With this week’s release, we’ve made some subtle improvements that should smooth the way your avatar moves when someone is overtaking you.
When your avatar bumps other players within a pack, your lateral movement is much less likely to be so drastic that you’re way off to the side and seemingly out of the draft. This should reassure you that your avatar is staying in the draft of the riders ahead of you.
When drafting behind other riders, the draft logic should minimize the likelihood that you will lose speed if you get too close and bump up against them.
To be clear, this is not eliminating the “sticky draft” that happens when you overtake slower riders. Improvements to pack dynamics will continue, and sticky draft is among those targeted areas.
is there a plan to adjust or remove the “sticky draft”?
Especially uphill it’s very annoying to overtake people that are just a little slower than you. You got really to bump through them when sticking behind.
Thanks
From release notes: Made improvements to the Draft Lock logic which should minimize the likelihood that a rider will lose speed when colliding with riders
Made it worse for me. 2w/kg warmup, stuck behind every rider around that was 1.5-1.8w/kg. Scooted past them once I had matched other rider’s speed without increasing cadence/power. Did Specialized Climbers event - 200 odd others up AdZ - first time I had noticed sticky draft on just about every rider I went to past.
Lateral movement had been improved dramatically for me over past 2-3 days and the event start today was consistent with past few day’s experiences (less washing machine churn) and noticeably staying the draft more.
Same here. I’m 196cm/85kg, and constantly hit the sticky watt wall riding along CC bot. Being passed on the the very end, and require occasional sprints not to be dropped… new improvements not really working for me. CC bot’s pace was up to 43kmh this morning with 41.5kmh avg for one hour. Maybe the improvements work only for small / light riders
James, I hear you. Yet, I’m riding very regularly with CC bot, including 2x 100KM just last days. But today felt extremely different.
CC bot was all over the place, peleton often very spaced out and not blobby, and overall pace was hot (41.5avg, vs. usual 39/40). Couple of times a group of riders dropped out on 42kmh on the flat section.
I finished 200KM in 4:52, and this includes some parts where I uturned at the dino stop, and was riding a bit on my own with lower pace before catching up with CC again.
If it not related to the update, would be interesting to know the root cause.
That probably is the update - not everyone will have updated (for example iOS devices) so if people’s are on different versions, there could be issues for a few days. This has happened a few times before.
Cant sticky draft just be turned off at a certain uphill %?
Just did the New York KOM and the group got away from me on that as I was stickied to a rider in front of me and the power to push past them was tough to get to when already going deep.
I feel it is more of an issue on climbs than on the flat.
From the release notes however: Made improvements to the Draft Lock logic which should minimize the likelihood that a rider will lose speed when colliding with riders
I raced the Zwift Classics today and felt like I had less incidents of being thrown out of the draft. It felt smoother and an improvement overall. I was mostly riding in a group of 9-10 riders. I can’t comment on the effect in bigger groups. Keep on tuning!
I run an event every Tuesday at 6.30PM AEST (Team Zwift Tri Oz - Challenge Ride) where we “Group Time Trial” our way across the Fugit Tempus / Feugo Flats Return Segment trying to beat our previous best.
This week after the latest updates we managed to better our time. We did notice a definite difference this week with a group of around 100 riders starting out and slowly reducing to 16 of us at the end of the 7.1k segment. The draft dynamics are extremely noticeable and we could really feel the difference when you last made a change (in the last update) as our pace dropped slightly (3-4%) across the segment.
We have set an 8.30min target for our next weeks attempt. We managed 8.32min this week and look forward to going under the 8.30 mark next week.
I just thought I’d let you know that the dynamics (Algorithm) are working.
