Recommended change to virtual shifting default gearing

General Discussion
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So recently, the game has been updated to have the default ‘start’ gear being gear 8 when you’re utilizing virtual shifting. As someone who enjoyed starting on gear 12 (and typically shifted up immediately to 15 to start), this change caused a bit of consternation, but I didn’t see how it’d be problematic.

Until now. Now I see how it’s VERY problematic.

This involves workouts and the automatic cycling of ERG mode.

When in workouts you hit a ‘free-ride’ effort where you expect to go full-gas (ie: 15 second sprint intervals), the sudden jump from a cozy spin in ERG mode on your ramp up to next to no resistance (Gear 8) when ERG mode turns off is terrible to put it mildly! Stepping up through the gears, having enough delay so that the game and virtual shifting can properly walk up through the virtual cassette, leaves you with little to no time in that 15 second block to put in actual effort (for me, this is typically around gear 20-22). Running yourself up the cassette from 8 to 20 is an entirely different problem - the game doesn’t compute the inputs immediately, and once lag-time is over, it gives you ALL of the resistance at once. It pretty much slams you from NO resistance (8) to ALL resistance (24) and then dials back to 20 - I found this out the hard way, and ended up standing with all my body weight on one pedal and barely getting the blasted thing to move because the sudden plunking of all the world’s resistance brought my cadence to a screaming halt.

The only way around this is to turn off ERG preemptively and then remember to toggle it back on once your’e done with the free-ride set, but if you’re deep into a painful workout, remembering to do this sometimes doesn’t happen, leaving a rider with the same spin-out issues when free-ride segments occur.

Why, oh why, can we not have an option in Settings for virtual shifting to set our own default gear?! I would LOVE to set gear 15 as my start. I’m sure there are other riders who’d appreciate the same. And those who wanted gear 8 can have gear 8. Heck, we could make it that gear 8 is the default, and those of us who want something different have to go and actively alter that setting in the settings menu.

Please, PLEASE give us an option like this. The dialing back to gear 8 in workout mode every time ERG turns off is ridiculous.

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Before pedaling, you can push 4 times on the button to move from 8 to 12.
But I can understand it is a big effort to do so.

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Stephane, if you would have carefully read the initial post, you would see this is not the issue. This concerns changing from ERG to non-ERG in starting at a default of eight. There is no way to just click four times and call it good.

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Sounds like what would be nice, is if v2 of the shifters had a +/- 5 gear shifter button along the lines of what those of us with real shifters, would call a front derailleur.

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Question: Were you in gear 8 to begin with? That is, did you ever trying shifting to a harder gear while still in ERG mode to see if the trainer stayed in that gear when it turned off ERG mode? Could you fully do an erg-based workout in eg. Gear # 18 or thereabouts?

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If you try and use your virtual gear shifting while in ERG, it ramps up the bias from 100-125%. But when ERG turns off, you plunk back into gear 8.

The only way to shift gears is to preemptively turn off ERG mode and adjust before the free-ride segments that don’t feature ERG, and as stated, when deep in the pain-cave of an intense workout, having to remember to do this (and then undo this at the end of the segment) gets problematic.

And I played with this - I dialed up to gear 20 and left it there to see if the next time ERG cycled if it’d start me off on gear 20. Nope. It starts off at default 8 every single time, unfortunately.

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Then definitely… this needs fixed. If they’re going to market these as virtual gears, they need to act like virtual gears.

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Or do the whole workout in Resistance Mode as if you were riding an actual bike. :wink:

Presumably the bits of the workout that matter are the free ride intervals anyway, right? Who cares if you’re 10 watts off for those?

The best/easiest solution (for workout designers) is to add a short free-ride interval (maybe 15 seconds duration) before every free-ride segment to prompt/allow riders to change gear whether they were previously in Erg or not.

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That may be an easy solution for future workouts to implement a ‘pre-free-ride, adjust your gears now!’ free spin segment… preferably with a hefty ramp down so you don’t go from healthy, heavy resistance to absolutely nothing, but that does nothing to rectify the issue for all other workouts currently in Zwift unless some manic developer wants to alter them all.

As for doing the whole workout in Resistance Mode (I take it you mean with ERG Off?), I’d ride a dumb trainer or my rollers. :smile: I like ERG mode - it’s part of why I keep buying smart trainers these days.

I think the best solution was presented above: having virtual gears behave like real gears, and allowing the previous setting to be ‘remembered’ by the user’s account. So that way if I leave my virtual bike in gear 18, it starts off in gear 18 the next time I fire up Zwift. That’d be excellent.

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I don’t mind erg mode in some cases. It’s fine for Z2 rides and it’s brilliant for stopping us from going too hard on recovery rides.

For short, hard efforts? Not so much. For sprints? Definitely not.

It’s a tool in the toolbox. :blush:

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I had exactly the same problem when doing stage 2 of the Base Line training. I nearly put my knee out on the first 15 second free ride! If you change up fast, you go from no power to full instantly (bye bye knees!), and if you change up slowly you run out of time.

Either we need to be able to change the default start gear or, have a section before the free ride to allow us the change gear ready (as others have suggested) which would make the most sense.

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