groups would not be able to chat with each other. I do not know what the actual threshold was, but it felt similar to the threshold in a free ride where you only hear people around you. (So for example, someone in the desert would not hear someone climbing the Alpe.)
But yes, I agree with @Tony_Agee. The chat function worked great in building community prior to the late January.
@Eric: I think most, if not all, would be happy if the restrictions on group ride chat messages introduced in late January were rolled back, and let group ride chat function as it was before the January update.
Thanks for all of your feedback.This is very helpful. There were some changes made between our back end services which may have caused inadvertent behaviour. We thought we got to the bottom of it but clearly we have not. Our team is sorting this out.
I’ll second that from Michael - it’s good that this is being looked into because I’ve felt that big events have become slightly less social in the past couple of months.
I’ve struggled to put my finger on why, but in the chat for the Tour of Watopia yesterday, one person was leading a bit of fun by saying “guess the punchline to the joke.” I saw some guesses people made, and I saw the “joke leader” say someone had got it right, but I couldn’t see the response which had been declared as right. It feels as if we can only see chat from those very close to us, and that “chat radius” could benefit from being extended.
Thank you Eric! We have been patiently waiting to be able to hear everyone on chat within group rides. I speak for many who really miss the comradery that has been impacted by the chat proximity change.
It will also be nice to be able to hear those who inadvertently fall of the back and need help with a wheel. Right now once they are past 3 seconds back, you can’t hear nor see them.
So nearly 3 months has elapsed and still no fix has been identified. This really is pathetic Zwift. You are happy to take the monthly subs aided by covid when loads of people joined Zwift but you do not see to be on top of the platform at all. It is full of bugs and some updates introduce previously fixed ones. I wonder if perhaps your software version control needs to be seriously looked at, perhaps your operational practices worked when you were a small company when you had a small IT team who could communicate with each other but now your team has grown perhaps you need to revisit how you manage and deploy your software
Assuming there a priority list of fixes/features within Zwift HQ, I’m curious if community input has any weighting in this process? I only ask this as, with each release/update, I am continually astonished by how so many trivial and/or limited-impact fixes and new features are included but gigantic, community-breaking issues are repeatedly pushed back into the pizza oven.
Yes, I understand the artists aren’t the same folks working on Apple Watch integrations. But “Fixed a bug where riders in the event paddock would slide backwards.” or “Fixed a bug that would cause screenshots from a previous activity to appear in the End Activity screen for your next activity”…I’m sorry, but why is ANYONE touching these when they should be working on a bug that severely handicaps, if not outright breaks, the social aspect of your platform, one of the key values of your product?
Have your developers seen this thread? Have they seen that some of our users have already diagnosed exactly what the problem is, that the server is sending the chat to the client but the client is somehow filtering out the chat? Group ride chat should not be filtered, not by proximity, not by any measure. Yes, it makes sense in open-world riding, but not within a group.
Good questions Tony… let’s wait patiently for an answer; I’m sure it won’t take long.
I’ve pretty much stopped riding with groups because of this specific issue and in turn my time spent within Zwift has dropped considerably as I find alternatives… I’m sure I’m not the only one.
@Eric
Disappointing and unfortunate not to see this fixed in April’s update.
Even the yellow beacon is still not seeing all chat. I was on an Ascenders ride Monday EST morning where the leader noted he too was only getting half chat. So it appears to still be broken both as a tool for leading rides as well as an interaction for riders…and it’s been months now. Seems like this should be a priority.
Thanks for the quick response. While the team works on improving the functionality, is it possible to just roll it back to what it was in January? I think that would assuage the frustrations of the community.
