i’m not against the idea at all. why not have both. i think FRR with their NP categories (i think approximately an hour would work better than 20mins+ because that is dr coggan’s personal recommendation if you are going to determine ability from NP - Archived notes from Dr. Andrew Coggan on the Seven Deadly Sins (functional threshold testing methods) ) are onto something too. there are a lot of possible ways you can categorise zwift racers
but you have to understand that they are all going to be flawed in one way or another and favourable to certain people over others. so more than 1 universal system is necessary, i think.
Ranking new riders will always be difficult. Returning riders I’d again advocate for longer look back windows.
I think the main thing to conclude, and if I interpreted your posts across forum properly you’d underwrite this, is that Zwift should enable two things:
Many options to categorize riders (ideally also able to link to community iniatives such as this)
enforcing those categories
I’d also add a third which is much better information how races are setup. How are you categorized, how is race scored, where are primes for instance etc. As personally now in many I have no idea (and not having Facebook is apparently a negative for Zwift…)
Anyway, having those two options and the community will pick several options, improve them and appeal to s much wider audience. Probably something will be developed we can’t think off but will be a blast for races. Much better than a centralized approach and the community has been driving most race development to begin with. Zwift has mostly been hampering things and should focus on providing tools.
The ‘matchmaking’ style system is really promising too. We trialled it recently. After the signups deadline, I looked at the ranks of the riders, and decided 3 pens was about right considering field size and course selection. I then roughly split the signups in to the 3 pens, so there were no major ability drop offs (the middle pen ended up quite a bit larger than the top and bottom ones).
Hey presto. Fair, fun racing with rankings to play for as well. Too manual, but very much possible to automate it
I think there’s a good case to be made for ranking on the basis of N best races rather than all events, which will start to drop people down as soon as they get a poor result. Training rides at below full effort, equipment problems and other interruptions can all result in an unrepresentative result. Plus, it’s a bit of an open goal for sandbaggers who want to drop down prior to a particular target event. You can’t entirely stop such behaviour but you can make it more difficult to achieve.
Assuming a normal distribution makes sense when grouping by ability
Unfortunately I couldnt join.
Anyway, unfortunately for proper development we need tools by Zwift and their track record is… Not great. Still believe/hope this is the Myspace and something much better is around the corner (but then more positive impact then the thing that blew MySpace away).
Was digging through some ZR results and came across a small anomoly.
How does ZR cope with ZwiftPower results that get amended after the fact?
In a ZRL race a couple of weeks ago I crossed the line 4th, but the guy in front of me in 3rd was DQed for going over power limits.
That DQ did not show on ZP for several days afterwards.
On ZR, the original result still stands.
I’m not asking you to change it. It’s small beer and I don’t care about that. I’m just interested in how the ZR system deals with (or doesn’t) anomolous situations like this? I think ZRL results are often 24hr+ before DQs are finalised.
There is an API to pull a rider’s ranking, so in theory any race organiser could set one up as I did.
We’re looking at the possibility of setting up a race organiser portal where the whole process can be mostly automated, using the Clubs event functionality. Any organiser could use it as long as they are able to admin a race on Zwift Power.
Possibly a stupid question (given that I’m never going to be in this position), but what happens to a rider’s ranking points on ZR.app if he/she is promoted based upon the current Zwift Power system e.g. an upcat from C to B?
Does the ZR ranking points re-set somehow, or do they retain their original points which then re-equilibrate based upon the, now, stiffer competition? Sorry for all the hypotheticals.
Well, I’m not sure exactly how you define “fair”. i can just foresee that if the system takes off and is widely applied, some riders will race hard once and then do their Z2 rides at the back of other races to keep their rank down. Repeat ad infinitum.
One reason this doesn’t happen much in chess is that playing a ranked game has a significant cost in both time and money. Plus, it’s actually pretty boring beating up rubbish players. Even so, some will try to drop their ranking just prior to a big competition, if they are just above the boundary between even classes.
You can never stop all determined gaming of course, but if your system allows people to win twice a week without promotion, by virtue of also deliberately losing 4 times a week (say), I think it might not work as a widespread solution.
speaking as the resident, uh, ethically flexible zwift racer on this forum, my stance is that i would probably do exactly this if it was universally implemented just by virtue of the fact i cannot race 6+ times a week and expect to be 100% committed in all of them
but a ranking system that looks at all your results (including in unranked) and can be applied optionally by race organisers seems reasonable. at the very worst, i can at least not race them, but i like to have fun too so i will probably participate now and again and when i do i will be, hopefully, appropriately ranked regardless of how i normally use zwift races
Yeah we’re trying to walk a fine line to produce an outcome where the effort to ‘deliberately’ ride easy to reduce one’s rank just isn’t really worth it.
A couple of ways to deal with that:
algorithmically, meaning you have to do a lot of races to have the desired affect. So anyone doing it is really a permanent resident of loserville
Flexible race boundaries and customisable pens - it’s much harder to lower your ranking deliberately if you don’t know what you have to lower it to.
Also, already implemented in the API, is the highest ranking for the past 10 (I think) days. You can sort by this rather than the current rank - again making deliberate reduction of rank a waste of time.
Im not sure about that, there are a few others who have been caught cheating that seem to pop up from time to time… they definitely read the forum, post every now and then too…
yeah, i just opted out because i went on a short lived “delete everything and attempt become an anonymous zwift hermit” spree. then i got a grip. i’ll opt back in now
i’d like to go on record and say that while i am happy to walk right up to the line and be a cheeky ■■■■ i did not at any point intend to actually cross it and have apologised and reconciled with all involved
