Perhaps you could have riders with truly no race history (ranking initially could be set based even on any rides the person has completed) be invisible/undraftable to other racers and not included on the race results no matter what they do until they’ve completed 3 races?
In an ideal world I’d force racers to have a HR monitor and then you’d know they’re at least putting in a convincing effort, but that might be raising the bar too high.
I am thinking seeding races. So every race will have a “E” pen where any one can enter if they have a ranking or not, new racers will only be able to enter the “E” pen. You will have to do 5 of those races and you need to get a full start for the race for it to count towards your 5 seeding races.
The star system is something like your 95% peak power in the race must exceed 80% of your Zwift FTP. That way you can’t got to easy.
Both ideas are good. I think it needs to be simple and easy to implement. I don’t think people would go deliberately easy in those races as there is not enough reward for doing so. Using power probably won’t fly, seeing as they are new to the system and Zwift will not have any rider history to go by.
Gerrie, I would go for your approach but simplified. Anyone can enter the E pen, only riders with 5 completed races or more can enter a ranked race. This ties in nicely with the way other games manage it.
I think the point is, this isn’t a system that needs years of planning. The crux of it already exists, the matchmaking aspect just needs coding. I am sure some flaws will be realised, but it can be tweaked and improved over time - again as any other game would manage it.
Long overdue. The racing value of the platform has been ignored.
This sort of thing needs to occur OR someone else will do similar. If that happens, I suspect the ‘racers’ will migrate. This also helps a lot where people get stuck at the bottom of a cut off. ex. someone 4.1 in A will always struggle to do well as they are at the bottom of the capability in the Cat.
One off scratch races it sounds a good idea but I’m unsure how auto assigning pens will work in leagues/series.
How would you replicate this model over to ZRL? would we have leagues based on rider score?
There are also many other series on zwift where you are competing v other riders week after week which is where the auto assigning pen falls down.
The main different between Zwift and other online games is the number of riders competing. COD and FIFA you have thousands of players entering an event so the match making works much better. With zwift you could be talking 10s of riders entering an event so deciding that split based purely on number of entries could result in a very mixed field. The good thing with ZRL races is the field has been of similar ability. One or two overpowered rider in a zwift race can ruin it for all. The same does not apply to COD/FIFA
I’m still undecided whether the existing cat system or points based system is the better option. Both have their issues. Ideally i’d like to see some cat enforcement with the current system as a quick win and see where to go from there. Maybe some hybrid system using cats but somehow account for those that continually podium to force them to upgrade. Also the power limits for lighter riders needs lowered.
One key issue is 20 minute peak power to mass ratio in competition is a super-crappy metric for how people are going to do in an actual race. Anyone looking at Zwift results can see that – the correlation with standings is weak. I proposed a series of different metrics in this forum, more or less complicated (the most complicated using the entire power-duration curve, and converting that to effective speed on flats and climbs, and averaging those), which should be much better.
Results-based categories are better. The present points system can be debated (for example, points vary wildly doing a hill climb with essentially the same time), and I’d love to dig into algorithms, but in the end, I think this proposal is strong. It also has the advantage of the category boundaries not being fixed, so for example in the present system, if you happen to come out right at the top end of the B’s you’re going to do better than someone slightly stronger who’s at the bottom of the A’s, but only because someone drew the B-A boundary at a certain round number.
BTW, I like giant combined fields. I find “my people”, we ride with each other, and if I’m gunning for top 100 or whatever, that’s fine.
Love the idea. The wkg makes great sense on a steep uphill time trial, less so in road and Crit races.
I do wonder about some of Zwift’s algorithms. Seem like they still overplay wkg on the flats and underplay the drafting effect and the aero gains of a TT bike.
Also it is very important that each of the pens have a different start time, fastest going out first. I’ve been in races where everyone starts at the same time -i don’t know who’s in my race.
This.
For having a better ranking on Zwiftpower , you must have better results than racers in front of you on Zwiftpower right? Last week, I had a race. 50 racers at the start, we finished only at 10. A lot of racers, for any reason, stopped the race and we don’t saw in the results. This is this cheating! In real life (IRL), if you started a race, if you don’t finished, you are DNF and you are in the results.Period!
@Shawn_McAfee_DIRT there is already many of those races .
This request is for those of us that want competition and tactics.
Was that 10 on zwift power or the Zwift results. Not every racer is on Zwift power.
I fully support that this system is greatly needed. A matchmaking system and rankings ladder is the right answer in my book.
