Theres this amazng thing in real life called racing categories, Zwift should just use those, you know, like in real life racing…
Dont reinvent the wheel when its already been invented and used for decades…
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Not everybody has an official race category and if you are self assigning your category it would change nothing…
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I assume @Leon_Evans_Cardiff_A was suggesting Zwift follow the same method to create race categories. There is currently rankings on Zwiftpower.com for all riders that use Zwiftpower and that has raced in the past 3 months.
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Zwift dont use your ‘real’ race category, they just copy the system and apply it to Zwift.
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Yes, auto-categorisation based on x number of past races or 20 min best efforts is definitely needed.
Am doing a Zwift Academy as an honest-to-God-C category rider; but I see that everyone has migrated to D. usually there’s a normal distribution of riders, a few As, more Bs and Cs, not many Ds. The Academy race has the most number of D riders ever! Hmmmmm, suspicious?
Big event, suddenly everyone’s a D-cat rider.
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Where are all these 60kg cyclists IRL😂 People have even learnt how to cheat zp cats by holding back in some races as to keep the avg down just enough to avoid being moved up a cat…
Maybe we need to start naming and shaming offenders in game and police it ourselves, but that could lead to more problems…
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That is called sandbagging and it has been going on for some time and it give me the most heartburn.
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As Zwift already knows all the opted in zwiftpower users, why not just add a ZP user icon to the leaderboard next to the name. Then I can choose to race only those who are ZP users and ignore all the other madness.
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I Love the Red-Grid/Banner upfront at GroupRides - this really solved the problems with Flyers.
This could be incorperated to races as well ( with an invisible banner)
A solution for Racing could be: when Exeeding the Category with 0.3-0.4 watts over an average of 20 minutes will individually ban you from the race… „Race Hard and Fair“ - or get kicked… - just like the Red Grind / Banner for GroupRides
It‘s soo annoying with Sandbaggers…
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In the United States if you win 3 races in year you move a Cat automatically, couple that with points for finishing place and people will move up quickly…if you win or place high you move up the food chain. Create more Cats as well…Pro, A+, A, B+, B, C+, C, C-, D…problem solved! Weight no longer matters so juicing your powermeter won’t impact your Cat…eventually you will be with like ability racers.
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Yes why limit to 4 we can have 20 cats for big races (+1000) and 2 for small races (<10) it can be all dynamic.
Every rider has a ranking not a cat, that way Zwift can match abilities and make racing more interesting.
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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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Blockquote
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 
), 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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