There is no way you fall 5 meter outside the pack and you can’t catch up. Meanwhile in the middle of the pack you can do 2.5 w/kg and stay fine. Fall 5 meters back and riding 7w/kg you can’t catch up.
haha yes that’s true! and there is no way that you will ride 40 km/h or even more with 3 w/kg AVG.
Another great one today…hare and hounds…riding with the group and pulling for 35 minutes… pass the C and B groups and it throws me on their draft and kicks me out of the A draft… 5 m back and couldn’t catch them. Garbage.
This is absolutely frustrating especially when chasing! At a certain point the phenomenon won’t hinder speed but often times it’s just sensless braking effort.
When steering hits the main game hopefully we can get rid of the annoying sticky draft. 
At least for races with steering enabled.
Any chance this also has something to do with the new ‘rolling resistance’ “feature”? I’m not sure what route you were riding, but there are a number of reported instances since the latest update of people putting out lots of power and not being able to stay with others putting out far less power because they have the “wrong” wheel/tire combo for the road surface.
I’m not a fan of the draft logic, either, as it doesn’t emulate IRL situations at all, but the rolling resistance issue may just be adding insult to injury.
How do i configure that? Windows PC and zwift companion app
There is no configuration, it just happened with the latest update. Different tires (well, wheels, since we can’t actually pick tires) now behave differently on different surfaces. One of the other threads has a video of someone on the jungle section doing 6-7 WKg and not being able to keep up with other riders doing under 3 WKg. It’s a bit nutty, and seems to be generating a lot of complaints in it’s current incarnation, especially since Zwift offered no insight at to which tires work better on which surfaces.
Here it is:
I find Zwift drafting quite frustrating as well.
I’ll do large group rides and find myself riding easily at the front (2.7-3.2 w/kg), then I am suddenly dropping back through the pack (50-80 person blob) for no apparent reason. My watts do not change and I go straight to the back. Then it becomes very difficult to move back through the pack.
I have also noticed that it’s relatively easy to ride to the front of a group when the gradient goes up, but struggle when the road turns downhill. I am not a tiny rider at 180 lbs, so this makes no sense and has become quite frustrating.
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Yes I find it quite often when doing a group ride that you would be riding comfortably at or near the front for 2-3 minutes then suddenly it is like you trainer just stops and you drop like a stone. Initially I thought that it was my trainer acting up but realized as you said that the power output is there at the same level all the time.
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My biggest frustration regarding the drafting is going up. I mean how much drafting is there really going up a steep incline at 10km/h. I would do around 10-12 km/h at 3.5w/kg catching the person in front hand over fist who is sitting at around 3w/kg. Then I would get stuck behind them. I mean really? If incline > x% and speed < y then sticky drafting = disabled. Not too difficult.
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Its not the drafting that’s causing most of the problems its the sudden drop of power, look at your graph and you will see the drop to zero at times,. It happens when certain riders pass you or when you get stuck behind another rider. Its like being handslung
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I don’t see a loss in power when this issue occurs. I just finished another group ride and had the same experience. I will be riding at the front, then I am suddenly at the back of the group I am riding with with no change in my power.
Then I have to increase my power significantly to get back to the front. It feels like I am constantly doing intervals on group rides with the way drafting works currently.
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As a gamer I wonder if this is graphic lag. I have just used a new laptop to run a group ride on zwift and had no problems, before my graph looked liked sharks teeth and like Scott was doing intervals to stay with ride
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I have experienced this. It seems quite explainable: assuming that everyone in a group is putting out about the same power. If you are at the front, you’ll have more drag as you are not drafting. This will slow you down a bit. Then you will be going slightly slower than the rest of the group who are all putting out the same power as you, so you will drift to the back.
The only way to stop drifting back is to put in a short boost of power to increase your speed back to that of the group.
Then to get past people you’re drafting, you’ll need a bigger boost of power as the drafting is slightly sticky.
It takes a bit of getting used to but is ok. On one hand it’s not very realistic and needs constant management. On the other hand, you don’t have to group stretching and contracting around corners, which you’d have IRL. So it all kind of evens out.
I quite like the need to constantly manage your place in the group as it keeps the experience engaging.
Try Zwiftalizer.com to see if your Graphics Card can keep up, look at the FPS P5 if that is single digits then you might have a problem with the GPU not keeping up.
Take one of the log files. Locating Log Files
Your average FPS should be at least 15-20 (higher is better)
I am going to crank my settings down today but my laptop has dedicated graphics, although older, but the game appears smooth when riding. It’s not choppy.
Definitely no power drop on my graphs and definitely no graphics lag. Graphics lag has got some very distinct symptoms and you would be more likely to get this when riding in a big group. This stickiness going up specifically happens regardless of the number of riders on screen or in game. The flawed behavior of the sticky draft is shown very clearly when going up an incline. In my +35 years of cycling I’ve never been stuck behind a slower rider on a >4% incline due to draft. And I have also never approach a slow person from behind on a flat and got sucked in. I understand that the Zwift implementation is best effort since drafting is a difficult thing to calculate but it would seem as if there are many clear use cases where it could be fixed easily.
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I’m regularly cruising at 40kph and then approach some riders from behind and speed drops to 37 and then 34 with no decrease in power. Its not a poor implementation of drafting, its a blinking bug!
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