I’m doing the ‘Sprint Test’ workout from the Zwift Camp: Baseline.
In between the sprint efforts, the gear gets reset to 8. There’s no way to change that. I could disable ERG for the complete workout after the warmup, but I shoudn’t be thinking on doing that.
Gear 8 is way too low for me to start from. Please add a setting to set the default gear.
Yeah it’s broken. I mean it would be broken whatever gear they defaulted to but 8 is particularly broken. Not as broken as 1 to 7 I suppose.
It used to be 12 which was the middle of the 24 gear range, there’s some kind of logic there - and the change to 8 was claimed because it would make it easier to start moving.
But in all the scenarios where you’re already moving when it defaults to 8 no one wants gear 8.
Like, your workout example, and, e.g if you join a robopacer ride - the D racers need gear 10 or 11, perhaps 9 if you spin really quickly. So in all these situations we’re all having to start pressing the gears immediately to get a sane higher gear. In your case, for a short sprint it’s ridiculous.
Now what about the person who is starting a ride from the side of the road not moving and they want an easier gear than 12? Well that’s the scenario where making a couple of gear changes is less of thing - there’s no time constraint.
So it made no sense at all to change the default to 8. Even without adding a feature to (a) Give people a choice over which gear to start with and/or (b) Not changing to a silly low gear in the middle of a workout every time erg mode switches off.
Developers of zwift - please buy a book or watch a youtube video about storing settings - I don’t want to have to choose ‘first person’ every ride. I don’t want to have to click ‘Ok’ on the pointless message that tells me I need to pair a device. And I don’t want to be in gear 8. If in doubt, the last setting I picked, the one I have to keep choosing over and over again because you skipped the ‘how to write settings to a file’ lecture - that’s the one I want to be in.
In one of the last updates the default gear was changed from 12 to 8. I also would like to see it back to 12 or higher again.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. We’re looking at ways to improve this.
Probably the best fix would be to add a setting for virtual shifting in the ‘settings’ menu allowing the user to input a personal default gear. Unmodified can be 8 to cater to the audience the update-shift from 12 to 8 was targeting, but that would allow users who prefer to start in a higher gear to do so.
I think the first thing is that the ‘default behavior’ should be like a real bike. Whatever gear you left the bike in during your last ride, should be where it starts the next ride. That simple. Before you hop off the bike and ‘end ride’, put the bike’s gear in what you prefer.
Barring that, and at the very least, during a single event (such as the Baseline Sprint test), the gear you’re in, should NEVER reset. When the workout hits a freeride portion, it should remain in the virtual ‘gear’ it was in, and revert back to that same gear when the workout goes back to Erg mode.