Happy to be shouted down, but in my opinion the issue that needs addressing is scores being too low - not too high.
Returning riders, who left Zwift for a few months, get to blow up races when their score goes down before it, hopefully, goes back up - although the score adjustments at the moment are all over the place.
not a big issue if its one or two riders but it seems that dozens of overpowered/ underrated riders appear in the start pens for weeks at this time of year
For clarity I’m talking about races in what were formerly the lower Category races - when we had category Enforcement
why assume that if someone isn’t on Zwift their not training or riding?
IMO returning riders should come back on the same score - if they’ve lost some performance their score can go down , but it should be based on performance in races ,not on a dubious presumption of inactivity.
I went away for a month in the summer ( carried on paying my subscription to Zwift ) but I continued riding as I suspect most keen riders do.
It’s worse than that, ZwiftHQ in the infinite wisdom decided that ZRS decay begins after 30 days without doing an event this uses ZRS, while all your success in other Zwift activities is ignored by the ZRS decay clock.
And once you’ve been gifted a pen demotion or two thanks to this insane decay implementation, there’s absolutely no obligation to smash out your real power figures to get a seed score ZRS adjustment, you can simply do enough to win or finish in whatever position you’re happy with. Potentially allowing you to slowly rise back to a ZRS and pen allocation that represents your true ability.
It’s been something like a month since this insane decay feature was implemented… Where’s the fix that we’ve been crying out for since day 1?
can handle a mass-start uncategorized race without lowering the score of the entire back half of the race regardless of how they did against the riders they were racing near, and likewise for higher categorized riders who get score increases for underperformance.
Turn it off until it does those 3 things. Either use vELO (already functional results-based system) , or go back to CE. It’s just my opinion, but OpenSkill-based ZRS isn’t meeting the community’s minimum needs without that.
vELO is already corrupted by ZRS when riders tank their scores, it will not work any better than ZRS and possibly be easier to tank your score with vELO.
vELO doesn’t change if riders don’t meet minimum effort. Yes, some riders ride to just over that effort, but they can’t just z2 ride races to drop vELO. People can tank their score a bit by choosing races, but vELO’s anti-manipulation measures are pretty good. Nothing’s perfect.
The results vELO gives for uncategorized races at least make sense. That’s a pretty basic validation test IMO.
You can drop your power about 20% and not get flagged by vELO, its still a results and not performance based system, new riders dont get flagged also as there is no data for them, it only really worked as nobody was trying to game it.
That is a problem. When riders really want they can easily keep their score down, since they dont need to go full throttle in the lower cats where they have been put. So their rise in ZRS will go very slowly.
What a lovely Zwift racing life it was, when just “CAT by watts” was the pen maker. Races were much more fair including some sandbaggers. Theses races were more thrilling and an opener for joining every next monthly GC. Actually its a lucky bag.
For all the many, many problems the ZRS movement has, the one thing it had going for it was that racers were stuck on the score they had when they left.
The September/October Problem was solved as well as it could possibly be
Then zwift decided to bring back decay, they ruined it. They thought that giving returning racers an easy start was worth more than fairness in racing. They thought that existing subscribers might complain, but they won’t leave. Net increase in subscribers and revenue.
I kinda feel they see ZRS as a prestige system, not a system to put people into reasonable pen defaults. If you look at it through that lens the decay makes more sense. Maybe the thought is people will want to quickly build their racing score back up to where it was by racing more?
But the first thing Zwift racing needs is a great system for grouping people together so you don’t have one group completely blowing out everyone for the foreseeable future.
The good news is new 5min PBs will boost your score to help put you in the correct pen, the bad news is you can decay a lot if you don’t specifically race ZRS races much. If you don’t race much and you race at a lower level than should, it’s less likely you’ll hit a 5min PB as well.
One of the dumbest things about decay is Zwift has also limited riders to only be able to race up one category.
So, if your ZRS has decayed from B to D level and you didn’t want to sandbag and still join B cat after your 6 months off Zwift then you can’t because Zwift will only let you race up one cat (to C).
Returning riders have no other option than to sandbag because of the limit on racing up one cat.
I mean, was it really for everyone? It was for me, but I’m highly advantaged by the 20min power categories & probably just as much by zFTP, and I’m not even close to the most advantaged. Looking quickly at your ZwiftPower profile, you look like a similar type of power profile. I’m racing a lot of power-based races now (CE, so zFTP & zMAP), and I’m still C Cat. I’m not “controlling my power” in the slightest, I’m trying to get faster & do the best I can in the races I enter. Riders who don’t have the ability to do the repeated bursts to keep from being dropped end up off the back even with superior long power. Results based that works properly (even if it doesn’t catch everyone trying to manipulate it) is better.
But by vELO I’m in Sapphire, should probably be in A for low-range ZHQ races / B for high-range but don’t race ZRS races enough for it to converge. I don’t think ZRS really works well even for the races it “works” for yet anyway. Races categorized by vELO I’m in the mix on flat / rolling routes, off the back on long climbs. As I probably should be in a group of peers in “overall zwift cycling ability”
This parked people at top of pen power more or less forever. It meant their impression of racing was always being at the finish with the leaders. The other side of that coin was people who were always at the bottom of their pen. Their impression of racing (until they often quit entirely) was never being at the finish with the leaders. Taken as a whole, that is a bad system. ZRS offers the promise of addressing that, though it has some way to go yet for various reasons. People who were always at top of pen power for years were in for a rude awakening - everything changed for them and not in a happy way. The flaws in ZRS unfortunately have not been addressed in a timely way, and flaws left in a system like that are bound to be talked about and exploited.
If you raced always in the lead of the CAT, your opponents did too. That caused, exceeding the 3,6W limit (CAT C) and you were out. That was ok, and everyone lived with that promotion. Even it ruined your overall result (iam monthly GC rider only). That way you could decide, to go all out or left some seconds to your opponents.
If this would left the same people on and on at the top, you could “promote as present” the top20 for next month (just an example).
NOW, its like you go to a racing and just trying to draft behind wattmonsters as long as possible.
In reallife nobody enters your race-class with unbelievable powerdata you wouldn´t know about.
But yeah, as someone in the forum described, ZWIFT is not real racing, its just motivation. Actually ZRS does not help to stay motivated.
Consider that it’s more motivating for the people who were perpetually at the bottom of C category and now they are not. Your perspective seems limited to your own experience.
