Exactly. Gosh, we should get a video and put that old thing away once and for all. 
It is easy to see riders getting dropped by 2-3sec from Constance when it is getting a fast tow up to 48km/h or more from someone pushing ahead. Then you see them all do 6w/kg to catch up again.
That happens frequently. Don’t know how that could be disputed.
I don’t have a video, but I used some hyper-realistic modeling and high-level statistical analysis to create the following infographic…
Bravo 
Now you just need to somehow incorporate my avatar 6 feet to the left for no apparent reason and the sound of me cussing at him to “get back in the f&*king draft, you idiot!”
That’s an ingame screen shot with these awful emojis right?
It’s very interesting to me how much discussion there is for this. I was expecting to log back on to 1 or 2 replies. I’ll chime in again to provide more thoughts.
I was, infact, riding with Constance. I didn’t want to mention this at first to see if people might bright up a certain pacerbot. From what I see the slower pacerbots you have riders infront and behind them at all times. Where I find this etiquette question to be relevant is only with the faster(est) pacer bots like Constance. So I guess my true question in this thread is “Should there be different etiquette/approach to riding with faster pacerbots?”
I think a thought experiment for this question could be this: If tomorrow Zwift removed the fastest bot, Genie (3.7 @75kg) would be the next fastest bot. Would it be poor etiquette to ride infront of Genie? How about the next day when they remove Genie as well. You get to a point where the question, in my opinion, is about the playerbase’s power distribution relative to the pacerbot. Similarly if everyone on zwift tomorrow gained 2w/kg on their FTP I don’t think riding infront of Constance would be such a big deal, even for an extended period of time.
However this is the current state of Zwift, the playerbase won’t all gain power tomorrow nor will Zwift start killing off robopacers. So I believe this phenomenon comes down to Zwift providing a “fastest” pace bot where a good chunk of riders can hang onto (at 3.4-3.8wkg roughly depending on weight) but less riders can ride at 4.2wkg for an extended period of time. So when there are 5 people who have been doing their 3.5wkg-ish rides on Constance every night at the same time and a rider who joins Constance wants to stretch their legs, those 5 riders get upset.
However imagine a scenario where there was 15 more people who joined Constance all riding at or slightly above Constance’s pace. Not to purposefully drop people, rather because this was their power target for the day. They could be pros who want to get an endurance ride in, or an amateur who wants to target their threshold and see how long they can do it for. Whatever their reason, 15 out of the now 20 riders will be infront of Constance. Those 5 original riders will definitely need to work harder. But now that a strong majority of riders in the group will be infront of the bot, you can start to see that at some point the mentality will shift of those original 5 riders. And it’s not as if those 5 riders can ask those 15 riders to join the A+ bot, which doesn’t exist, so why not have those riders ride with Genie, for example?
So I think it comes down to the basketball court dilemma. If you go to a basketball court with one net and you are there playing with one other friend and full basketball squad with team jerseys come along, you probably will give up the court to the larger group. However vise versa, the larger group probably won’t cut their game short to two people waiting on the sidelines. Riding infront of Constance where the vast majority of riders are using the bot to draft is kind of like the first basketball scenario- a small number of riders (could be 1) changing up the game for many.
Zwift could create a faster pace bot, they have in the past for special events, but the question is whether this would even be used or worth development time/maintence/cost.
I suppose my outcome to this discussion is that if a large share of riders are using a pacerbot in one way, it’s best to follow suit for good etiquette, even if there’s nothing stopping you. Although as a somewhat fast rider who enjoys riding with pacerbots, I do, perhaps selfishly, wish there was a 5.0 bot I could dance with.
Thanks all for your thoughts and input!
I was riding Constance yesterday on the big ring and there was someone on a TT bike holding 5w/kg, sat in front of the bot the whole time and was definitely dragging the group faster than normal.
A couple riders politely asked this riding to drop away or ride off and luckily they did and the pace instantly settled down to normal Constance pace.
So to answer the original poster, no i dont think its fair to pull the bot.
I dont think anyone is doing it purposely tho
This has been discussed since 2023 and still there is no video showing there is a difference when you are on the Robot’s wheel. 
Yes the Robot and the group will be faster if the Robot is mid pack and people are pulling, but all in the pack will receive the same benefit as the Robot. SO as long as they are in the draft they won’t feel a difference.
The think that break the group is when the Robot increase power on every single incline.
And I could probably guess who asked you as well. You didn’t have to mention the bot, I already knew which one it likely was.
