i agree, brother. i made some type of snap observations along the lines of “oh, it puts everyone above their seed score and then the results can sort them out that way, cool” after it was announced
of course, it only works like that if everyone is racing frequently. but it seemed, and still seems, like the basic idea. so, a little allowance for people to go below their seed score is OK too. last i heard, which was recently, that was under strong consideration
That was years ago, and yet empty zombie ZHQ events continue to flood the calendar.
he definitely did do that at some point, because one of the 3r races i liked to ride before the tiny races got caught in the crossfire
Extending the results/power lookback period from 90 to 365 days would go a long way to resolving the issues with racers who don’t race during their outdoor season. But you can’t get away with NOT fixing the formula for initial seed score. Low cp30 TTers are going to destroy the racing experience for “lower category” racers because they are way underseeded. And high cp30 sprinters are going to have a lousy experience because initial seed is too high. Even if we’re allowed to drop below seed score, race results don’t seem to drop you very fast, so I might still have several weeks’ worth of racing before my score would settle. If Zwift recognizes that the seed scores are not ideal (James has mentioned that they believe cp30 is too heavily-weighted), then why not just fix it? I fail to see how collecting months worth of data based on a faulty starting point can be more useful than iterating again with a better starting point.
Seeding is definitely fairly important; review the image of how many people only did 1 single race at the start of this whole thing.
Retaining people into willing to race again is definitely more important…
Seed matters in the sense that if anyone thinks the seed was too aggressive, they won’t do another race.
James brought it up in the past month or so on Facebook some folks were making comments about it.
I’m in the general agreeance about data terms though.
CE, 90 days is fine, whatever.
ZRS should take an entire year’s worth of data at minimum. If someone feels the need to have it handicapped due to a change in trainer or injury, that can be on them to take up with Zwift Support as people do with CE anyways.
Watopia Hilly and Rooftop Rendezvous aren’t exactly flat though, are they? 
The seed has room for improvement and allowing your score to dip below seed when it overshoots your ability is crucial to alleviating some of that issue.
I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it will always be a 90-day window. That’s just the starting point given the history with categorization.
For me, there needs to be a separation between someone returning to racing on Zwift from a long absence and those who are active players. For the person returning from a long absence, use a longer history view to seed them. For active players, use a shorter window that can be reflective of their current fitness.
Sure. The only challenge is ensuring that Zwift have the tooling in place to elegantly handle those requests once they start rolling in, right? 
Pulling from lackluster data (90 days which could be the entire summer for most folks especially right now), is going to be a big ruiner of seeding.
And as said; a poor experience on a singular race will determine if most people do a second race or not.
Someone coming back from summer who is underseeded and does their first race due to poor data will likely win and go on to do at least another.
Someone who has been riding all year and has an accurate seed is likely to get smacked by the underseeded and not want to race again.
How about this Tim
Is there a way to flag a potentially poor / inaccurate seed?
Like is there a possibility to perhaps overseed someone in value if they have very little data, versus someone who has a lot of data and the seed is likely to be correct?
I’ve said this more times than I can count…ZR.app already covers this.
It does, but I think there’s an opportunity there for Zwift to do better with their implementation.
You’re starting to sound like Eric Min. I don’t believe this is true. People who want to race will race, those who don’t won’t. I do strongly believe, however, that an unsound cat system, particularly one that locks people in a place, will deter (and has deterred) people from racing. Because it bereaves riders of hope.
“If I improve, my results will improve” or “In time, it will get better” VS “There’s no point. It will always be like this.”
SImply make the power lookback to initially place a returning racer a set number of races, rather than a number of days?
10?
20?
30?
More than 30?
As someone who used to be a Category Enforcement B two years ago (borderline A when zFTP was effectively 20mins, rather than now effectively 60mins), I think a year is too far a lookback if a racer has racing data.
Well to be fair… it has been this way for a pretty long time 
worse is a post race review and you go back to the winner and see this:
I always check the winner after the race on ZP just to see what their profiles look like, and more often than not they really do look like this where it’s podium almost on the daily…
(Which is just another reason why sprinting numbers for seed also do matter; because it’s easy far too easy to sandbag in CE)
I’m just saying; there are ways to encourage people to want to race.
