I disagree. Riding in large packs, with steering enabled, has become much more frustrating. A large portion of the agency you used to get from having steering is gone now when the pack is big enough. And at random a rider may drift out of the pack to one side, pushing you out as well. Riders overtaking you can push you aside before their handlebars are ahead of yours, which is 100% wrong. IRL that would be a crash scenario so it’s super weird. There is a kind of pinball effect with riders jerking around in the group. I was hopeful that this development would improve the experience but it made it worse.
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From where do you get your conviction that noticeable changes in pack dynamics do not exist? Do you have insider information or is it also based on your perception?
I would agree that there are too many complaints and a lot of people might mis-interpret their own perception of a ride. However, to me as well there a noticeable differences.
I did not know that PD5 was being rolled out and when I came back from a 3 week trip I quickly noticed some differences in pack dynamics. In larger groups it definitely is much harder now to move up. Maybe that is a good thing as it will require more effort for positioning in races. I can understand however that this system might not be ideal for group rides.
Zwift is a bit annoying with the lack of communication, but maybe they would be more open at least here in the forum if there were not so many users reacting not consrtuctively but overly emotionally.
I am ok with Zwift testing PD5. The changes from PD2 to today allowed break-aways a chance which adds to the racing. Just don’t get me started on the different auto-steering of Zwifters with and without steerin enabled. This is just ridiculous in small groups and I absolutely don’t understand why Zwift has different algorithms in place. Did this change in PD5 to the better? The last events were large groups where it does not have the same effect.
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Love them or loathe them, Zwift has acknowledged that they made changes.
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Agree on all counts. Very frustrating riding in large packs now with my Zwift Ride. That this made it out of dev into a public build does not reflect well on Zwift development.
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Sticky sticky sticky. The most interesting one today was getting stuck between a cluster of four riders on a coffee break next to an active blob. Also got pushed to the side several times by a single rider and had a hard time escaping the stickiness even at 1 W/kg more than the other rider. If the idea with the stickiness was to make it more difficult to ride through others, steering around them should be automatic if there is space (on either side).
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There were many persistent calls for slower packs so breakaways could succeed, Zwift obviously listened and this is the result.
But that would make it too easy to hold your speed and then packs wouldn’t slow down. I think this is working as intended, just that we don’t like the results.
At least it was rolled out widely so the effects are obvious.
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I previously described large group behavior as what you see on a charity century ride. Glad I’m not the only one seeing it like that.
The half-wheel attacks are funny to watch though
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Slower packs are not only for breakaways to succeed.
If someone loses draft in any sort of group ride they basically get hit with a wall of wind, it makes the difference between being in a group or not far greater than it should be.
A group shouldn’t be faster than a solo rider just because it’s a group. It should be faster only if the person at the front is riding faster, and remain faster only because there are people to share the work with.
If they get the dynamics right a slower group will stay together better as long as everyone is wanting it to stay together, and the group will stretch and snap if people are trying to stretch it.
The difficulty is in knowing whether the people you’re riding with are trying to keep it together or trying to break it apart.
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What happens to Guinness world records set in Zwift with all the pace dynamics tweaks?
If I remember right someone recently did a fastest 500km record attempt.
The result is nothing like riding in a group irl. I don’t drift out of the drafts in packs for no reason irl. I don’t get boxed out far into the wind with steering not responding to input to move back. What you call a fix is just swapping problems.
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Did a TdZ ride on Shisa Shakedown this morning. I’d say that 95% of the time PD5 seemed to work absolutely fine.
The other 5% of the time I was turning the air blue in frustration.
“Get back in the draft!”
“Why have you gone out there!?!”
“Seriously. Get back in the draft, idiot!”
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Is that why it’s called PD5?
I want PD1, then.
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I got half-wheeled out into the wind several times with no way to get back to the group in the TdZ C ride this morning. Was a little annoying.
It seems like the problem is that riders pushing up through the group force you out to the side (and out of the draft), and the only way for you to get back into the group is to fall to the back. Once you’re there, you have to surge your power to regain your previous position (probably pushing other riders out along the way). You could just hang at the back, but you’ll fall back even further if the rider in front of you loses the wheel ahead of them.
