Good summary.
I’m really disappointed in PD5. Not at all what I hoped for. It broke things that wasn’t all that broken to begin with (mostly because of forum whiners who don’t have steering?) but didn’t fix the things that were really bad with PD4.1.
I have stopped using the Zwift Play steering devices. I bought them partly to get buttons close to my thumb but also to counter the weird draft avoidance behavior in PD4, with the avatar taking some really stupid lines far too often, staying out of draft.
Then came PD5 and now you’re worse off with steering than without as you get constantly pushed to the side at the most inopportune moments.
Add sticky draft to that and you get pushed to the outside by some semi-slow rider to the left, but you need to dig relatively deep to get past him. Or, since packs often like to avoid the oncoming lane, you get pushed to the inside right and get locked in. Getting locked in is kind of cool… sort of… in a way… since it’s realistic. Only it’s just you having to swallow the realism pill while non-steerers are allowed to spit it out and continue to pass through others. They still lock you in though.
(Sidenote: A second reason why I stopped using Zwift Play is the horrible bluetooth hardware inside. It’s so hard to hook the devices up at startup and they often lose connection mid ride, e.g. right before you intend to fire off the powerup… My other BT devices don’t. And no, this is not because there are too many BT devices connected - I made sure my computer and BT interface could handle the number of connections I need and then some, and it’s only ever Zwift Play that drops out, never any other devices. Zwift Play is trash.)
What didn’t change with PD5, going from PD4, is the bad behavior when going in and out of draft, which I think is the worst part of it. Mainly it’s about these behaviors:
-Sticky draft when going uphill is one very old issue. One might think it shouldn’t be completely impossible to lower the stickiness proportionally to the incline. Or just turn it off when the incline is, say, 5%+, if that makes it easier…
-Going from PD3 to PD4 you got spat out the back in groups too easily. This behavior persists in PD5. What I’m talking about is that at PD4 launch people spoke at length about the need to not over exert yourself and instead try to minimize Watts when in a pack since stickiness would let you overdo your effort if you weren’t careful. But my experience was rather the opposite. It was suddenly very easy to get dropped if you were at the back. You had to secure an embedded spot close to the front to be safe and sometimes, at certain group sizes, it was hard to get into a good position because they were “taken” already. So you were left fighting at the back. Silly. And it’s still the same. It wasn’t like that in PD3.
-Draft still doesn’t blend well. A chasing group approaches from behind and slowly passes through yours, carrying some excess speed from the final chase. You want to melt into the new arrivals. But you’re stuck with your old draft at slower speed, so now you have to work like hell to get into their draft. It can get ridiculous sometimes. Real life physics doesn’t work that way. If you are surrounded by other riders close to you, then in that moment you are in draft, regardless of their speeds. You have to accelerate a little(!) to match the new speed, yes, but in Zwift it’s like the draft you were already in doesn’t help you at all. It’s like you have to break out of the sticky goo and follow the new guys for a bit to get into their draft.
-Someone made up a good name for the phenomenon but I can’t remember what it was, so I call it “waves”. The waves in groups still persist. It’s a consequence of your being able to ride through others. The front doesn’t want to or can’t pull hard enough, so people in draft who happen to push it a little at the back move forward, pass through the front, and now everybody has to catch up. And then it happens again. Rinse repeat. I don’t know if people in genereal are just bad at guaging speed and their effort, and I don’t know if it annoys the hell out of me only because I tend to race hard and don’t have the reserves to spare for these constant micro punches. But I don’t like the behavior. It’s so unrealistic. Unavoidable maybe, but I’m thinking there could be clever ways to at least mimick somewhat calmer group dynamics.
I’ve had enough of them