I may be missing something, but especially now the score changes after a race are becoming more volatile, what is to stop someone repeatedly racing hard one day, and racing easy the next? Effectively not changing much over time.
I raced yesterday as hard as I could, came 3rd and went up a few points, today I joined a race to do zone 2 as I enjoy flicking around other riders and watching the race. I was surprised to see my racing score is lower today than before my race yesterday.
I am relatively new to zwift racing, but I think I have spotted a few people sandbagging on the category system, but to me it seems like a lot of work and concentration to keep below certain power numbers when that person is clearly capable of more. The above however seems a lot easier.
it’s something they’ll have to think about, for sure. there is a floor to how low you can go relative to your athletic ability, but as far as losing a few points in one race that isn’t so important to a rider, so that a rider can be in a specific pen in another race that they might be more interested in, that will probably require some thought
You will always have people playing the system and every system can be played. The riders who hated the CE system since it allowed Sandbaggers to stay in their cat were hoping this new ZRS would solve it all, but it wont.
Might be harder and perhaps they wont win every race, but it for sure doesnt solve the issue for those who werent winning in the CE system.
There won’t be anything stopping riders from doing this. ZR.app puts in a min effort score you must reach, but even that you can still put in a z4 workout to get around.
For sandbaggers there will be an increase interest in short races, like Tiny Race. You can effective tank 4 races in 1 hour and you set till next week.
I am honestly more interested to see the lower limits of how far you can tank? Will we see former A riders riding in the sub 300 point pens? They can definitely sit in the draft for 45 mins, then put in a strong effort up Hilly Kom and 4.5 w/kg the last 1 km on the flats.
well, i did it 1 or 2 timers , dead last , then got 1st place in the 4th race, but i did to feed my online trolls. online trolls need to feed lot. @Michael_Turbosnail
ZRS is still in beta testing. Once it goes live I’d expect to see some anti-tanking measures included. Something like this is easy to spot, and should be easy to account for.
There is nothing that say you must be near the front. There are a lot of reasons riders fall off the front group because their goals isn’t to win.
You can be assisting a teammate on a tow.
You can be assisting for the fastest groups GC time.
You can be in the race just to figure out the route for ZRL as a recon race.
You can be trying the segment.
All of these would give you a subpar result because you don’t give beep about finish results.
i suspect it will be. regardless, i dont think the “australian sprint champion” cares about his zrs score. he just wanted to do two efforts instead of 4, which is fine by eric as far as i’m aware
Sandbagging should not be an issue if the category score thresholds are not constant because people can’t know how much their score needs to decline to be moved to a lower category.
Shouldn’t there be a limit on how long it can be before a rider can downgrade after being upgraded? For example, a rider wins a B cat race and their ZRS goes up just over the limit into A cat.
Next race (A cat) they finish last either because they deliberately tanked or because they were genuinely outclassed (does it matter?) and their ZRS drops just below the limit.
Should they be allowed back into B cat even though it’s only be 1 day since they got upgraded? Can someone do this in the current system? I’m nowhere near the cat limits (I’m right about it in the middle of B cat) so I can’t test it myself. Shouldn’t there be a limit to how soon you can downgrade? 30 days? 60 days? 90 days?
If there’s no limit and people can jump between categories every day then this sounds like an ideal situation for sandbaggers.
