Why not simply have two different types of accounts? General Gameplay and competitive? Under the general gameplay account you can do whatever you want and there is no cheating and you are not allowed to compete in races. Under the competitive account, there would be algorithms to prevent people from weight doping and all the checks and balances recommended by the community would be imposed on these accounts at all times.
Then people like me that say it’s my game and I can use it however I want can do so. Inversely the competitive accounts will be completely separate, and will not race against general gameplay accounts.
You can already do this, there’s just no mechanism to enforce how the accounts are used. It’s the same as training on TrainerRoad (or anything but Zwift) and only racing on Zwift.
If they shuffled all the ‘my game’ people into their own version of the world so the ‘our game’ people didn’t have to see them, I’d be okay with this. But no way I want the other users of what is a shared game to be all flying past me at 90kph everywhere I go just because they want to, I actually don’t understand the motivation at that point but whatever. It’s a shared world, it’s not ‘your game’. If they made it separate and actually your game, okay.
What’s the point of cheating in Zwift if there’s no competitive advantage to it? Zwift is different than a typical video game in that (I’m assuming) people are using it for training more so than for entertainment. Are there really that many people who want to change their weight to 30 kg so they can watch their avatar fly up AdZ in 45 minutes? Alter their wattage so that they can ride with Constance even though they can really only hang with Maria? This would be a massive project on the development side and introduce a lot of confusion and hassle for users, and I can’t imagine there are enough people who want to go all Game Genie on Zwift to make it worthwhile.
Also, being a community/shared platform, it’s not anyone’s game to use however they see fit. There are rules and terms in any multi-user community or game. You don’t get to drive at 95 mph and drift through every intersection just because you pay road taxes and vehicle registration fees.
Arguing about why somebody would want to cheat is pointless. The fact is that they do. For whatever their motivations or reasons, this is something people complain about on this forum on a regular basis. With all the what if scenarios the fact is that the cheaters already fly by you at xx miles an hour. I am just brainstorming a possible solution that could actually work. Not hypothetical scenarios that won’t actually work or even help the situation. It may be this is a dumb idea.
This may allow the zwift team more time to police the racing accounts, or competitive accounts, and not care about the game accounts. I don’t know it may take more effort for them making this a bad idea.
That would be a good solution, “my game” would let them ride solo on their own so they can do 315w / 5.2w/kg for 750km like the user I flagged yesterday.
These kinds of fake riders are a disincentive.
I don’t see how anyone could be satisfied with a fake 40 or 45min time on ADZ. Yes you got the time but you still know it’s fake and you don’t have the ability to do it for real.
I’m old enough to have played early ‘death match’ video games in the days of Duke Nukem and early Jedi Knight games. There were ‘god mode’ cheats that let you run around invincible with unlimited ammo and blah blah. And while I never understood why you’d want to do that, so long as people weren’t trying to use those cheats in multi-player games, there wasn’t a problem. So a completely isolated sandbox Zwift where you could plug in whatever weight you wanted, plug in a set wattage and just sit back on your bike and watch your avatar zip around, where you could fly, sprout bat wings, whatever–make it like a bike-based Second Life, lol. That would be fine by me. Just so long as none of that could be brought over to the shared Zwift game world with the rest of us.
Right? But if that’s what people want–making all of this easier and simultaneously less rewarding, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
I would absolutely prioritize this as way below just about anything else in Feature Requests, including the better skin color for bald people request and my Silly Walk request. But I’d be okay with it eventually happening
It’s just stupid, spending crazy amounts of money and time on riding ( Zwift ), trying to be serious about things, I feel slightly stupid seeing something like this happen constantly without Zwift taking action
It’s not like I requires much code to implement an auto detection of something like this
Would the more “gamified” rides still upload to strava? I would think not otherwise the strava segments would get all messed up. But then if the gamified rides don’t upload to strava … did they really happen?
In fairness, a lot of the Strava segments are are already messed up, due to the longstanding bug of high speeds in small meetups where keep riders together have been checked.
Even without those bugs, there are going to be a lot of weird placements on Strava due to Keep Together functioning properly. I’ve been halfway up a KQOM multiple times in the past and had the tail end of a Keep Together group come shooting past me as they got pulled along to keep up with the main bunch that was now speeding down the backside. I don’t much care, Keep Together is a great tool and Strava leaderboards don’t mean much to me. But that happens all the time on shorter climbs (Legsnapper, for example)
So there is already lots of cheating whether it’s intentional or the data sent to Strava from keep together rides? Sounds like all the arguments against a game account are, as I said pointless. It’s already happening so having two different type of accounts would basically change nothing in game for those not interested in racing. If you don’t like cheaters then don’t play in the game world. There would be cheaters and they can do what ever that want. If you don’t like that then use a competitive account. Allowing zwift the ability to monitor those accounts that value fair play and ignore the rest.
