Ok, the fence is a thing… we all know and respect it. Some folks like to ride on it and surf it and that is cool - they pay the price if they don’t pay the attention. And none of that should bother a ride leader because, hey, they set the pace and the fence is not going to get away from them, right? But then why do we have so many ride leaders whinging about those up on the fence…? And worse, what is with the ride leaders who toggle it on and off sloppily and cause a whole group of respectful well paced riders to get kicked like just happened today in the a certain, er, “easier” ride? if you are a ride leader, just set the fence and forget the fence and let those who like to play with it do their thing. Don’t be the ride leader that pulls it in to suit your own discomfort. And don’t be a ride leader who causes people to get unfairly kicked in the last few minutes, eh? I mean I am pretty sure his afternon’s ride leader just made a goof, but I have experienced certain other ride leaders brag about how they are known to fry people (one even give oneself a nickname, eh) and then witnessed them toggle the fence in vengeful way. C’mon man… respecting the fence is everybody’s responsibility - especially the ride leader. Burning people with sloppy fence control is so uncool, man!
I thought the fence was intended to encourage people to ride with the yellow beacon?
Pretty sure the point of the fence is not to encourage people to ride with the fence.
I believe this misunderstanding may well be the source of people’s confusion and misery.
It is the intended outcome but most leaders will run the fence at 5 or 10 seconds gap ahead as they themselves don’t want to be staring at a fence for the whole ride and it allows a bit of movement around the beacon for other riders.
But there will also be a subset of riders that like to lick the fence. To me its not a problem. 99% of them are respectful and just ride the fence rather than going past it so it’s not a problem.
All i can advise is if you don’t like a ride leaders style move onto a different ride there are lots of social rides to choose from.
Zwiftcraft is real. I enjoy the variety.
It’s not possible to comment on the specifics of your ride experience without seeing it, but in any case your comment isn’t going to be very effective here. You don’t have a way to influence all the leaders who use the fence, or even a significant number of them. What you can do is either give some respectful feedback to the club that ran the event afterwards (preferably in private if you want it to do anything) or pick rides with leaders who do a good job according to your criteria, or pick rides without a fence. On ZwiftHacks events page you can see if the ride is fenced, or has “No kick mode” enabled which makes the fence advisory only. Basically I know the rides I like, I know how their leaders behave, and when I think they are incompetent or habitually inattentive I might not come back.
I have done thousands of group rides and never seen the leader use the fence in a punitive way, though I have seen them mess up and accidentally zap some people by turning on the fence when riders are already up the road, or pulling it in when riders are descending away from the group. They’re usually not happy about that, but mistakes happen. If you see behavior by a leader that is clearly malicious then I would report it to the events team.