It’s makes churning worse and makes riding in groups frustrating and unenjoyable. Steering isn’t particularly useful because you can’t use it to steer back into groups anymore, which seems unfair because you can be pushed out of a group but can’t do anything to get yourself back into it.
That said, I think the biggest frustration is Zwift refusing to acknowledge any feedback on the new pack dynamics.
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My first post on the forums 
Only to address this weird behaviour…
… at random a rider may drift out of the pack to one side, pushing you out as well
Frustratingly you can’t counteract this behaviour with steering, the only control you have is braking or overpowering. Since I mostly do group rides, it’s borderline funny, but I can imagine how infuriating this could be during a race.
Not even mentioning the pinball effect in a group, which is weird being a heavier rider, getting tossed around like a flyweight. It’s noticeably different now, I’m afraid people think I’m steering erratically.
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I’ve seen a few comments about that in group rides. I’m not trying to steer anyone out of the draft, it just does that sometimes.
Hi - PD5 is bad. I don’t know what problem it is trying to solve so I can’t tell if it is successful at anything.
It also seems to break my steering devices.
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Hey all - I don’t usually see forum notifications, but today got told there’s this thread that formed and I have read through the comments now. It’s great to see how keen of an eye most of you have, as I think 90% of Zwifters don’t notice/care about any of these details. The more cycling oriented of us at Zwift certainly see the things mentioned in here and we’ve been building a list of the next items we need to tune or fix. Your comments are helping us prioritize once we restart pack dynamics work in a week or two.
Specifically I think we need to:
- Reduce the “pinball collision”, specifically the janky rapid sideways motion that occurs in a dense part of the pack.
- Balance between steering and non-steering Zwifters isn’t right. The intent is unified auto-steer regardless of if you have paired a steering device, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way in practice. The programmer says it’s the same, but it doesn’t behave like it! We’ll figure it out.
- Reduce the feeling of getting bullied and pushed out of a pack. Hopefully be solved by the previous bullet point, but probably never eliminated if we want steering and collision.
- Tune “sticky draft”. Still feeling not right.
- Improve smoothness of networked riders through intersections and road transitions. It is pretty sensitive to how sharp and aligned the intersections are. Eric and I have flagged the worst intersections we saw during TdZ to our road designer and he’s fixed 4-5 of them during TdZ. Still more to go.
- Maybe make coffee stopped riders non-collideable? There sure was a lot of coffee drinking during TdZ events and some people were getting multiple riders attached to them, paralyzing them from steering.
- Supertuck still feels wrong when there’s a few riders together. Unrelated to current pack dynamics changes, but something I think we’ll revisit after other items are tuned.
Re: drafting changes
We weren’t specifically aiming to change drafting behavior (and didn’t change code there). Could be the collision changes is keeping the pack less dense (and thus the draft less) and that is causing the feeling of it being harder to sit in. You draft less in general when you’re not inside 3 other cyclists. 
Add in sticky draft and the result it is does seem like you’ve got to fight more than before to hold position, which I think is an interesting dynamic not totally dissimilar to real life. As mentioned in the above bullet points we will make sure to at least investigate the math around “sticky draft” again to see if we can make things better there.
Finally wanted to reiterate that races will only get new pack dynamics once we’re finished tuning for group and solo rides.
Thanks for all the comments and thoughts around this topic. It’s easily the most creative code in Zwift so it’ll probably never be truly done, but we think it’s a battle worth continuing even if it does mean we all have to re-learn how to ride in a Zwift pack from time to time.
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Just to say, it feels odd being forced out by a rider approaching from behind.
The rule should be, if I am in front, the rider from behind should be forced out & around me. If that means into the wind to overtake then so be it.
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Can you respond to issues between steering and non-steering riders in TTT events?
I recall reading some time ago that TTT’s were improperly lumped into “group” rides or something and PD5 was accidently implemented for a brief time. It may have since been removed, but I can say with 100% confidence that there is still a major issue that prevents non-steering riders from staying in line with steering riders at times. Our team often ends up with two lines during a TTT which is frustrating for all to say the least.
Lone non-steering rider basically forced to iTT:
I know the temporary solution is to get everyone to turn off steering, but that is untenable for folks that use play controllers to control virtual shifting. Alternatively, we could all use steering, but play controllers aren’t available for purchase in all countries making it especially hard for international collaboration.