Those folks if they want to can absolutely go flat out and leave the bot group way behind, I’ve seen them do that and they are a minute ahead. All fast riders IRL. When they go, the will drop the group in an instant - they push way higher power than the bot with its fixed power levels.
Well, the closest you had previously was BigMig. I could just about stay with it but very very difficult. It was a good trap to catch all the folks with badly calibrated trainers (or incorrect weight)… Nearly always there would be someone riding along with the warning triangle. 
You could use a mountain bike with the Constance Group. Or getting away from the groups completely you could just do what I’m doing this year so far, lots of laps of ADZ. On ADZ there aren’t big groups. The only problem is the steering putting in the wrong place all the time.
Others are also pointing it out in this topic, right above your post. It is happening.
Where is most obvious is at the banner on Tempus Fugit course (going both directions) - where it is quite flat or even slightly downhill, but also on Tick Tock where you go up over that bridge to go back up to the desert, the robot can be towed along enough (it is already going quite fast) to give the folks behind about a 3 second gap if they don’t also immediately speed up to match. And that’s where it goes wrong, because the expected pace goes out the window.
You can see when someone jumps on the front and pushes all the time (and stays on the front) the average power everyone is doing goes up compared to previous laps, as you pointed out. And when that person finishes or goes elsewhere, the pace slows down and the average power needed drops back as well.
So what you’re suggesting is that at some point with the RPs, the blob always surrounds the RPs. Maybe it’s with Jacques, maybe it’s somewhere a bit higher with Genie. But whichever RP it is where you expect that nobody should be pulling the RP, in theory those riders could just drop down a RP and stop worrying about possibility that folks will be pulling the RP, because they will be.
Is it the case then that if the cutoff is with Genie, then basically the pace with Genie where the humans are all drafting the RP, is about the same as with Jacques, where the blob surrounds the RP?
Here’s a Jacques snapshot btw 
sounds like a them problem
I can’t wait until Zwift adds fences and rubberbanding to the pace bots so that no one ever gets dropped and everyone can ride 50kph while barely breaking a sweat.
When I ride with a Robot, it is usually as a race warm up.
I will start with or behind the bot then gradually move ahead.
There is usually a group of riders up there and we gradually move away from the bot, form our own group and stop getting bot drops.
I guess doing repeated intervals in front of a bot is in poor taste.
I can’t wait till people start in with hyperbole, it’s the best thing ever.
Riding off the front of the bot group is very different than consistently and purposefully pulling the bot at a faster pace. I do sprint intervals from bot groups all the time–launch at a sprint banner and see how long I can stay away. That doesn’t affect the speed of the group behind me at all, doesn’t affect anyone else’s ride at all. It doesn’t sound like what you do is pulling the bot faster either.
Others above are starting in with the too cool for school replies now, but if someone shows up to a group expecting (with good reason) a certain pace, and there are people who are purposefully pushing the pace of the group faster, I don’t see why it’s crazy to think that someone would ask them to stop.
OTOH, I do know what I think of people who regularly shrug and dismiss polite requests from the people around them. 
If you snap off the front of a group I would not expect that to affect the group much at all.
But will that request really change anything? If the goal is to change group behavior, I don’t think it will work. Even if Zwift formally said “hey don’t pull the pacer” I don’t think that would do much of anything.
I don’t understand the point of this discussion. If you don’t like the pace of an unorganized group ride in the open world you are free to join a different group. Asking someone to stop riding in front of a pace bot (that is still going at the same w/kg) seems very entitled to me.
A polite request looks like it changed what was happening in OP’s post, yeah Whether there would be some sort of global solution is a different matter. But there are behavioral standards that get communicated across groups, even messy groups like ‘Zwift users’, and those standards get set somehow. I don’t know why requests like happened with OP, and this thread as a result, couldn’t play a role in setting those standards.
Someone pulling the pace bot to a faster pace, knowing it’s negatively affecting other people, is what sounds entitled to me. The person who wants to ride faster is free to join a different group or ride in the open world.
That’s like some of the very fast people in Constance group, when they go, they don’t linger in front of the bot - they break away so quickly the bot and the rest of the group don’t have a chance to draft or catch up. They are down the road 30 seconds or more in no time. That to me is fine, they aren’t speeding up the robot.
How is it negatively affecting others? Because the speed is 2kph more and someone has to pedal slightly harder than anticipated following a bot in the open world that has no rules?
Again, it seems like the simple solution is to put the pace partners in their own world and turn a fence on. Or join a group ride with an advertised pace and a leader.
