Just want to start a discussion about robopacers and the routes they ride. Let me know your thoughts below
I personally ride during zwift’s dead hours (9-11pm pacific) so often times the events are lackluster and I end up riding with a pacer bot. I always see these bots on the same routes: volcano flats, volcano loop, flat route, sugar cookie, etc. I totally understand why they are on these flat routes- it’s easy to zone out and keep in touch with the group. But it would be nice to have these bots (even rarely) do uniquely hilly routes.
I’m not saying we cant have robopacers on flat routes that are popular nor having only the hard bots on hilly routes, but a random variation. Maybe 20% of the time the robo pacer is put on a hilly route. So about 2 pacers at a time would be doing a hilly route. It’s just at the moment none of the bots seem to do any route with much true climbing or exploration (pretzel routes for example)
Any time someone suggests bot routes with real climbing there is always negative feedback. Sigh… Oh someone will join the robopacer at the top of Alpe zu Zwift, nobody will ride with them, etc. People could join the robopacer at the top of Volcano climb as well and that wasn’t an issue.
Last time I remember that occurring was with Anquetil which used to go up the Epic KOM and even radio tower climb quite a lot.
Anquetil also went on Alpe du Zwift a few times by accident.
It would be nice to have 65kg steady robopacers that do the mountainous routes again.
The current robopacer routes I agree are very boring so I always ride on my own or do workout modes elsewhere. The pretzel routes would be great for the robopacers, encourage more people to complete them.
I have to agree that Route selection for most popular RoboPacers is a little boring.
Would love to see at least 1 Hilly route per month for each Robopacer in Watopia…there is so many options.
There are two of each pace partner, I’d like to see one of them always on a flat route and one always on a rolling/hilly/mountainous route.
I’m sure the flat route would always be more popular, but having the choice of something different is a good thing too.
There are obviously some logistical limitations on route selection, they need to be looping routes to start with. And pace partners on very long routes won’t help people get those badges unless they’re lucky enough to join at the right time before the route starts.
I thought what they were doing in general was trying to keep one version of the bot on a flat route, and the other on a more punchy route (not a mountain route though - they haven’t really used mountain routes much since they added the variable pacing).
Just looking through the pacers now, the hilly routes aren’t ‘that’ hilly, but you can see that they are much less attended than the flat routes so my guess is Zwift is using past data to determine what to do here. They did say the game can only support a certain number of bots for whatever reason, so my guess is they are trying to optimize for what will appeal to the masses with the few they have on the go.
Blockquote
Just looking through the pacers now, the hilly routes aren’t ‘that’ hilly, but you can see that they are much less attended than the flat routes so my guess is Zwift is using past data to determine what to do here.
Yeah, that’s a very fair point. But at the moment there are 10 flavors of ice cream and all 10 are vanilla. If the ice cream shop changed one of those flavors to chocolate it may draw in more customers that arn’t already in the shop
My other thought here is that if you want to do 2.5wkg for 1 hour you can do that with many different robopacers on the current plethora of flat routes. So changing one pacerbot to a mountainous/longhilly route might actually help consolidate people into one bot (esp during dark hours) helping the social element of zwift while also offering a unique experience for the few who want to climb with a buddy, albeit robotic.
Yeah, I mean, as long as one of them is on the flat it seems they could do whatever they want with the second one. Like put the second one on any pretzel route etc. I guess the question is how many folks would ride with it, and in general would they gain participation or not. I don’t know - right now there is 1 rider on the hilly constance route, and 21 on the flatter one. If it was a mountain route how many would there be?
The other side to that question is whether putting both on more popular flat routes would lead to more total participation, or would any increase in the usage of one come directly from the other? Those who want a flat route are already catered for, and there’s no limit on how many can join that group.
For me, I probably wouldn’t use a pace partner on a mountain course simply because I want to ride up the whole mountain rather than being dropped wherever the group currently is. And my sessions are rarely long enough to join and keep riding until the start of the next loop. But I know there are others who do very long pace partner sessions who wouldn’t have that issue.
I would use the mountainous route with a pace partner because I always do reasonably long rides anyhow.
In the days of Anquetil I’d usually get two or three loops of Epic KOM. It was a good effort. Now the routes are quite boring so I just don’t want to keep going.
I think dynamic pacing has kinda made a mountain route pace partner a hard thing to really cater for.
Picture a loop on the Alpe where it’s an hour up, maybe 15 mins-ish down (to some turn-around point), and looping somehow. The pace partner is going 20% harder on the climb, 10% lighter on the descent. If you start your ride on the descent or close to the top you’re going 10% lower than the advertised pace for a significant part of your ride only to then go 20% higher than the advertised pace for the next hour. If you start in the middle of a 1hr alpe ascent you’re doing 30 mins at 20% above the effort, then 15 mins at 10% below the effort - and this is ignoring weight differences which are amplified on the hills. If your weight is much lower than the pace partner this might not be a problem for you because you won’t see the same spike in watts on the climbs as you would as a heavier rider.
They still have the capability to run pace partners with static power if they want to, and use them on hilly routes. My impression is that they were completely convinced that it’s a bad idea and won’t reconsider. In a way they may be right - I mean if they put every pace partner on Tempus Fugit all the time they might get the biggest numbers, so that’s winning right?
Dynamic pacing makes sense for rolling hills, where momentum and a bit of a punch gets you over the top. It doesn’t work for longer climbs. In the real world the pace would either be steady up a longer climb, or there would be a regrouping at the top which is much harder to replicate on zwift. I’d love it if the pace partners were smart enough to reflect the different behaviour on different types of uphill.
Yea, people would have to account for that. But since the pacer bots have been on mostly flat routes for a year+ there will be an adjustment period esp since I know some people ONLY ride with pacers and are very used to their dynamics. But zwift has never shyed away from making changes to dynamics itself so I dont think thatll be much of an issue.
On the way down a hill (at like over 60kmph) you can do 6+wkg and someone can be in your draft at 2kg or less so I’m not sure it would be too bad. So if the bot is doing like 3.2 down you can keep doing the 4.7 or whatever if you are with the A bot for example
[WARNING TANGENT INBOUND] But this brings up another can of worms… dynamic pacing always seemed a little silly for a pacerbot in the first place since you can ‘sit in’ on the flats, ‘coast’ on the descents and match pace on the hills anyway. Dynamic pacing (in my humble opinion) just meant even more variation in the power graphs for riders. But thats just me. [/end tangent]
I wonder if doing something like maintaining dynamic pacing for short punchy hills, but for longer hills eventually falling back to the advertised pace would then open up more mountain routes. I think they said this wasn’t something they would consider a while back.
I really think most folks just pick whichever version of the pacer has the highest average speed, and go with that regardless of the route.
You still have to do a big spike in power regardless of weight.
In the Sugar Cookie route the section going up towards Epic KOM I end up having to do 300w or more to avoid getting dropped by the group, everyone else seems to punch 5.0w/kg or more with Constance (who is doing 345w).
Not a big problem given it happens already on flat routes when people get pushed out the back of the enormous groups.
A light rider won’t have to do the same level of spike on a hill as a heavy rider given the switch to w/kg on the hills in their dynamics. So, if a robopacer is going 200W average on a flat, and 240W on a hill at 75kg, that shift goes from 2.6w/kg to 3.2w/kg. For a 100kg rider they will have to go close to 3.2w/kg to keep up on that hill which is 320W, much higher than they would be doing on the flat. A light rider won’t see that big of a swing.
