The 1 through 4 star rating is not very helpful in determining the differences between items. Why not just change it to the actual number used in the code, assuming weight and aero are a number between 1 and 100 or something to that effect? The current system gives you no useful information as so many bikes/wheels have the exact same star rating as others, yet have completely different results when riding.
Not everyone knows about or has the time to scour through 3rd party blog sites to understand the actual differences between the offerings of bikes and wheels.
I’d assume that weight is measured in kg (so roughly between 6-10 ish) and aero probably relates to CdA (so probably in the 0.2 - 0.5 region - probably wrong, I don’t really know what a high or low CdA for a bicycle is).
But even if we had those numbers would most people be able to make sense of them?
Is 7kg and 0.35 drag better or worse than 6.8kg and 0.37 drag? I dunno. I’d still have to go to a third party website to find out.
This would make too much sense but I suspect that companies wouldn’t want their sub-par products in the game. Let’s say that all the top aero bikes are within 100 grams of weight and about the same place for aero, you could have a hot shot (cough…Special…cough) come in and pay for the fastest in game attributes. Zwift does do any real world testing that I know of so all of their stats are at best based off of bias white papers published by the manufactures. Anyway, their system is extremely sub-par but I don’t expect it to change.
Honestly, they would probably be better off the announce a new “season”, release the new UI, start everyone back at level one. This way they could also revamp the insane incentive structure they currently have going on. Sure some would hate it but it’s not unheard of in the gaming world to do this. Also since the challenges are 3-5 years old you would get the pleasure of completing them again!
