Members Only Ride: Sights and Sounds Tour: Watopia Figure 8

The Archives Clubs 1.0
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Enjoy the sights and sounds of Watopia in this experimental, bare bones Zwift ride. No timers, no watts, no text at all … just pure Zwift.

This Club Jarvis Members Only ride goes back to one of the early favorites in Watopia, the Figure 8 route. This route visits many of the original and most well known landmarks in Zwift.

Join in ZC (in the Club Jarvis event list) or with this link The at Home Cycling & Running Virtual Training App … if you can’t see the event with this link, you’re not in the Club. :slight_smile:

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Looking forward to this ride

Cheers

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Very excited about this! Sometimes I just need a tee-shirt ride and love the graphics so it will be nice to not have all the visual clutter.
Is the hope that we will be able to turn off ourselves?

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The link to discord channel for this ride in ZC is not launching discord , anyone else having this issue?

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Permanent ghost power up :ghost:

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Try this : Experimental Event Modes incoming

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Sounds great.

It will be nice to ride without the whole UI blocking the view!

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Thanks for organising the event Wes. I could not see it in my ZCA today so unable to really reply to messages.The pace was pretty hot but fun with the company around you and Jarvis.

Once again, thanks and much appreciated.
Zwift Club Jarvis Members Only Ride - Sights and Sounds Tour: Watopia Figure 8
Mon - 1500 UTC, 1100EDT, 1600 LDN 2300 SGP.

Ride video: https://youtu.be/HPLz9jcN6-0

No UI, no problem just figure out the pace of the Ride Leader and do it the old fashion way of pacing. Stay around the Beacon solves it all.

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Thanks to everyone who rode with us this morning in our very first “Sights and Sounds” event mode. We found a few bugs and had tons of great feedback in Discord and in chat.

Here are the bugs we found:

  • Powers ups seem to not work in this mode
  • Leader chat is queued up until the end and hits you all at once when you leave the event.

In addition, I think we want to minimize or remove the rider nameplates in this mode, it becomes very “noisy” in big groups in this mode that is supposed to be all about the bikes, the roads and the scenery.

If you have feedback, suggestions or saw bugs … please post them below.

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It was quite a visual when the messages slammed right into view at the end. For a second I thought that messaging was broken.

Removing the name tags will be consistent with the fully clean of UI theme. Supported.

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Thanks for the ride today. Some thought and feedback.

I was positively surprised how big a difference it was. I have not realized how much attention I put to the HUD when riding.

I think that the name tags were ok. There must be some unique identifier on riders, bib numbers could be good for group rides and races. Then you can see the name in the app.

I think that this would also make racing better as you need to focus on the riders and not only on the numbers in the HUD. The problem you would get is that you could still use the app to see power numbers. To keep the racing good for spectators tough you need to show the power numbers.

If this is implemented for racing then there needs to be markers at the road to indicate distance to goal like 5 km, 1 km, etc.

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I wasn’t on this ride but just FYI the ‘entire chat log appears at the end’ issue has also been seen by people using the old-fashioned Minimal UI hack on PC since the last update.

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It so nice to watch, I could not ride but used fan view to see what was going on.

It was cool that I could use my KB to type my messages, I find typing on the phone hard.

Having Leader chat on screen will be helpful. But maybe move it down to the bottom so it is not in the middle of the screen.

Someone mentioned a rear view camera. If there could be a rear view top left about the size of the Map that you can toggle on from the KB and companion app, It will only stay on for a few seconds.

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You pretty much covered the only two bugs that I found - was a bit of a shock to see the UI reappear and then a queue of messages appearing, the scenery just disappeared and became the exact opposite of what we’d been doing for an hour!

Name tags: yes to removing them, although I would keep the leader ones that appear at the bottom, to see how far ahead a rider is from the beacon.

Racing: not seeing the Riders Nearby means not advance warning of a rider sprinting or of gauging their power to match their surge. That’s a very good thing. Likewise with no power numbers - racing is exciting, if not more so, without them.

Lack of map or distance: also a good thing, IMHO, as it makes it closer to real racing. If a rider hasn’t figured out the course, they are disadvantaged just as in IRL. If they get lost on a familiar course such as Watopia, I don’t know how they cope outside!

One big takeaway from this ride for me was that I found immensely relaxing and immersive. Without the data, I got lost in the ride and just focused on positioning; this is what I do IRL, where I don’t have any computers and just ride by feel.

I experimented with different views and it’s probably the only time I’ve ridden the best part of an hour in View 3 - I almost always stay in 1. The bigger screen space makes this possible, rather than having a smaller square of scenery in the centre.

I would definitely use it for my weekly group ride and most of my races. If it’s not something that we can force onto others, then I’d choose it as an option whenever I wasn’t racing for a better riding experience.

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Thanks for a very nice hour!
Just want to say I’m agree with a lot of what been written here. I really liked the no-HUD-mode from first second! Names off: Yes!
Just like MRBaldi I used the view 3 for the whole ride, just cause it felt like the right thing to do (Never used it before…)
Had no plan for the ride, but decided to stay with the front as long as possible. For the most of the ride we were 5-8 riders and the dynamics and tactics was a lot of fun! I did even put away my garmin and just ride my bike, without any idea what we were really doing, exept having a lot of fun!
I think a race in this mode, with forced veiw 3, and maybe a small mirror like mentioned, would feel very real and exciting! :smiley:

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Top phtots.

