With the Garage Sorting & Drops Economy Update why couldn’t you make the bikes slowly deteriorate? Like, tires wear out over mileage, have to buy new rubber,… maybe chain stretched from too many sprints,… time for a new chain.
You want reason to spend drops, lets look at the reverse side of the equation. You can also vary the cost in relation to what you paid for the bike/rims and the rider’s level.
Personally I would not like this, it would be net negative for me. Repairing bike mechanicals, and bike maintenance is not why I enjoy indoor riding.
So you would just like to get all the net positives out of it, without any riding effects,… got it.
You’d like to spend your training time fixing virtual flats. Got it!
That’s not what I mean, you’re taking this out of context.
Your bike components wear down over time, then spend drops to get them back to 100%. If we are spending time on the bike to get free upgrades, why not spend drops to repair.
Personally, I would hate that. It’s just a level of micromanagement for no reason. It’s bad enough in some MMORPG games, but at least those are role play so it makes a bit of sense for equipment to take a bit of a beating when fighting. Even if it’s “click a button to repair all items for 50 gold”, it’s sand in the gears.
This is one of the worst ideas in the history of Zwift
Lmao, this place is like trying to sell gloves to people with no hands. But yet, cash upgrades is an idea,…
I can LMAO as well.
This is not a good idea, people just want to ride.
More different routes, expanding the existing worlds (eg, the UCI ones like Innsbruck) is what should be done, rather than these ideas that serve only to annoy users. Also bring the graphics improvements people want to some of the Apple Silicon powered devices.
There is no real need to muck around with drops unless your idea is just to stir up people on the Zwift forums for a laugh.
If you want riding effects, then you must also want virtual flats and virtual broken chains that prevent you finishing your race, your ride or workout or at the least delay you by minutes at a time. And things like the broken chains would be affected by how much sprint power your regularly put out.
Otherwise you want to get all the net positives without any riding effects, got it. See what I did there…
Well, while not supporting meaningless micromanagement in exercise game, this would work if there’s some fully single player game mode with racing teams and seasons etc. where you could earn money for your team and then get better equipment/ maintain old ones.
This however would be a very different game 
(I would not be opposed though, racing bots through virtual seasons etc.)
We could have worse ideas, like potholes that damage your virtual wheels. Lol
my real bike still has wear and tear while riding on Zwift, chains, cassettes, etc… I don’t need to be fixing virtual bikes as well as my IRL bike… no thanks.
On a similar subject if anyone wants silly ideas.
In Gran Turismo, it’s a silly feature; but been around almost since the beginning, and it made no difference whether you did it or not to clarify.
You could “wash” your car, and it would just make it shiny.
As it stands, Zwift bikes are all matte (which I cannot stand), but it would be kind of funny to have a dirt map buildup over time that makes the bikes dirty underneath and more matte (assuming we ever get glossy bikes).
They are different sort of people using Zwift and they have also different focus and goals. I think of myself to be somewhere in the middle - don’t make structured workouts but also don’t care about XP or fastest bikes. Fast for rolling/flat and climbs is all I need nowadays. But I do really like challenges and the landscapes/sounds of the Zwift world. There’s unlimited possibilities how to make Zwift more engaging for all sorts of people. But costs, time and effort needed make it all undoable. Plus the Zwift could be too resource heavy and at the end it would look s**t on my 2019 MacBook just like MyWoosh.
Only chain I want is one that I can hit people with road rash style
One hypothesis of why we didn’t get Mt. Fuji in this season is they want to add ALL the climbs up (one ~16 miles and two ~8) so there’s some work needs for that, and it seems they’ve been going a pattern of flat, climb etc. with each season announcement that had roads in it (Climb Portal Summer 2023, Coastal Road Fall 2023, Winter 2023-24 none, Spring 2024 None, The Grade Summer 2024, and this new road that seams to be flat Fall 2024). Just my thoughts.
I just think it points to the fact that if most zwift users aren’t spending them then the feature they’re there for can’t be very good. Or there’s no feature at all. Usually if you add a feature to a game it’s to encourage people to play the game.
It’s like, for me, I have no interest in training workouts (training for what?), zwift academy (Far too old to start a cycling career) or racing (My competition on zwift is to have someone give me a page to read explaining why zwift racing makes sense and then they win if I can read it out keeping a straight face - I don’t expect any winners)
That doesn’t leave a great deal. Zwift seems to think their customers are all aged 18-30 and they bought a trainer to maximise their ftp for racing. Now you could argue they had some reasonable reasons to assume this when zwift started because not many people bought a turbo trainer to do intervals preparing for their sunday bun run…so yeah trainers were mostly in the hands of people who wanted to train.
Now we’re told (Eric’s DC rainmaker video) that he fantasises about millions of cyclists all sat on zwift rides and pedalling around in the virtual world and that is as much of a thing as riding outside - well what are the software features they’ve added for those fantasy million customers? Because most of them are not going to be racing or doing vo2 max intervals. That’s really why I would argue at the moment zwifts software side seems completely at odds with what Eric says in interviews - because when I look at the interface to select stuff - there’s literally nothing for me other than ‘Just ride’
I’m mostly riding around by myself, or riding around with robopacers.
