That was the last evidence of the immense gap between what Zwift leadership claims (claimed?) everywhere pretending they care about performance accuracy and what they actually do.
Beyond that, it showed also how little they care about their commitments to the community.
The same happens with other elements that are important to the community, for example what have they done with Zwiftpower since it was acquires? Since they are not improving it, are they going to kill it? Because so far they have show little to no interest in it, and this is one of the only tools (with ZR.app), and far from perfect, enabling a little bit of transparency.
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You forget about Wahoo’s unbreakable “autocalibration” and many other things.
Unless a standard is managed industry wise for power reporting I don’t see anything possible on that side.
You add it to Zwift being client side and you get perfect ground to allow all kind of manipulations, even if Zwift cared about it.
And then, top of the top, you see that Zwift is not event allowing to have real hardware enforced events, in which those spin bikes are excluded. When @DejanPresen and others have been reporting bugs for hardware enforced eventd, permitting even basic exploits like HR2VP allowing to make it in the events, like always the first reaction was thank you we will find a solution soon, and a few months later came back giving a fake excuse on why they would allow spinbikes and Schwinn’s of the world to continue entering the events.
It was showing in any case that they did not care about it. It is just a game.
At least now, thanks to Chris Snook we know that all community racing was always “just for fun” and that any expectation of performance accuracy should be plainly forgotten.
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I totally understand your position and believe that you are exactly the reason why Zwift could not care less about performance accuracy, because most of the people don’t…It’s just for fun.
Then please don’t organize worldwide leagues with ranking systems and promotions, winners, world champions, race catégories, create a ruleset plenty of never applied sanctions or controls. All this mascarade of “competition structure” is deceiving if at the end the only thing you really care about is the “it is for fun” part, which is super important, vs the “it is accurate” part. In my case, and you are fully right we are a minority, the “it is accurate” part is at least as important than the fun part in races. For social rides or other things the fun part is clearly dominant.
As per the real ride feel, well, it is now more than demonstrated that speeds in Zwift are overestimated compared to IRL, and all the exchanges about pack dynamics are super healthy but show that there is a long way to go still. Even in terms of pack dynamics there are choices to make between privileging social riding vs IRL feel and Swift has been trying to find the right balance in this trade off for years.
Some other platforms (in this case I am not saying it is better or worse) are making s clear choice of trying to stick as much as possible to IRL feel and dynamics to try to guarantee a fairer racing. Same happens with power ups… gamification vs accuracy.
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I was highlighting an issue raised in the article and drawing a parallel to my own experience.
It is a direct parallel to the original thread, about the conduct of people within these forums, when people seek to challenge the status quo on how zwift and zwift dependent services are run.
It is rather ironic that such behaviour resurfaced itself. I appreciate that this was only part of what the article was about, nonetheless, it is relevant to this thread because the thread is about the article. Is that not accurate?
It’s clear that since they got control of Zwift Power it’s not the same thing at all. There were changes made but not in the right direction so we left the doors open to anything and everything…in order to satisfy everyone, the result is just to see now the number of people we are considering like cheaters who are classified on zp it’s madness!! But hey, Zwift will stick its head in the sand on this subject and won’t say anything because you shouldn’t touch the goose that lays the golden eggs. Investors are watching…
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It does
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I would like Zwift to hire you and implement your ideas. Fairness and accuracy matters in every competitive sport.
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Of course it does. But we are in the infancy of fantasyland digital sports here.
Where does the cheating begin or end? Honestly, I don’t really see a way to make that determination, yet. Every device has its own settings, which Zwift depends on. Zwift has its own settings, which are less than RL.
I’m no apologist for Zwift, but if folks are looking for pure accuracy they’re looking in the wrong place, for now.
Push for improvement. But don’t let your irritations interfere with what you can enjoy, now.
Just a bit of advice from someone whose time has been counseled as more finite than was expected.
I think trying to chase total accuracy and precision isn’t the way to go, and IMO it doesn’t matter if someone’s trainer reads 4% high as long as it’s consistent and it’s not an intentional exploit. At the elite end sure, restrict it to devices with sub-0.5% accuracy, but for a bunch of dads racing cat B on Tuesday nights it doesn’t really matter. It’s the egregious stuff that Zwift allows to happen that’s the big problem, again IMO.
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Yes. There has always been a “the biggest problem”. In every time. In every culture. Under every form of governance. And, now, within every digital environment.
My advice remains the same, and it’s tried and true.
Push for improvement.
But don’t forget to enjoy what you have in the here and now.
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There is no improvement without intention to improve. And Zwift made clear their focus is not improving vulnerability towards exploits and devices manipulations. There are other platforms actually taking that way more seriously from the scratch, adapting their architecture (server side) to limit, to the extent possible, vulnerabilities.
But I believe end game (no joke intended) you are right. That is what happened to me.
It reached a point where I was no longer enjoying Zwifting, because the fairness aspect of the competition is really important to me, so I found an alternative platform providing me an environment I could enjoy.
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The cheaters really do lower the experience.
I’m not bothered about absolute accuracy, but I am bothered about the guys with dodgy calibration zooming along or the bots wrecking the experience.
I get fed up with having to report them while I’m trying to do my own rides.
On the day I’m fortunate that my 46 minute time on ADZ gets me a KOM jersey, it’s not nice when someone comes along at 35 minutes or so (sometimes 400w steady at 165rpm cadence for the entire climb) with ZPower or a dodgy power meter calibration and gets that. I know I cannot possibly do 165rpm cadence for 40 minutes or more.
Maybe some folk see nothing wrong with that and well done to those people, but to me that’s not fair on the people who are trying to do the right thing. Egregious performances really detract from the experience.
There should still be fairness and accuracy. It should be reasonable expectation to trust that the performances of other people are real and not automatically doubt them. If you leave the flat-lands of Zwift and head into the mountainous courses of Zwift you’ll see it is a big problem.
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I’ve spent plenty of time on Zwift mountainous courses. Yes, I’ve observed obvious cheating. I’m just not going to let cheaters decide for me whether I’m going to enjoy what is there to enjoy.
It’s fine to advocate for improvement. But please take time to enjoy the good things. If Zwift doesn’t provide an environment within which you can find some healthy fun, then you should find something else. Life is much shorter than we think. Be responsible. Advocate for positive change. But find what you can enjoy and embrace it.
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That’s great! And, it’s also thoughtful of you to still advocate for improvement on this platform for those of us who use it. Ride on!
Calling out cheating and advocating against it isn’t losing the enjoyment, it’s about trying to encourage an environment where people can trust that other performances are genuine.
I don’t remember seeing you on ADZ recently - join me some time, I’m on there most days (as my activities show in my profile). I notice the regular riders and chat with them quite a lot, the more the better.
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