How ZRS Score changes are made

But the whole system is broken. Riders can easily ride an ITT race like this and be way ahead of the field and still put in a low ZRS score. Good thing for those that are out to sandbag, there are tons of way to do it.

This race beating 100 riders by over 17s and having a seed score of under 230, when others are setting seed score of 300 definitely shows a flaw.

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In the old category enforcement races lighter riders at the top end of the Cats would have to go over the Cat limit to beat the heavier rider in a race if the heavier rider was near the Cat limit,then they would get promoted to the bottom of the next Cat, this new system is doing the exact same to the heavier riders hence you can do 4 W/kg for 5 minutes at 63kg? and have a score of 243 after the race but the heavier riders doing 3.8 W/kg who you are beating get a score of 307 and put in the next pen.

I think when the heavier riders realise how the system works they will just change their weight to whatever is optimal as its rigged in favour of lighter riders.

The old system was silly with the watts floor too. Those at 45kg can be smashing 5 w/kg in C.

The problem is just using a single data point and the fact that they hired a phd data scientist for input. Like what could be the problem of using a single data point as that combine a varying range of skills!

Why is it surprising when the best drafter with the strongest sprint wins and the rider with the best itt skill wins? Path to victory seem to be the extreme outliers.

And wait till next years ZRL. When multiple riders do a team breakaway and pull a team TTT in a point race while sandbagging 5 mins.

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It isnt.

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Probably already mentioned, but another consequence of this stupid system and how small pen fields creates bigger score changes, taking part properly in a TT event (in the correct pen at max effort power) risks a big score increase for simply finishing in the top half of your pen! :clown_face:

So no shock, the already often unpopular TT events are getting even less participation.

Racing Score needs to change to be a vELO system, where you only get a score increase if you beat people the system says you’re not expected to beat, or you get a new 5min power best from your recent history.

A vELO system would also mean racers cannot drop their score by racing in a pen higher than their correct one (eg. an E racer joing pen A), because they would be expected to finish close to if not dead last.

Racing Score as it stands is terrible and combined with events coming off the public schedule through lack of entries, it could well kill off Zwift racing and TTing altogether.

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Lots of the zwift itt are to short. can’t stream them, it to short can’t make youtube , and not good test.

i dont know why james has it set up that way, 20 min or more.

James has always started each new TT Club series with a short one, such as the current one lap of La Guardia.

The issue for me with substantial stamina problems, is that the last couple of weeks of series are often monsters, like a lap of Makuri 40.

Did a race yesterday that was very very hot for the “D” cat of 210-330. Looking at the results we had 2 riders that ended up with a ZRS score of 388 and 379 respectively. I dont know what their score was prior to the race, but I seriously doubt that Zwift gave them an increase of 50 points from 1 race, so how were they able to enter the 210-330 Pen??

The score change sign shows they recorded new 5min power for the last 90 days, so their seed score was increased.

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I agree.
I am surprised that we are still seeing this much volatility of scores.
We probably are aware of how much some people are decreasing their scores.

Still,not enough top cat races.

I’ve been bumped up a bit and will race rande 2 for a while and that’s every 2 hours.
While that is a little inconvenient ( my normal race time was 11 am) , it’s doable and not too hard to adjust.

What is happening with the 700+ racers is just terrible.
They should be offered a race at least every 2 hours.

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Its not just the volatility. As mentioned, those 2 guys no way came into that race with a score under 330, so how did Zwift allow them to enter that race in the 210-330? Ive finished top 10 and the most my ZRS score increased by was 5 points. And, that was coming off my score floor and with my best power output in a race. Theres still things that are broken with the system.

Yes, they likely did come into that event with a score that put them in this D range. As mentioned, the significant score bump (eg. for the winner) was not due to placement, but a change in the baseline seed score. He did a 4.5 w/kg 5-minute effort (5m is what ZRS seeds are based on). His prior best 5m power was only 3.7 w/kg (so significant change in seeding due to this)

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As mentioned above they both set new 5min pbs in the race and this gave them large score increases from seed changes.
Winner probably entered the race with a score of 322 ( previous race 4th Jan)

7th place score entering race was 318 from race 2 days before.

Results based point movements are not huge but new 5 min pb score changes can be much larger.

Zwift has fairly recently implemented a system by which you can’t enter the pen with a ZRS higher than the pen range. I believe there is currently an issue in regards back to back races within a very short time period.

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Aah ok, thanks for the clarification. How are you able to see other riders ZRS for past races etc?

You need to look at their activity (I use Zwift Companion App) and find their last race result. Fairly easy if they have Public account and save activity as Public.[Not guaranteed to be accurate if their 5 min pb has changed in between races]

There have been a few requests to make ZRS score history more visible for all racers.

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Yep, still waiting for it to function for the likes of Tiny Races. :unamused:

The really annoying thing is, I haven’t noticed Racing Score adjustments from Tiny Races from reprocessing results up to ~12 hours, so from what I can see those immediate scores shown after a single race are valid and should be used to exclude those who exceed the pen range.

I’m beyond sick of seeing at least one racer in pen E Tiny Races go way above the supposed score threshold of 260 (which I think is too high and I’d like @Eric_Schlange_ZwftIn to reduce pen E to something close to 0-225 at most) every single week and I think in every single zone per weekend.
Last weekend there were nine pen E racers registered at zwiftpower (so excluding any non-registered, which could also exclude any non-subscribed “burner” accounts created just for that quartet) in zone 2 who exceeded 260…

Can it even work for the tiny races ? How would it cope with riders who dont finish in 15 min but do finish when the others are already in the next race ?

You could of course calculate from the riders actually starting the race but afaik DNF and other dropouts arent taking into the ZRS calculation.

The number of Tiny Race participants getting a pen promotioin through improved 5min seed score, but not finishing within 15mins of the pen start will be minimal to non-existant, won’t it?

That is what we dont know I guess.

Do you get different ZRS scores when you finish 5th out of 10 riders than when it is 5th out of 15 riders if we take that 5 riders dont make the 15 min cut.

Tiny Races really needs to create and enforce a n-1 race entry requirement to prevent people jumping into the middle of the series.

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