Knowing they’re up against people who are in a constantly first place state has a profound impact versus waking up and just not feeling like doing a race that day.
Curious. Was this the typical heavy hitter sandbagging sprinter winning these, or a lightweight who saw his chance with all these climbs in this month ?
Actually in that case it’s a U23 account; but that’s besides the point lol
I see accounts like that fairly often.
And more often than not, they’re indeed doing a race EVERY single day, sometimes more than once per day.
My personal issue with seeding and why it’s important, or a system that can deal with time more than 90 days is…
A quick review of the races Americas again last night:
HERD: 3 B’s, 1 D
ZMonthly, 1 A, 11 Bs, 8Cs, 2 Ds
Crit: 1 A, 2 Bs, 2 Ds
3R: 2 Cs
ZMonthly: 1 A, 5 Bs, 3Cs, 2Ds
ZMonthly: 2 A, 9 B, 5C, 6 D
ZMonthly 4 B, 6 C, 3 D
Again, less people are going to “want” to race if there’s nobody to race against, and then post results; if they see whoever won seems to do nothing but win? Probably won’t do that race for a while.
I had two of those in my race this week. Both 13 years old and 36kg.
We could not drop them before Box Hill and they smashed us uphill and finished 1 and 2.
Guess they are pretty hard to seed.
For sure, not blaming the system.
It turns into the earlier conversation Geralt talking about w/kg.
Because indeed once you really get outside of the 60-100kg range, speeds in Zwift REALLY get out of hand.
For those who say “I never see them”, well, do some rides around solo more, watch for the people holding 5+ w/kg for a while and usually on a Tri bike, and then spectate and check their watts…
I get passed by people doing like 160w and 5+w/kg on the weekly during my warmups.
How often are these people doing races on Zwift, I have no idea; but the point remains… the speed / physics of Zwift really get out of whack.
Mind you; I almost never see speed sensor riders anymore either, so it isn’t that
I’m looking back at my own ZP at races last year / last summer…
The races I joined were pulling some HUGE numbers too; like 50 riders in B and C.
Which is likely why I did them in the first place.
What’s strange is, I honestly haven’t seen any Americas time races all summer that have pulled those kinds of numbers on a week night…
Surely the price change didn’t have that drastic of an affect; something has changed…
i rack a lot of races up and honestly the only thing i want out of a category system is that people try racing and like it enough to want to do more of it
i was DFL in probably the first 20 races i did back in 2019, lost to time… it’s obvious i must have found something i liked in doing them anyway, but i’m not sure many would
I know you’ve been on the right side of things for as long as I remember. And I know that kind of rider all too well too.
Actually, I’m not sure a beginning/infrequent racer will look into race histories of others. Btw, did you check the HR histograms of that guy? I know of only one or two racers with a… “gilded history” that can do an orange race (unfortunately one of them is rather vocal in here, saying the wrong things at the wrong time, strategically speaking. 
)
The thing, though, is that the podium monopolizers tend to race frequently. (Pre-cat enforcement and the “new” model, they used to until they got upgraded, which is when they went on a 90 day hiatus - maybe they do still, I haven’t really checked.) So having them upgraded by a results-based system after podium streaks will solve a large part of the problem regarding deterring effect on the new or infrequent racers.
Personally, I don’t mind getting dropped hard by someone who I can see worked hard, when checking him out afterwards. In one sense, it is always fair.
But of course, a constant throughput of new or returning racers that get placed in bad categories is also a problem, you are right. It’s just that the fear of that scenario mustn’t undermine or derail the underlying effort here. We worked for years in here to get a results-based classification, you did too.
So we can’t lose focus on that. To me, a high-risk scenario is that people complain so much in here about the test model that ZHQ start to complicate things and include even more Newtonian parameters into the model and thus lose focus themselves. You know how hard it is to make people see the light…
Initial seeding is a problem, agreed. But it isn’t the big problem. The big problem remains that we need to move from a static system where people are put into a cat for the wrong reasons, into a dynamic system where people are put into a cat because they earned the right to be there due to what happened in previous races, not because of what did or did not happen in the magnets of the smart trainer.