You will only lose draft if you are the rider behind the burrito user. If you were in say a large group and your avatar were to move outside of the cone behind the rider using the burrito - what would normally be their draft area without the PowerUp - and to another Zwifter’s wheel within the group, then you’d be drafting that rider.
Essentially, the burrito nullifies the draft for all riders behind the person using it while it is active. You can think of it like a dead zone of draft. If you were to move outside of that, your draft is back to normal again.
Used the longer feather today on the Herd’s FriYay Social ride today, very much appreciated! Did get the truck once but didn’t pay much attention, and the pace of that ride was such that drafting wasn’t an issue for me.
Tonight rode through banner-full Neokyo for 65k and never landed an aero. Got lots of everything else, but no aero. First time in 60,000km+ that happened to me so I became worried that aeros may be somehow suppressed?
Also, what gives with the new display of jerseys? It’s more confusing than previously: shows two jerseys when someone only holds one, toggles back and forth, etc. Less intuitive now.
Last, as an ATV user, why do I now have to press menu twice to get to the menu? Seems like a bad solve for a previous non-problem.
This in no way should indicate that I don’t like the experience provided by Zwift very much. I’m grateful.
The anvil is already significantly better for light riders. At 100 kg, the anvil gives me an 50% increase in weight, while it gives a 100% increase in weight to a 50 kg rider. Changing it to benefit lighter riders even more seems poorly thought out. At least when the feather was changed from an even 10 kg to a certain percentage of rider weight a number of years ago, it made it more fair for all riders. This goes in the reverse of that.
Anvil is the power-up that needed the most balancing (see Cobbled Climbs Stage 3 if any doubt) so I’m glad you’re adjusting it. Reducing the time and moving it to a percentage of weight rather than fixed seems very positive. The part that gives me some pause is the end of the first sentence and the last sentence.
I trust in your testing you saw that a fixed percentage showed less benefit to the lighter riders and so you had to slide the percentage a bit with weight to make it a roughly equal benefit regardless of weight. At least, that’s what I’m hoping . . . I don’t think you would just make it more powerful for lighter riders (unless the lead dev is 55 kg )
That said, what I’m hoping is that percentage formula does indeed slide incrementally with weight rather than something like 60% of weight if heavier than 75kg and 70% of weight if lighter than 75 kg (just sample numbers). If it is a hard step rather than a slide, we’d quickly run into situations where someone .2 kg different in weight would have a much different experience. For instance, in my example above, a 74.9 kg rider would have a marked difference in benefit vs a 75.1 kg rider.
I would hope it’s something more sloped with weight rather than stepped. For example, in my scenario above, a 75.1kg rider might get 60% and a 74.9kg rider might get 60.2% of weight gradually sloping to a 62 kg rider getting 65% and maybe a 55kg rider getting 70%. Again just example numbers - but yeah, hoping that variable percentage of weight is sloped and not stepped.
PowerUps are unfair in general, I don’t like their effect being improved. Ghost and XP are useless, it’s frustrating to get them while other riders will fly up the hills with a feather (a 60 kg rider will get 6 wkg at the effort of 5 wkg for 30 sec!?). The burrito is the most disruptive of all (in a negative sense), in the bunch it can affect dozen of riders (and one rider can be affected by dozen of burritos in a chain), while all other PowerUps can affect only one rider.
Let riders choose the PowerUps, or you are providing “strong strategic tools” to some and undeserved frustration to the others. I liked the batteries so much more!
feather casually gets double duration buff and no1 bats an eyelid?
anyone tried blasting a 30sec atk uphill with feather in a race yet?
sound busted to me but haven’t done any races recently to see it in action…! (and not much of a climber anyway, usually just trying to hang on for dear life, hence why worried about this change as hills are hard enough already!)
races getting by decided by “did you make the break because RNGsus delivered you a feather powerup?” does not sound like a good idea to me.
Looking at ZwiftInsider’s numbers, it appears as though for the very light, the benefit has actually increased over what it was before, but for riders at ~100 kg like me, we only get about a 20% increase. Went from someone at 50 kg getting 100% and someone at 100 kg getting 50% to someone at 50 kg getting 120% and someone at 100 kg getting 20%. Massively, massively unfair imbalance in favor of the lighter riders and almost useless for us heavier folks. What a garbage update.
With anvil enacting a dynamic percentage effect based on weight, can the feather also have this added in reverse fashion?
With Zwift W/kg mechanics favoring sprint acceleration scenarios, the now 30 seconds time period favors the lighter riders more, provided they have the watts which makes their W/kg exceed that of heavier riders.
I did some example number crunching of a 50kg and 100kg rider. Assume they output 800 and 1200W, respectively, for irrelevant 15 to 30 seconds duration.
10% weight reduction means: 45kg and 90kg, respectively. However, the now 45kg rider has an approx. 0.4W/kg “gain” over the now 90kg rider during the power up activation period. I realize I ignore speed here, but that is critical to assess for whatever height parameters.
Zwift Insider found some results with speed differences for varying weights using the recent modified anvil power up, so it would be good to look at this for the feather as well
Not saying modified feather in current form is greatly flawed, but it seems odd it’s not the “reverse” anvil
Thanks for confirming, I was replying to someone on facebook who was alarmed that if they were last man over a climb and the rider in front Burrito’ed them, then they were screwed, I suggested they could sprint then super-tuck and be fine (in theory)
heavier riders still have an advantage with anvil from what i understand, just not as much as before.
which is fair imo, because lightweight riders are struggling to keep on descents already as it is without even taking powerups into consideration.
Based on Zwift Insider’s numbers, the anvil boosts everyone’s weight to roughly the same final total weight. Since that weight isn’t all that much higher than my actual weight, the anvil is more or less useless to me. So a power up that gives benefits to light people but not heavy people is not balanced or welcome. How would you like it if you had the chance to get a +10 xp in a race but knew that I never could? That’s essentially what we’re talking about here.
from what I can tell - you will still be able to drop a lightweight rider if you use an anvil and they don’t.
and likewise they will now be able to drop you if they use it and you don’t.
if both of you use it or no-one uses it, no-one gets dropped.
which seems fair to me.
cos in the past I watched lightweight riders pushing 5-6wkg getting dropped by “heavyweights” supertucking - and that didn’t seem very fair or fun.
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