I rode with Coco for an hour or so this week and kept losing my drops multiplier because I was off the front or off the back and couldn’t tell where she was.
There were at least 100 riders in the peloton and the pace partners are very difficult to find unless you are right beside them. There really should be a tower of light above them just like there is for the ride leader in a group ride. The pacer should also be visible on the mini map and in Zwift companion.
Another things is that while the indicator at the top of the screen telling you to stay with the pacer helps, it doesn’t actually indicate whether you are in front or behind the pacer. So you don’t actually know whether to speed up or slow down, and if you guess wrong then it’s probably too late and you’ve already lost your multiplier. So that’s another area for improvement…
I rode with Bowie today and (presumably because the effort was so much harder) there were far fewer people in the peloton so it was much easier to find the pacer. But even still the indicator really should tell you whether they are in front of or behind you because you still can’t always see them from where you are. Also I’m not convinced that 7m in either direction is a large enough buffer. It should be relative to the size of the peloton rather than strictly in relation to where the pacer is…
Same happened to me. Only encountered one pace partner so far and they were surrounded by riders so that unless you were on top of them you couldn’t see them. The tower of light sounds spot on or even just something similar to a boost icon above their head permanently would be great.
Yes, that’s how you find them when you want to join the ride. But that doesn’t help when you are already riding with them and need to stay within 7 meters of them to get the drops multiplier but you can’t see where they are in the peloton…
I absolutely agree with this request to make pace partners more visible; it seems that this was part of the design all along!
from the FutureWorks info page (link provided by Gerrie above) I copied this:
Pace Partners appear in a glow color corresponding to their category rating … (being red) … (being green). A beacon also displays above the Pace Partner’s avatar and next to their name on the leaderboard.
Seen in this light it is not a new request, but a bug, waiting to be solved …so please, please, solve it
One simple way to resolve this issue, would be a display of the time gap between the user and the pace partner at all times… This could be at the right hand of the screen, at the top of the list with all other riders… This way you would know how far you are, regardless of size of peloton!
I wouldn’t change the avatars or put any marker…looks great as is…
With no way to brake, it is way too easy with 7m to drift off the front a little bit and EVEN with no peddling have the pace partner not catch up in time. If you take a drink, respond to real world interruption, or just get distracted for a moment and go off the front - doom.
The point of a pace partner as I understand it is to have always an option to jump in and join some other zwifters for a paced ride without having to do a scheduled group ride. Making it worse is when the stupid robot “goes to bed” and kills the ride for no reason whatsoever.
I agree with these suggestions especially if you’ve intentionally decided to join the PP from the beginning. Not sure how this could be made to work if you’ve just “run” into one - when would it show, for how long, etc.
I would change the color of Cadence though since her color is the same as Ride Ons and it is dificult to see the badge/shield above the pack when Ride Ons are constantly raining down.
Here’s an easy, unsupported, though essentially riskless “hack” that will improve your ability to resolve Coco’s BLUE spinning clock from amongst all the BLUE ride-on rain… and hence, your ride experience. Obviously, this will not improve your ability to “see” the Pace Partner when it is astern, a solution for which I’ve described a fix in multiple other threads.
