Stop race category cheats - opinions?

Personally I don’t care if the people I am racing against are weight doping or have inaccurate power readings. It’s not racing IRL, it’s just avatare’s against each other with weight/hight errors, power meter inaccuracy, trainer difficulty at low%, not close to real life drafting, etc…
The fun races for me are the ones with hills where you end up with a small group of riders that can’t get ride of each other and start colaborating against other groups until the finish line comes in sight and the battle is on again.
But as suggested the dead simple solution is just to categorise on results, not w/kg over 20 minutes (a bike race, hilly or flat, is not a TT)
When you win or get good placing you move up. And once you move up you stay there.

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Completely agree. This happened to me in my last race and it was a blast.

…Ended up finishing 21st out of 139 racers on zwift, but when I checked zwift power they had me finishing 2nd out of like 35 or something. Pretty significant difference.

I like the idea of somehow marking riders in race as “race category verified” or something. Leave riders with the ability to be unverified or not, but let us know who we are racing against.

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This really needs to be fixed. If you’re riding a race in your category it’s always ruined by people who don’t belong in that category. It doesn’t matter that results are ‘fixed’ on zwiftpower, the race itself is ruined.

Fix it or don’t organise races in weight categories.

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There are reasonably easy solutions, like autobanning people from racing after joining the wrong category. A game should be able to implement that quite easily. Racing is a lot of fun, but it’s a lot less fun with all the idiots joining the wrong category and Zwift’s lack of action to do something about this

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There is a feature request here to create a more robust category system: Formal Race Category System - #2 by Christopher_Grote_B

The idea would be to follow the practices that exist in pretty much every country in real life: which aren’t based on your power rating at all, but (surprise!) how well you actually do in races.

You earn points based on certain placings in races, and once you have a certain number of points you move to a certain category. You can’t compete in lower categories once you’ve qualified for a higher category (unless it’s an “all-categories” / multi-category race).

Could people decide they want to always race in low categories? Sure, but they couldn’t win (or they’d get the points to qualify out of the lower category). So they’d be riding to prove that they can’t win a race, and can’t move out of the lowest category, so that they can brag about that? Sounds pointless (pun intended :wink:), and regardless they wouldn’t be creating an issue for others that are actually at the top of that category because those others would be left to win (and gain the points to qualify for a higher category).

Meanwhile people like me (and I suspect many others) who even with a relatively high average power, but who still can’t win races, will be really pushing themselves to qualify out of the lowest category for some proper bragging rights. (And the people we lose to will be bumped up to higher categories because they’ve won the races and earned points to push them out of that lower category, so the field that we’re competing against is constantly changing so that we can be more competitive in our next race.)

Without this kind of system racing in general in Zwift seems kind of pointless to me? I mean, I can perhaps average 4w/kg as an FTP (putting me in category A), but I weigh 62kg – someone who weighs 90kg can be a category C rider (needs to average more than 2.75w/kg) and they can absolutely destroy me in a flat race (due to a higher overall wattage). Of course, on an Alpe du Zwift race I’d destroy them.

But this w/kg-based category system doesn’t seem to account for these differences – and it doesn’t really encourage people to move categories as it’s based purely on power output (significant changes take months of dedicated training) rather than race tactics, course-specific strategies, teamwork, etc – all the hallmarks of what racing is really about, surely?

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I feel the Pre Race categorization would be good as long as Zwift used actual race events for determining the racing FTP.
My FTP, in the Zwift game , is artificially set higher than my real FTP.
I have it set at my projected fitness goal.
This way, the workouts I do are geared toward a higher fitness goal.
I still use the +/- 10 % setting to increase or decrease the workouts on certain days.
I guess if I could adjust the work out difficulty more than +/- 10%, I could use my “race FTP” and adjust difficulty needed.

I enter races based upon Zwift Power categorization.
Races and workouts have exactly opposite goals and thus, 2 different FTPs.
In work outs, I want to hit certain HR zones for a set period with the goal to increase fitness.
In a race, I try to go as fast as possible while expending the least energy until the end. Then I want to beat everyone in sight and win all the status, acclaim and wealth that comes from a virtual trophy!

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I would just add the option for race organizers to make it auto ftp, and then we will see who Will opt in or out to that race…
To zwift developers… make it as a test…

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Whatever they do, they really need to start fixing it. Right now it’s completely broken; top 20 in my last race, all except a few didn’t belong in that category. All I can do is drop down to D as well.

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I don’t understand why people are so upset with the lower Cat riders drafting the higher cat riders.
If someone grabs the wheel of a faster rider, they still will need to increase their power out put and that will usually drag them into a high cat for the next race.
I like trying to grab the wheel of a faster rider and hold on as long as possible.
If I can hold it for 15-20 minutes, then I graduate.

I’m giving notice now - my goal is to be the fastest rider on Zwift… Don’t lose any sleep!

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I don’t think other Zwifters would mind you drafting higher Cat riders if we were using a points based Cat system.
I actually like the mixed racing.
That way when I get dropped from the first group I’m in, there could be another group I can latch onto for a while. :slightly_smiling_face:

Don’t you just hate being in no-mans land.

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I totally agree, i am a B rider and only weigh 61kg. I cannot do flat races because of the w/kg categories. I can never maintain the watts required on flat races.
On the hills and mountains i am sort of midpack which is good enough.
But would be fun to be able to do flat races, but this system makes that impossible for me.

I agree. I recently did Stage 2 TOW Race Category D, which is advertised as 1.0 - 2.4 w/kg. I finished with an average of 206 watts and a w/kg of 2.5. I was placed 58th out of 145 riders when I feel like if riders were grouped on ability more, I would have placed much higher, and there likely would have been many fewer riders. It seems feasible that Zwift could limit access to categories based on historical performance.

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:joy:

Are you just confessing to being one of the offenders?

Yourself and the 57 worse offenders would just have placed lower in the Cat C race.

Nah, you need to use 95% of the best 20 minute power, so could still be cat D right?

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I don’t know the official calc’s, just assumed that if you’re averaging 2.5w/kg you shouldn’t be racing in a <2.4w/kg race. But you might be right.

That is how Zwiftpower does it. I’ve averaged as high as 3.4 w/kg in a cat C race and not been upgraded or removed because of the 95% rule and it also takes your best 3 race average over the past 90 days or something I think.

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Mike, my average is 2,7 W/kg.
ZP did not not upgrade me to C, but I did after being on podium in a D race.
I think you know where I am finishing in C Races now - I do not care, but I think it is discouraging for many.

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Hi I agree totally with your issues with zwift cheaters, but i find sometimes that the in races you push so much harder than you would in training. I think this is poss one issues that Zwift would not be able to address. I give an example yesterday i was riding in a ride that was cat C and B which included a pro from NTT along for a ride.I pushed so much harder when he was on the front trying to suck his rear wheel and ended up getting a forth place. I am currently 55/57 kg with a FTP of 245 aged 55 if everyone on Zwift who races is made to sign up for zwift power there would be no issues as any power issues would come out and you could DQ people straight away as has happened to me on a few occasions due to pushing harder in races and producing larger watts than i would in trg.

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I understand, no one wants to be last in a race. However, it is also discouraging for the racers in the lower cat when someone from a higher cat joins just so they can finish in the front group. I’m on the verge of being upgraded to cat B, and when that happens I will probably never get close to the podium ever again, but it would be unfair for me to drop down so I can continue winning in cat C. I’ll just have to live with finishing towards the back, and set goals to finish in the middle and eventually see if I can get close to the front group.

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