Recently discovered “sticky draft” during Alpe de Zwift race. Had decided to ride the first flat 5km steady then work hard up the 12km climb, rather than engage in the usual mad sprint off the line with red zone after 1 minute and cling on for the rest of the ride. I’m cat B so started catching cat D riders struggling on the climb. To my surprise my avatar snapped behind the slower rider rather than passing. can’t remember the exact figures but I was doing say 3.6 w/kg and sitting behind someone at 2.5. I eventually figured out that by sprinting, I could get past, but then I would catch the next person, so after about 6 sprints I was fried. Thought I must have changed a setting somewhere only to discover afterwards that sticky drafting was something Zwift had created on purpose. Having read up about it, i can understand the logic but it’s a disaster for climbing. I emailed Zwift who explained the intention was to make drafting “realistic, intuitive and functional” but recognized it was an issue going up steeper hills. They advised increasing power by 100W or approach the person in front at a significantly higher speed, neither of which is sustainable on a long climb. I made the following suggestions to them
- Ideally the drafting algorithm is modified significantly when speed falls below let’s say 20km/hr. So then the dominant metric becomes w/kg rather than speed and should be based on a % differential. So I’m thinking that maybe you have that already because an extra 100 watts prompts the overtake, however if we consider that cat B and cat A might climb between 250 and 350 watts, then 100 watts is 30 to 40%, which is much too big a differential. A more realistic differential would be 5%.
- If this is too difficult to code (and I believe it’s achievable if Zwift wanted to do it) then just temporarily disable the draft at 20 km/hr.
They they replied saying
Thank you for the feedback!
I’ve passed it on to the dev team, but we also encourage you to share your thoughts on the Zwift Forums.
The forums are a great place to get more community support for an idea and gain attention from our dev team. The more attention an idea receives, the more likely it’ll get implemented into Zwift. You may find many members have the same thoughts and ideas as you!
Hence the post. So if Sticky Drafting is an issue for you please add to the post