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I loved this for a group ride, one of the most telling things was that we were 50 minutes in before anyone started thinking (or talking) about how far into the ride we were.

Knowing the course certainly makes things a lot easier. Even knowing where the gradient was steep enough to super-tuck becomes more of an issue.

Looking at my Strava, i see that i PR’d the reverse KOM climb (by 20 seconds)…which was likely related to trying to keep up with a group that was faster than me and not seeing my wattage and thinking “oh, i can’t do that”

I leveled during the ride and nothing happened… but when the UI popped up after, i got the “you’ve got ” message.

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Cheers @Wes really good to see a community idea make it into potential features so quickly! It was a really enjoyable ride for several reasons - I normally ride with music on with the Zwift sounds turned low but halfway through the ride, I switched off my music, increased the volume from Zwift and engaged camera 3 and the experience became so much more immersive! The banter was good on discord and it was so nice to be riding without looking at the ‘numbers’. I had ZC on but only used it to read the messages and not the metrics.

From me, feedback would be:

  • This would be ideal for ‘Raw Racing’ - this is the reason we suggested it in light of no IRL racing. Race by feel and sight only and we would love to be a guinea pig to trying it in a race series - please!
  • It would work for group rides BUT only for steady state and not for interval rides where there is a w/kg / power change element. I think the compromises / complexities for Group riding (leader messaging, yellow beacon etc should not be the primary consideration for this ‘rollout’)
  • IMO - it is either On / Off - switch everything off and keep it simple (but still show the yellow beacon on group rides)
  • I had a conversation on the forums recently about ‘chat’. Not having a plethora of chat messages on screen was really nice, encouraged voice conversation but if you maintained the chat history in ZC then it would still be available if riders wanted to use it.
  • Rider Names: I agree. Switch them off as in real racing you would need to recognise your competitors by their jersey / bike / bib number etc…
  • Teammates: However, once Zwift can recognise clubmates (would be interesting if there was a Race Team subdivision of a club) then for those riders to be highlighted with something like a white arrow over their head, Fortnite style as your teammates do in Squads mode.

I like @Gerrie_Delport’s rear view camera but I agree with @MRBaldi_T-ZHR that the lack of this can add to the excitement of a race.

re: Bugs - neither spoiled the experience - the stacking up of messages was a little offputting for a few seconds at the end of the ride (but if there was a leaderboard I suppose that would hide that!) but the lack of power ups certainly not a problem for us as all of our 3R races have PU disabled by default - this would be a great progression of our drive to have the ability to offer ‘Real Racing’ as there are plenty of other races on the schedule that do offer PU as part of their races.

Overall, I really enjoyed the ride, more than I thought I would TBH - more immersive than I imagined it would be.

My video is here (but please excuse the stream music!): Twitch

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I enjoyed the ride and while I only hit one PR, I came close on an 8+ minute segment I only missed it by 12 seconds on. OK, 12 seconds is actually quite a lot, but the effort didn’t feel anywhere near a PR effort. It was interesting how perceived effort possibly felt easier when I couldn’t see the numbers.

There was some chat about whether we should be forced to use “Camera 3” in this mode - I absolutely don’t support that. I rode in Camera 1, as I always do.

Although I play a lot of first-person shooter games, I always have a weapon or hands to place me in the world. With Zwift’s “first person” view there’s nothing. It’s not like riding in the real world to me, as IRL I can always see my handlebars in the periphery, or look down and see my wheel etc.

I don’t think a handlebar/hands view will do the trick, but it’s worth trying.

Regarding turning off nameplates, honestly I still like to know who’s around me. In real life we recognise people easily; but in Zwift that’s not the case. Although I’ve seen some people’s avatars many times, I don’t recognise them. It’s only when the nameplate pops up that I know who’s alongside or in front of me. I’d miss that connection if it went away entirely, although I do agree the nameplates detract from the overall effect. Race numbers might help up to a point, but remembering who has which number if they change from race to race would be a trick.

Similarly with knowing how far people are behind; I think that even without turning round in the real world, you know when there’s someone behind you, especially if it’s a group of riders. Wheels, breathing, shouts between them etc. Perhaps the sounds of Zwift could be improved to help with this if nameplates went away. I know some people don’t really listen to the game sounds. I usually have Spotify running too, but that’s because Zwift sounds don’t mean anything. They don’t enhance the experience a great deal, they’re all over the place in terms of volume and some are very repetitive.

On the other hand, when I’m playing an FPS (Overwatch is my main one), sound is essential and I never play with music getting in the way.

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A one button/click/key for turning on nameplates or a version of riders nearby but only showing race numbers with names, just for a few seconds before fading away again would be a nice compromise. Then it would all be turned off as per the intention of the mode but you could have an optional quick glance to see who’s around or in your bunch heading to the sprint etc.

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