I do like the idea of using a combo of rank and category structure. Realistically, there are some riders who progress slower than others, and some eventual plateau. If just using a general ranking system riders will end up stuck at a certain point and will no longer advance.
It may get a bit more complicated, but having a ranking by category and a global ranking, I think, would push riders to do even better. ZHQ could set it up something like if you top 5 10 times in 90 days OR hit the w/kg barrier you are upgraded to the next category.
When I am racing, I always looking the starting list on ZP , not on Zwift companion. IRL, when you are racing , you can have punctures, mechanical problems and crashs ! On Zwift, you can have power drops, wifi connections problems but it is how a race is done ! You start a race ? You don’t finish ? Sorry but you have a DNF on the results on ZP
Hi
It is because people / human likes to compete that rules and systems is created.
If was just racing trying to escape from a hunt down of a lion in the real world, where it most likely will be the slowest person to loose, then is was easy. If you know you are slow, you also know you most likely will be the next lion meal if you join the race.
But also in such situation people will try getting advantages for them self, the big slow person would maybe use some power to knock down a smaller person to escape the lion. Then another lion is added to the run and then another person is using tricks not to become the target for the second lion. And so lions could be kept added into the race until it can’t pay off to keep cheating because every new lion added to the race is programmed to hunt down all the cheaters first.
It seems the same here in Zwift. Everyone want to add new rules until everyone can outrun all the lions added to the game.
Zwift need to come up with a solution where the lion is going after the persons that trying to escape it on someone else behalf and make it uninteresting for such person to even try to be a part of the lion escape game 
Here people are talking about a system that allow the cheaters to race together with people who claim that they don’t cheat. Why allow cheating at all?
The simple way is, if you sign up as a user of Zwift, you race fair and if you don’t and you get caught, you already know the consequence, you get excluded for life.
Zwift should stand up for being a place, if you join, you don’t cheat and if you do and you get caught you are excluded for life. That’s the one rule Zwift should add to the sign in terms as Zwift can’t change the mindset of the cheaters anyway.
I’ve been waiting for this feature for YEARS ! I don’t race anymore because I’m light and near the lower to middle of Cat C. I always get dropped and end up either alone or in a small autobus. On flat courses (all races even ones with climbs have long flat or downhill sections) I can’t come close to keeping up - even when I stay in the draft. Plus you can never tell at the start of the race which group will be DQ’ed and which will have the winner, so knowing who to try to stay with is impossible. If I knew I could be competitive with the other racers in my group I would definitely start racing again. MAKE IT SO !!!
In case anyone hasn’t seen it, this idea was written up with a little less haste for Zwift Insider:
I think this is a great analysis of the current broken situation. Not a lot to add other than Zwift needs to quite rapidly decide if it’s a serious platform for cyclists, or a game for many who will not ride a bike outdoors. Already some are voting with their feet & migrating to other platforms (EG RGT).
I have been using rankings for a while for finding quality races but think Cat’s are still needed.
A lot of you have the luxury of living in timezones that might support big fields, but some timezones (mine for eg), we get very few events, and few participants. So having a race with Cat podiums for our 20-25 participant events that spread the current Cat spectrum from A+ to true D is needed to support motivations. Yes, some of us like to compete with the next person and be happy with perhaps a few points. But when you have low participation, the chances of getting a ranking increase is very low if everyone rides to their ranking ability and if I cant bag a podium or points … why am I bothering?
Alain points out above, people starting but not finishing should be considered DNF, they should lose points, and their ranking pre-race should still be considered at result time for others - I get sick of entering races (a couple of 100k+ semi-recent events come to mind) where I was beating higher ranked people and they decided to bail - my motivation for the race was to bag points and kick their butts. This is an easy fix however.
And auto matchmaking is a crock in the gaming world - again, in popular timezones or when games are new, all good, but once you pair beginners with experts as popularity starts waning, users will move on to the next thing.
Yet another good thread and thanks for putting your ideas out there. I do feel however that its all been said before in the multitude of threads I have read over the years and wonder how many more threads Zwift need before they will do something. Maybe they are doing something apart from paying the pro’s and building hardware. Hope so.
If the race is split in to 4 ranking pens, rather than 4 categories, you will race exactly the same number of people just divided up a different way. It doesn’t necessarily have to reduce the size of races.
Good point on ‘rage quitters’, however as you say, this is easily solved as it is in many other games.