Malicious use of Flyer Reporting? Cone of shame! [September 2023]

Hi

Last night I was in a ladder race (ZP zid=3822965). When I got the error in the subject. I was in a pack, not off the front, I hadnt broken any of my power records but this error came up, it took me out of the race and I got nothing for it.

Video is on youtube but I’m not allowed to include links in my post

I will upload the fit file too when I figure out how to do it

Thanks
David

My Zwift ID is 467537

You can post a link if you mangle the URL slightly, e.g. change “https” to “httpX” or put spaces in the middle of the hostname

Check what Zwift thinks your weight is. :+1:

Watched your video - Just coincidence or did going under the lap banner bring this on?

Thanks

Race is httpx://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eolAhtFCKEI&t=2007&ab_channel=DavidWilcock 33:25ish is the power cheating error message

Zwift weight was 67.5kgs as it has been for a while which is accurate. Nothing new was updated there recently and my speed was just consistent with the pack, i was hardly on the front also so power was lower than some of the others in the race I would assume

Im sure there used to be an issue if you crossed the lap banner quickly in short succession, like warm up into race, then this type of thing happened

Does seem like a bug to me

It does look that way doesnt it although cant rule out coincidence, this was the final lap of a 2.75ish lap race

This is super weird.

@DavidP or @shooj can someone take a look at this video…it’s a good future but shouldn’t of happen like that.

This seems like an unfortunate isolated event. The code around these kind of possible cheat detections is as old as Zwift.

Here is the log line of what happened:

[19:28:56] TIMING ARCH: Player passed finish line acheiving a time shorter than seems humanly possible - player flagged and performance invalidated.

Basically, for some unknown reason, the game thought that the route completion time was impossible. This is very difficult to track down because it happens one in a million times and can be caused by a multitude of reasons… :confused:

3 Likes

Ok, thankyou for looking into it. If it is a one off and shouldn’t happen again then I don’t think there’s anything to worry about on my side

Can I ask, just a curious ladder developer, why Zwift excludes him from the results?
Not ZwiftPower - but Zwift itself.

Given there are “flaggedCheating”, “flaggedSandbagging” fields, I just would have expected one of those to be true and the rider to still be in the results?

You maybe don’t know or can’t say, but thought I would ask anyway.

I guess it was just how it was decided back then. These cheating detections are basically to catch “bots” and outrageous performance situations, which was not the case reported here from what I saw.
So, in 99.9% of the cases I think it makes sense just not to register any results for those situations.
I’m also not saying this is not a problem and can’t be improved, it’s just one from a long list of things to improve.

3 Likes

No problems I was just curious. Thanks for the reply

Wouldn’t this also apply to other riders around him? They should have the same lap time.

No, because something specific happened to him (random network problems (?), etc…) that didn’t happen to others around.

1 Like

I would expect this FLAG to be more strict…there are many riders doing +7Wkg for 5mins and they aren’t flagged or excluded out of results…but when i use BOT with Steady Power above 5Wkg i get the tag pretty quickly.

Shortly after taking a jersey I had a notification pop up saying I had been flagged for superhuman effort. I can only assume that the rider I had dislodged had maliciously flagged me, as my effort was only slightly below the current best time and still above my PB. I am now not showing up in race results and again can only assume due to the lack of any notification that it is because of being flagged as a flyer.
After a lot of googling I was unable to find any info on what to do about this.
I have been using Zwift since it was in Beta and this is the first time anything like this has happened to me.
How can I get back to being included in race results?