Upgrading the Tron sounds ridiculous. Are you gaining basically 5 watts? You can have a tricked out bike and lose a sprint to a lesser bike with a power-up.
In racing or riding, you can’t see any difference. I would rather unlock a color slide to my Cadex. Or the forgotten Tron helmet. How about my bike only gets power ups with no ten point results when I’m racing?
RED VENGE HAS ENTERED THE CHAT AGAIN
22 million drops. After , two years of work, Zwift will lower the requirements and new Zwifters will get it in a month or two.
But that could never happen. Oh wait, it did. Leveling from 50-60 took a year. Then it changed. 60-70 was just a few weeks. It went from a month of work to less than a week per level.
I really hope ZHQ learned a lot of lessons with the levels fiasco
I think the bike upgrade path is a sign that they did. Instead of changing an existing feature in a way that would annoy some people, they introduced a new feature that has no baggage so there’s less of a problem comparing it to whatever came before. That’s a good thing for the people who had their heart set on progressing in a certain way when the rug was pulled out.
As long as they don’t nerf everything in a year or 2 and make upgrades way easier. Time will tell.
Or a Sagan S-Works Venge (also quite nice).
Or a metallic silver Tron. 
Actually, maybe something like the MSO pacific blue colour from McLaren. Or something like this colour scheme:
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/supercars/mclaren-speedtail-took-mso-12-weeks-paint
Exactly what I’m saying. But in some respects, what if they make it harder or just change things to all kilometers instead of elevation or time? That’s why I am going to climb more in my Aethos while I can grab it in 16 runs up the Alp. The 40 hours of time trial was not too much to ask. But, I don’t want to spend money on any other time trial frame. 300,000 for a Quintana and 750,000 to make it quicker (but still slower than a frame I can buy for one million?)
With the pacers using some of the new halo bikes instead of the Tron, does this have any impact on the speed of the pack and associated effort to stay with the group?
To each their own. I want it, you may want something else.
Of course.
Good luck.
Sincerely
( I kind of meant ridiculously hard)
This is probably more impacted by the size of the group and how many are in front of the robopacer in the area that is generally smoother and less affected by pack dynamics blocking/braking.
I haven’t ridden with the robopacers on the halo bikes, only just joined a couple of groups (without riding) to see what the bikes looked like. Nothing looked too different in terms of speed.
We also don’t know if the robopacer uses a fully upgraded halo bike.
I’m sure it is more impacted by the group size and pack location, but that wasn’t really my question. Also not really sure you can look in and “spot the difference”…
After actually riding for 45 mins in a large (50+) flattish watopia based group, I see that my average w/kg over the whole period is about 0.2-0.3 higher than typical for similar previous rides (I haven’t changed my personal metrics or bike setup). Certainly not proof of anything, but I wondered whether there is any calculated impact of a change in bike for the pacer. If the same pacer puts the same average power into a slightly faster bike on flats, what does that do to the surrounding pack? Maybe in the draft, not much!
Well, if the bikes don’t affect the group dynamics then that would make a strong argument against playing the upgrade game.
If someone rides about 40 kms/one hour a day…it will take about a year to upgrade the Concept bike. It’s about a month to upgrade each of three zwift branded entry level bikes. Then maybe 8 months to ride 9000 kms. That is some serious commitment.
It didn’t look like the robopacer was running away from the group at any point (was in the middle) and nobody was whinging about things being too fast.
Yup, all excellent scientific observations!
As more people get wind of the upgrades and wish to upgrade their bikes, I suspect there will be fewer TRON bikes for a while while riders are upgrading other level bikes.
Riding Genie today for 3 hours, the group was easily 30 strong at times and there were waaaay less tron bikes than usual.
I’ll ignore the sarcasm.
I had the thing running long enough that I would have seen people complaining if it was too fast.
So even though I didn’t have my 75kg robot at the ready, I’ve seen enough of those groups in the different pace levels to know the speeds that do without needing a robot or stop watch.
Watching the chat, some people don’t even know about upgrades and or don’t even care. Things like “I just want to ride the tron, not interested in anything else”. Some were even asking what upgrades were - they didn’t know. Another theme was “I worked hard to unlock Tron, why do I need to do anything more”.