I need some advice on how to report a rider who is clearly cheating and ruining the racing experience.
If you look at his ZwiftPower profile, his 20-minute power is listed at 490W and 6.5 W/kg. These are professional Grand Tour podium numbers, which are impossible for an unverified amateur account.
It looks like he was already caught and suspended in the past, as he has a long streak of races with no results registered. However, he is now back on the platform and continuing to destroy race dynamics for everyone else.
What is the best way to flag a returning offender so that Zwift takes permanent action? Is standard in-game flagging enough, or should I contact support directly with his ZwiftPower ID?
Thank you. I will try to report this to the Zwift assistant because this is major cheating and it completely destroys the race dynamics. Personally, I finished 8th in the race, so one place higher doesn’t really change anything for me. However, I imagine it must be very frustrating for the runner-up
Right?! In the exact same team, they have an incredibly talented sprinter with an all-time record of 2000W (26.7 w/kg)! And to top it off, they have a 60+ year old rider holding 5.0 w/kg (365W) average for over 33 minutes, peaking at 20.4 w/kg for 15s! He must be immortal. This team is absolutely fantastic, they are probably beings from another planet!
If every team had to verify it’s top 3 riders on a continuing basis you could decentralize the work away from Zwift and clean up racing pretty quickly. Add in Zwift asking the top 100 to verify for a silly “best power on platform” badge or something and you could probably get rid of most of the silliness.
FYI - ZPower you can go to Rankings > Zpoints and filter by power score to find most of the hilarious power accounts. I’m sure Zwift has better internal tools as well.
Thanks for the info! I just checked and indeed, they have three of their riders in the top 10 for power in Zpoints. The rider over 60 is actually ranked 2nd in terms of power on this leaderboard—incredible! I understand that the platform can’t catch every single cheater, but with the ZRS on ZwiftPower, it’s really easy to detect them.
I saw this guy earlier, he won the race I would have done if I hadn’t given up with ZRacing because of all the cheating. This guy has lost 9kg this year, never dual recorded, 490w for 20mins, ZRVG against his name. Everything that is wrong with Zwift racing in one account.
I used that form quite a few times but to my knowledge nothing ever happened. I never got a response and everybody carried on doing what they were doing before.
That’s sounds like an awful solution. You have to know that there’s this one guy on a forum with an email address you can send a message to? Ridiculous. (not having a go at you)
That’s why I suggest a periodic report, completely anonymized, so you encourage people to keep reporting. If you don’t do that, you lose the trust of people who are interested in helping, so they stop helping. It would be a way of demonstrating that “yes we are taking action” since without it, people are left to assume the company does not care.
Well, it sounds like this particular rider was reported many times, and they are still riding, so it seems Zwift internal process seems they are legit. For anyone looking at those numbers from this rider and believing there is no way this person is legit, that on its own would make people lose trust in the system even if they did a general report.
I’m looking at the overall situation rather than expecting a specific outcome when someone is reported. The action taken might not always be what I would want, but we know the person we’re talking about got a sanction, it didn’t last forever, now maybe they get another one, maybe it’s longer than the last one, we don’t know. But if there’s reporting about what gets acted upon, the numbers, to me that is helpful. For others perhaps not but I don’t think it’s possible to manage those expectations perfectly. The point is to maintain community support for reporting in general, and I think any signs of action would result in more reports.