I guess if they’ve added new places to ride around around that’s something.
But I’m reasonably happy doing that, I just think it surprising that they have little or no gamification for someone who isn’t saying “I use zwift to do workouts and race”
Like pretty much everyone for the last 10 years I could name between 5 and 50 things a junior programmer could have changed in a few hours to a week of effort that they’ve complete ignored. To me that seems bizarre. They don’t even say “nah we’re not doing this because…” to the more frequent and common requests.
So, the motive to play zwift from my pov isn’t provided by zwift at all. I want to cycle indoors rather than out, I own a smart trainer and at that point you need some kind of distraction. Youtube, netflix sate some. Others came up with this great idea of making pedalling on a trainer translate to cycling around in a virtual world. There’s a lot of software all trying to invent this particular wheel and after a decade most of it sucks. Zwift sucks a tiny bit less (at least by my estimation YMMV) so I use it.
But what are drops and socks or virtual bikes for? As a grown up I find it difficult to get excited about any of that. For now I’m happy enough just riding around. Maybe that will last a year, maybe I’ll extend the membership. At this point I don’t know. For the past 2 years I went climbing and mostly did no cycling - except perhaps bit during the pandemic. So obviously things change.
But if zwift are sitting thinking “what do our customers want” why don’t they just read the forum. There are some really cheap and easy changes that would, I believe, make some people genuinely happy. No features or big development work necessary. Just fixing or improving things. Making the UI so you can read it would have probably justified the price rise alone for many.
The latest hud change for example could have been a huge win done right. As it is, they added 1 feature that’s useful - the gradient display - we know that’s good because other platforms already did it - but implemented in a way that makes it annoying. Half the customers think it’s too big. Others don’t want it displayed. Others want it displayed all the time. So even if you like the feature it’s delivered in a way to make sure you’re not actually happy. That seems to be the motive behind zwift’s software development.
I honestly believe they have one or two people high up who think they know better than all of you how zwift should work, and they’ll keep doing what they think is right until either they get millions of customers, which to them will prove they were correct (their fantasy I guess), they run out of venture capital, or one of the bigger investors says “Hmm, maybe someone else should have a go”
But, anyway, that’s what millions of drops means to me - I have millions of them because the game gives them to me for reasons that I only vaguely paid attention to so barely understand, and I have no use for them. Because I have no use for them I see little reasons finding out how to get them at a faster rate. Is that changing? I doubt it because I don’t care what my virtual bike is - and if I care about how fast I rode a particular route then anything that changes the virtual bikes speed will delude me that I’m faster or slower when nothing changed won’t it? So what’s the point in that? Zwift already gives me average speeds that I couldn’t have done IRL 30 years ago.
Fine, I’ll say it.
Let me roll into Pumped Pancake and spend 1 million drops on a fat stack of virtual pancakes.
I know that’s what half of you want, stop hiding…
For what it’s worth; as per classic “early game” video games, is where the fun can be, where collecting etc. happens because you want the things. As time passes, that feeling of want disappears and things shift.
This isn’t a Zwift problem, it’s just reality, and is an issue literally every game struggles with. There is no economy in Zwift as a video game, so the drops just continue to stack, but indeed; after a while it really is meaningless.
Personally, at this point in time, while I personally am very much against the new and upcoming bike unlock stuff discussed in OP, I kind of prefer its methods.
I am under the impression at the moment, that unlocking things via riding more, is potentially a better method than just buying stuff in the drop shop.
At the end of the day; both require riding… so there’s no real difference, the only difference would be the method of “purchase”.
Say for example you wanted to buy the new '24 Canyon Aeroad; previously it would be ride until you get the drops, then buy it.
As opposed to having it on a list of “wish list items”…
But giving them instead a goal to unlock them; instead of drops.
“Do 10 sprints, 5 climbs, and ride 100 miles to unlock this bike”
Seems like a potentially ‘better’ method, than drops… as drops haven’t expanded in any reasonable format… and people seem to PREFER the mission type stuff at least from my perspective anyway.
As it stands, that’s not really a major alteration in how it works; but mentally it is more engaging “oh… I have to do KOM segments to unlock this bike???”
It’s more encouraging to get people to maybe not want to, but generally force people to do other things… which, as you get closer, is generally the encouraging push.
Just an idea. (but I would never expect this to happen to be honest; this would require such a rewrite in code, and doesn’t really offer any value)
Maybe you have to do 150 consecutive climbs of ADZ (1 per day) in sim mode at 100% trainer difficulty to achieve an unlock? I can already see the hate for that.
Except for the people who cannot do a 100 mile ride because of permanent injuries not physically able to do so.
Same with sprints - some people cannot sprint due permanent results of injuries, you lock people out of a whole lot of features or items.
Maybe they will just use an ANT+ sim or some other bot to do the unlocking, so you might as well just stick with buying items with drops, that gives a fair chance for everyone to achieve it.
Sorry; I meant a combined 100 miles, not in a single ride!
For all of that I meant a “ride 100 miles total, go through 10 sprints, go through 5 climbs”
not in one ride 
I should’ve been more specific
This would be similar to how the Missions work for Ride California, Climb Everest, etc. etc.
But a more condensed format similar to how it sounds like we’ll have to do the ride upgrades.