Spawned in midair and ran through the skies!

Hello,

I experienced quite a bug today. As I joined today’s Pride On: Social Run event I spawned on the warmup treadmill in midair. I decided to finish my warmup and wait for the actual event to start, believing my avatar would come to her senses and descend to the ground as she took off running. Pictures at the end of the post.

Instead she did a 180 and started running in the sky over May Field and over the ocean! At one point she even rammed right into a cliffside and kept going, until she met a road at a hot springs looking area (sorry, I’m a Zwift newbie and unfamiliar with the map) from which point started to follow the road all the way until 30 minutes when I stopped. The road was in an entirely different direction from the event course. I missed out on all chat, but got a couple of Ride Ons during my time in the sky.

Here are the steps I took to get this bug to happen, in case they’re helpful to someone at ZwiftHQ:

  1. Launched Zwift on my Android phone (Huawei Honor Play)
  2. Paired my Zwift Footpod
  3. Wanted to go running without selecting a route and spawn in the default location (May Field)
  4. Accidentally misclicked on some rider on the rider list and joined them instead (they were at a desert area)
  5. Clicked ‘join event’ on the popup as soon as I could after the loading screen
  6. Spawned on the warmup treadmill at the race start line… in the sky!

The run data otherwise seems like it’s all correct on both Zwift and Strava: (remove spaces)
zwift. com/activity/834776035445412352?__znl=en-eu
strava. com/activities/5452067702

Pics, as promised:












Snapped back to road:

Hi @Julia
Yeah, that’s definitely not supposed to happen. :sweat_smile: I am curious if this bug is reproducible if you go through the steps you described including joining another player. Would you be willing to try that?

Also - if you omit the step where you join another runner - does it work as it should?

Hi @shooj, I did some more testing today.

I am curious if this bug is reproducible if you go through the steps you described including joining another player. Would you be willing to try that?

I managed to repro the bug using the steps provided and even snagged a tiny little video of the bug in action: youtube. com/watch?v=TaBfGAQyDcA (gah, links!)

Also - if you omit the step where you join another runner - does it work as it should?

I’ve successfully joined events before (even the prior Pride On runs) with zero issues, so my money is on joining another Zwifter is what causes the issue.

My guess is that the game somehow preserves the prior player coordinates and height data when joining an event which causes the player to spawn in midair if the event start location is at a different height. That’s also probably why the avatar runs midair to some random stretch of the road; the game somehow thinks the avatar should be there.

I also guess that it only works when the Zwifter you join and the event are both in the same world, as it was in this case.

Thank you @Julia for taking time to help us reproduce the bug and give us your insights. I’ve added your notes to the trouble ticket.