It has returned - the enlightened young chap identified this method of gaming watts on Zwift.
At the time, you couldn’t not see, in ride, that someone was using this nefarious method. However, now we can see it being used.
However, of late I’m seeing a greater amount of Zwifters using it. Today. I saw one rider close a 15 second gap in a bunch in a blink of an eye.
it’s all rather fascinating and I wonder how it has raised it’s gamification head once again?
Ride on in Watopia,
Dave.
what now?
Shh can’t talk about it
Gamification never left. Unfortunately people keep finding methods of using even “harmless” Zwift features for ill gotten gains.
The common one I see daily is gaining free distance with no power. I won’t say how that is achieved but the folks using it are pretty shameless, they keep going despite multiple people calling them out.
The old Chau guy also promotes other methods..,
Would those folks be easily identified by a cup-of-coffee 
Zwift seriously needs to kill that coffee break “Cheat”. It needs to move out to every 60 minutes and they need to dump it from events like Zwift Unlocked, its a total joke, the two major hills came up perfectly in time on the longer A ride to take a total break on both. If you are going to run an “Event” that has actual placings in Zwiftpower, then there needs to be no coffee breaks at all. Don’t tell me it wasn’t a “Race” everything in Zwift is a race.
Actually no, although they may use it when it becomes available. But otherwise 50km or so with 0 watts needed. Day after day or as much as the person wants.
People notice it and call them out because it is so obvious.
Blocking out phone apps that generate fake power would be another nice improvement. That would probably zap a lot of the bots running around.
There are a few other apps that allow the power reported by a trainer to be increased as well, used sensibly those would be hard to detect. 
As someone who has, due to health reasons, gone from A to probably D, I now only do group rides these days and a coffee break is a wonderful thing, I can tell you - I also do weights as part of the break.
I do get you on this though. What I see are riders hitting the power for a few seconds and then freewheeling for a good while and they repeat the method, continuously. They make up huge ground doing this. If it’s being one in group rides, I can only wonder what is occurring in races.
Back on the coffee breaks - yesterday I was riding the Stage 1 group ride. I had already done 30 mins before the ride and Coffee Break was locked for me and others. However, some folk had the Coffee Break and were able to strategically use it on the hills. Weird.
Ride on,
Dave.
no it isnt
Just bear in mind that I have grown up with cycling and I’m now in my 60s. What I’ve observed and experienced and especially on Zwift, is that the super keen racers and big km accumulators never last for long. Some, good friends, didn’t make it past 55. Many can no longer ride above Z2.
Ride on,
Dave.
Umm, it almost certainly is.
Look at any event at the front, official race it might not be, but they sure treat it like one. You know what they are like.
I’m sure I don’t need to find any videos of events, there are enough out there.
Can someone explain this “Christopher Durham Method” - never heard of it
Sssh… nothing to see here… Hmm… 
I have seen people employing erg mode on their trainers (controlled via something like a Garmin Edge) to hold a fixed power which does give a bit of an advantage over someone having to shift up and down through the gears. I doubt it is that.
It’s micro bursting to most people - it’s been around for god knows how long and never went away.
Sprint, pick up speed, sprint again. It’s gaming the physics engine within the game. Often used along side sticky watts.
Hmm, if it’s just that then nothing radical, as you pointed out, been seen before.
I went digging about the various places around the web after this topic appeared and I would say there are probably worse exploits around than that using a few dubious methods. I kind of wish I didn’t do that digging to be honest.
Don’t ask for details because I certainly won’t be sharing those. If I can find those then everyone else probably already did as well.
That’s why fences exist.
I do a lot of group rides, several times a week, that are not races in any sense of the word. Even the ones that don’t use a fence are generally not race-like. Maybe a handful of people blast off but then you have 100+ people chilling at 2W/kg and telling horrible jokes. That’s not a race.
he explicitly said everything in zwift is a race, it isnt
The coffee break isn’t a cheat, it is a feature that is being used exactly as Zwift designed it to be used. Cheats are using Simulators, known “bad” Z-Power bikes, Sticky Watts, etc.
I do agree that Zwift Power (even though not all riders are on it) and placement display in the HUD encourages racing, but not all riders on a group ride such as Zwift Unlocked are there to race, while some are. Yesterday during one of the Tropical Rush rides someone posted up “My HRM battery died, so I”m not going to contest the finish”, so yeah - he was racing, the group I was in happily finished in 1:06 - we were not racing.
I knew the coffee stop arguments would start up again as soon as the new Unlocked series opened up. We’ve already beat this dead horse many times…