Since I don?t see a direct link to Team Not Pogi, I?ll post here.
Your race today at 13:45 (Take No Prisoners Crit Racing, event 5559190) has an E category with a racing score interval of 0-350. A typical E category would be something like 0-190 or 0-210. Thus, your E category is almost like combining normal E and D categories together.
Your categories D, C, and B all have racing score intervals of 100. For example, D category is 350-450. Perhaps this is intended to make the riders in these categories more equally competitive. However, if you modestly increased each of these three intervals by 50 then you could reduce the E category by 150 - i.e., then 0-200.
As is, I think your broad E category will discourage many typical E category riders from entering. (My racing score is 197. I will try this race only because it?s a course that I haven?t ridden before.)
It’s a crazy huge ability range for teh weakest pen, but there could be reasons, such as…
Not many Not Pogi members have a ZRS under 350
The race routes are usually long by duration/distance, which will appeal to less weaker ability riders
The event has a history of low turnout under 350 and so they pool them together to try and give weaker riders some sort of race with reasonable numbers
But there could be some self-fulfilling prophecy here, vey few weaker racers will sign up if they feel they have absolutely no hope.
Tiny Races second weakest pen is 230-350 MAX (score in last 30 days), where because of the ridiculous seed score formula, I could be racing someone ~60Kg who can do ~3.8W/Kg for 5mins who has a seed score under 350 (if I could do 3.8W/Kg for 5mins at 93Kg my seed score would be ~401).
I purposely set the numbers this way, previous races we did using 0-200 we had either no sign ups or very few. Hence I broadened the bottom and top and narrowed the middle 3 as these are usually the best attended.
We do other events and use different ZRS splits dependent on a route , race series etc
Yeah, I get it. There’s no perfect solution. Have too narrow of a cat, less racers. Too wide of a Cat, the bottom get discouraged and never come back. I’m more though in the camp that thinks organizers should focus on smaller ranges overall, versus as you say, trying to cater to all. I just think it’s not practical or going to be a good experience for all riders, trying to bucket everyone from total beginner to semi-pro within just 5 groups.
Then races become better and you attract racers to your event categories. Part of the reason for low attendance in some cats, is going to be (looking at the calendar), there are a total of 8 races scheduled in the time period 15 mins prior to 15 mins after your event.
The bottom of racing score mostly doesn’t race at all even in events with the standard ranges. This is the problem for organizers - they have to get enough participants so that the event isn’t cancelled, but most of the potential participants are in a fairly narrow range in the middle not at the bottom. There’s a bell curve where you find the majority and it’s not down there.
I’ve advocated that ZwiftHQ should have a quota system by race range. Eg. the 6pm UTC time zone already has a Herd Beginner race going. It’s likely to attract the lower racers – indeed it uses 4 categories (B thru E) to cover the same 1-350 range covered by just the TNP Cat E category. It also has more signups in just its E-cat 0-115, than does this TNP race’s 0-350 range cat. So, how many other organizers should be trying (somewhat fruitlessly) to attract the same capability riders, at the same times in their races? I don’t think in most cases, if instead of running 0-1000 races, you ran 200-825 races, you’d really be losing that many entrants, though you might be making your event that much more attractive to the bulk of available racers, while avoiding discouraging the riders that now wouldn’t be able to enter.
I still like the idea of there being novice (eg. ZRS 1-500), enthusiast (eg 200-825), and expert level (eg 500-1000) races, and an organizer has to pick which type they want to run, with Zwift meanwhile having a quota per hour (based on available universe numbers) of how many race events there can be for each.
ZHQ already looks at the schedule when deciding when to add events, and in this example my guess is they would look at the TNP race and say it doesn’t conflict with the HERD beginner events because of the ZRS ranges used by TNP compared to HERD.
I have ridden in a number of races where the organizer actually set up two separate races for the same event. I can’t recall the exact ZSR numbers but they were something like:
Race 1a - ZSR 0-650 (5 categories)
Race 1b, same event (advanced, 10 minutes later) - ZSR 650 - 1000 (I think only 1 category but maybe there were more)
That would make the lower range event compete with the HERD race with the risk of it never getting on the calendar or being deleted due to low participation
We have had really good attendance in the past on these. The issue now is European summer time and alongside FRR today is the smallest sign ups we have had due to this. By the way the race is mass start so the field all start.together anyway so small fields don’t look as small
I’m happy with how we have set the races, our other events use different ranges
This would mean even more work for the person setting the events up and given I do this in my free time I wouldn’t look at adding two races to make smaller fields, this dilute races further in my opinion. They work in massive fields events but not all