Today, our Pace Partners feature graduates from our FutureWorks program into a fully matured game feature status. We want to thank everyone who’s contributed their feedback to help us along this journey.
Along with the move out of FutureWorks comes a name change. Pace Partners are now called Robo Pacers. These are the same draftable bots leading the never-ending group rides you’ve come to love, but just renamed.
TBH, I think the new moniker is no better than the old one in describing their actual function (but lends itself more to the “exciting” gamification side of Zwift rather than the functional training side, perhaps?). Anyway, I’m sticking with the PPs descriptor (old dog, new tricks etc.).
I recall a spreadsheet with the route rotation posted somewhere by @James_Zwift but I can’t find it at this time. Maybe someone else has that…? It would make sense if that were updated automatically and posted to a pinned thread in the Robo Pacer section.
Reading the FAQ page, there’s method to their madness:
Q: Why did Pace Partners change their name to RoboPacers?
A: As we continue to evolve what this feature looks like in the future, we wanted to ensure one thing is clear—this particular AI is draftable. Just as a robot is a solid object, Zwifters should assume the same from our RoboPacers and expect to catch a draft off of them. This is opposite of HoloReplays which is derived from “hologram” or something that is not solid. This means Zwifters will not be able to draft off of any feature with this prefix.
Some platforms (Garmin?) have “virtual pacers” which quite obviously can’t be drafted.
While anyone in this thread already is probably well aware of what the Pace Partners do, new users may not be.
There’s also likely going to be an influx of new users, if ZwiftHub selling out in about 2 hours is any indication so this change probably stops a tonne of confused questions before they’re asked.
I personally like the name pace partners more than I do Robo Pacers, technically they are more like “Group Ride” Partners since they introduced dynamic pacing I suppose - but that doesn’t have the same ring to it.
@shooj@James_Zwift
Redesign the draftable RoboPacers like (friendly) solid robots, to differentiate them more from the not draftable seethrough HoloReplays.
