Seems like some, maybe many, of the criticisms of Category Enforcement would be mitigated by, say, 6 categories instead of 4?
This would risk diluting participation numbers per race, which would be undesirable IMHO. I noticed that Monday of this week there were 108 races, 45 of which were organized by Zwift HQ.
What if we suspended those Zwift races at the same time categories were reorganized? By my math we’d have slightly more racers per category per event. Am I thinking about this correctly? Seems like it would be much better.
I would appreciate any feedback if I’m on the right track or thinking about this the wrong way.
Thanks for reading,
Josh
Sane Cave Racing (mid-pack Cat C)
Zwift prefer bigger numbers in races and worlds rather than give people what they want e.g climb portal with more than 2 options, they feel there wouldn’t be many people riding
Aside from what was already mentioned, I don’t think anything is stopping community organizers from doing more focused races, using 5 pens but that are devoted to only say, 1 or 2 cats. I mean, why not, since Ride events are often only 1 cat?
So, they could make a race equivalent to a B/C rate, but use the 5 (A thru E) pens available to them, such as below.
A = 3.9-4.2 wkg
B = 3.6-3.9 wkg
C= 3.4-3.6 wkg
D= 3.1-3.4 wkg
E= <3.1
More categories could help sometimes, at other times it would only make small fields even smaller. Some sort of dynamic grouping would be great, set some parameters and let the software sort out how many pens there are and who ends up in each one just before the race starts.
On removing some races, I think the zwift crit club could go. There’s no shortage of those races. The hill climb races are something a bit different, but maybe zwift could invite some community clubs to host them or use that race format.
The ZRS races I think need to stay, mainly because they provide the only race option for those who can’t ride during peak times. Just look at the number of community races in the Europe and US evening peaks, and the absolute void in the middle.
Jamie is correct; this is what’s going to be the downfall of community run events some time down the road if they don’t improve in this area (improve either by… stopping, or, giving event leaders better access to what they need to make their lives easier.)
Zwift is hurting its own community by trying to do their job for them, or at worst, push their own community out of the way to make room for their own stuff.
This doesn’t include Hill Club and TT Club, as those are unique events (which only suffer from CE’s own failures).
Crit Club doesn’t count because it’s not even available here Americas times until the super late evening / west coasters, and it struggles to pull 10 people.
Zwift races are only big because Zwift sponsors them across the literal main menu; do it for another series, and I bet you’d see that series blow up. People just follow the crowd, and the crowd is doing what’s right in front of their faces; which is quite literally always Zwift’s racing series, and Zwift’s group ride series.
Categories aren’t the real issue (CE is but that’s a different story); it’s overloading the community with too much “garbage.”
ZRS is rife with cheaters, which is why the A category is empty; because everyone else with half a brain realizes it’s stupid to join a basic Zwift CE series, when the CE is literally: "A is everyone that isn’t a B and below, and also every single cheater"
The issue is advertisement, and lack of support to good and unique series.
Throw everyone into a great community lead series, and ask them “do you prefer this, or the zwift series?” What do you think everyone’s response will be?
The irony is that Zwift themselves have the numbers that they could take their major events and split them to 2 separate split-cat races – ie. 8-10 pens total for each race time.
some organisers put a lot of time into that, but those that do have extra work to do before and after the event making sure everyone is in the right pen, or was in the right pen after the fact, and everything extra with regards to event setup is another manual step where you gotta email or dm someone and hope you catch them in a good mood, and it all leads to this: f*** it, just use CE instead
That’s more to do with the boundary change zwift made because the A group was to wide by being 2wkg but D being 2.5+wkg difference is fine, it’s almost like the boundaries were changed to keep some people out of A and in a B
I think you do the VirtuSlo split cat races?
Is part of the headache you’ve run into, because you’re splitting cats across the existing CE boundaries, which I believe are. D = <2.63wkg, C = 2.63-3.4 wkg; B = 3.36-4.2
You seem to be using different boundaries within your cats, where none of your cats use an existing boundary. Your D = <2.8, C = 3.2-3.6, etc
Partly explained in this article is that custom cats were made possible, but you were supposed to use existing boundaries, but could subdivide within them?
not my headache. as far as i know nobody other than dejan uses custom categories despite them apparently being possible, i dont know if it’s by choice or because it’s a drawn out nightmare to get that stuff set up. probably the latter
FRR this recent time around used zrCS; and then will be implementing their own system for the coming rounds due to some issues we had with CompoundScore not being the best tell for some folks’ 90 minute performances (no surprise there).
DRS uses zRacing’s vELO as far as I’m aware.
Series using unique categorizations are certainly out there…
again, this purely comes down to poor marketing / the lack of an up to date system that shows all unique series ongoing in Zwift.
If anyone wants a project… that’d be a very good one to be honest.
They are using versions of Zwift Racing App not native systems.
Zwift HQ have been stubborn in steadfastly refusing to support community events that want to use the additional category splits they announced last year. I think Dejan is the only person to get any luck with this. TFC might also but im not sure on the details of their system - It might just use 8 pens over 2 race events.
