The challenge that was seen previously & that Michael refers to is, when at the top of category you are the strongest in the field - therefore its difficult to score points as you are getting the expected results and also not beating anyone stronger/higher ranked than you. So your actual score increase gradually becomes very little…
To combat this, podium type bonuses of finishing place points were introduced to ensure that strong or high ranked riders winning, continued to move upwards.
Currently winning a race is showing a small increase in ZRS points.
Sure, but you only need one point to be pushed up into the next bracket. It might happen more gradually rather than a 10 point gain, but it should still happen.
Surely a rider would get at least 1 point for winning a race.
I don’t race a lot so there might be some nuance I’m missing, admittedly.
If it takes 10 wins to get you the last 10 points out of the category, thats not right.
Its an inherent flaw with these types of systems that needs to be manually overcome.
Your take is right, the higher they go, the less they will score -Without knowing the detail of the system, it could end up in the 0.xx for winning a race if the opposition is not strong enough.
It would be interesting to hear how they allocate points — I know they announced they’re not saying until we’re out of testing. I can attest that after coming in 2nd yesterday in women’s only iTT field of 44 my score only went up four points. I was placed in Cat E/5 and am nowhere near the top of it. The woman who won was one minute ahead and has a ZRS in the 148 post race. Mine is 172. So we are nowhere near the top of the boundary and small increases will not get us there. It’ll be interesting to see how things shake out with a few more races in the series (especially those that suit different types of riders). When the course suits me less, I won’t finish as high, and those with different strengths may.
Additionally though, I think that this lowest Cat is probably too broad. The finish time between the first place and fifth was about two minutes. The majority of racers finished four minutes behind the winner. The top five of us would have finished mid pack in the next cat up.
I wonder if this issue is because the seed calculation only takes 60 second and 10 minute powers into account. If they also took 20 minute power into account (which is more relevant to any race more than 15km) then that would give a more well rounded score and the higher performers in your race would have been in the next cat up already.
Zwift probably needs to introduce “seasons” or something. So you can get promoted, but not demoted within a season, whether that’s 3 months or whatever.
Going up and down through the boundaries of categories is something that will happen normally whether people are trying to game the system or not. At least, that was my experience of being a good C/barely B some years ago.
I’m in a return-to-fitness phase and making rapid improvements, doing a vELO-based series and while already near the top of the category it has taken five races of mercilessly abusing everyone else in my category to finally get over the line, and that’s with the podium bonuses that ZR.app grants. I really hope ZRS has bigger podium bonuses than ZR otherwise it’ll be a real problem.
@Daren I said a long time ago the on here Zwift need to so season where people need to get point to get your Cat then, then the next season you at the Cat where you finish then you need to earn point to keep it of you lose it
Or they can default races to variable cats in some shape or form, where people aren’t always racing the exact same strength of riders every single time. They can also introduce podium bonuses like velo did as you mentioned.
There shouldn’t be a huge falloff in 10 to 20 minute power, and the overwhelming majority of the time a 15km race will have more than 10km of just sitting in at Z2. Only racing against much stronger competitors forces harder efforts
That would solve a lot of this but it’s not likely to happen. CE had the same options but ZHQ keeps every one of their races at the same limits and there’s no reason to expect they’ll change that going forward
Because surely you should be able to enter a higher band than your current score and if you beat some people that should increase your score? Am I missing something?
I guess it depends on what your power curve is, some riders fall off a cliff after 10-12 minutes if they’re built that way. I feel like having a 20min data point would balance out the 60 second one, so you have short, medium, and longer reference points for a more complete picture of the rider. Would maybe help the diesel riders who are under-categorised based on their short power and sprinters who are over-categorised based on their short power. Just a thought though, I’m sure things will shake out in time and people will get to their natural categories.
Type 1 danglers are going to drop.
Type 2 danglers are usually the strong riders chilling in the back and seeing how the race is unfolding. If you are far from the back and your net speed is higher than the pack, this gives you longer coasting soft pedaling time.
