Any riders who are part of a meetup with “keep everyone together” active travel unrealistically fast, especially on the descents and also to a large extent on the flat, though climbing seems less affected.
This is a problem even when there is only 1 rider actually riding in the meetup.
This has made Sprint segments, lap segments and some KOMs inaccessible to riders not in a meetup, and really messes up the feel of the game.
Came here to report this exact issue and add a little more info.
Yesterday I arranged a “solo meetup” with "keep everyone together enabled and essentially, assuming a gradient of zero and power of 3.0+ w/kg, the rider gets a continuous speed boost of roughly 5 kph relative to a small group (with draft enabled) and around 6-8 kph compared to other solo riders!! Here is another strava example
You’ll note that the bug is even acknowledged in the discussion thread under the ride!
I didn’t have time to confirm whether or not the advantage is fixed or exponential relative to power, but the time I got for one Tick-Tock lap was almost identical to one I managed in a recent TT event…where I was averaging almost 150 watts higher!! Please investigate and fix this issue since there already appear to be a bunch of people knowingly exploiting it to obliterate legitimate KOM times earned in races, TTs, solo rides and group events, and once the times are uploaded, I very much doubt anybody will voluntarily flag or delete them!
Wow I didn’t even know about this! Why would people create a meetup with themselves to cheat?? That’s messed up!!
Well I guess it’s just like when people make themselves lighter than they are to climb up the hills faster. You will always have cheaters.
But zwift should definitely work on the meetup so that you’re not able to ride with only yourself and have a draft boost if I understood that correctly.
That takes the fun out of Zwift.
Still not fixed. Riders riding at 2.1 w/kg cruising around passing groups doing 3.8w/kg. Come on Zwift it’s been over a year and this is still broken. Take a look at all the strava segments and the majority of them are filled with riders averaging less than 200watts but cruising at inflated speeds.
I am investigating another issue and therefore paying attention to what riders around me are doing when I noticed this small group sailing past me doing sub 2 w/kg efforts . I had a look and I was doing 40 kph at the time and they screamed putting a lot of time and gap in a very short space of time at the time I guessed nearly double speed ! even it was only 50% thats 60kph doing 2 w/kg … I dont think so .
10 minutes later … another group … same thing … They were holding station with me doing half the w/kg and with a modest increase went flying off up the road .
Seen solo riders too … so perhaps they are doing this for some easy drops or something .
To be honest I never noticed before and didnt really care , but now I have seen it … now I know its a bug known for over a year … thats not great .
These guys are welcome to there easy workout but not things like grabbing jerseys and causing other riders to put in silly efforts to try and hold onto them thinking they are genuine riders . If the bug cant be fixed why not make group meet ups not visible to us and not qualify for KOM spots !
I do for Meetups each week usually, and have done so for months. This issue of going unfeasibly fast seems to be very frequent now, whereas it used to be an occasional thing before.