The majority don’t want hills as that means fewer km per watt.
I assume all the people riding Tempus Fugit are watching something else than Zwift. They get on, join a pace partner and then crank out the miles while watching a movie/TV/netflix on the main screen. The bigger the pace partner group the better as it means even more miles per watt.
The desert road is great for this as all they have to do is glance at their Zwift screen once in a while to make sure they aren’t getting dropped by the pace partner without having to worry about any pesky hills.
Making more flat roads for people who aren’t even watching the scenery 90% of the time seems like a waste of Zwift’s development budget.
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What says they are vs aren’t though?
What says a huge population going up ADZ every day in workout mode isn’t doing the exact same thing?
At the end of the day, none of it genuinely matters, anyone can be not watching the screen, that’s a given.
All I’m stating is that there are tons of opportunities for mixed flat routes that can be taken advantage of, in worlds that are already well built out… some time just has to be put into them, which is true for any of this. We can’t alter the budget of new routes and worlds; but obviously more is being put there than on garage features…
Look at how great Watopia and Epic looks now after these latest updates…
Now go visit Richmond…
Heck, even Bologna has more uniqueness in terms of structures and design than Richmond, and it’s only a single route you can’t even normally access!
On a partially similar topic, I was looking at IRL Zwift roads and comparing them to Garmin’s heatmaps for the sake of curiosity… I’ll share those soon.
Maybe that needs an “endurance” portal with all the new flat roads accessed via a portal. They woud have the same graphics as climb portal with a loop at either end and an exit.
More engagement could be added if they had robopacers that did sprints or chased the breakaways from their own groups. People would then watch the screen rather than the TV show, enjoying the pretty portal style graphics.
To be honest with trainer difficulty you are capable on your own to make literally every road in Zwift flat as pancacke. So I don’t see a problem over here. Plus, many people riding in ERG up the AdZ make it to gain more XP and drops.
Definitely. This discussion of drops and updates to me is thinking “what do other games have” - and most of these other games have drops and items either because they’re a revenue stream or they’re for kids. It’s like Gran Turismo - lots of updates for cars, sim racing - it’s played by grown ups so they don’t usually bother.
The core game play needs to figured out first anyway. What’s the core game play of multiplayer games and sports that are played by millions of people for millions of hours? Skill. A high skill ceiling. Sim racing removes all the physical effort of driving fast but leaves most of the skill and people play sims for thousands of hours.
Chess - people aren’t playing chess online because every 10 games they get a hat it’s because it’s a game of skill, such a high skill ceiling you’re a certified genius to play at the top level. Even games with hats like Team fortress 2, the skill ceiling is huge and that’s why people have played for tens of thousands of hours.
You have to figure out some reason for people to play before you started adding peripheral stuff like drops or items. Drops an items don’t turn something into a game. That’s a flawed idea. And really, if people have already subscribed to your software you don’t need items anyway.
But what is the skill element to zwift? Oops. There isn’t one. It completely removes all the skill from cycling and doesn’t add anything back. It has a physical thing that games don’t. It’s the reverse of sim racing. From that I’d argue that you can’t compare it with other games or start adding things from other games, unless it’s the skilled element of those games you’re adding.
Tenet 1 : The only way to gamify zwift using stuff from other games is if you’re adding skill.
What’s the fundamental reason we’re running zwift? It’s for something to look at because sitting on a trainer pedalling is mind-numbingly tedious. It’s competing with things like netflix, youtube and the wallpaper for viewers. Which tells us first if they wanted to get lots of people playing zwift who won’t subscribe the most obvious thing would be a free version that has adverts - because that’s exactly what the things they’re watching if they’re not using zwift have.
For the people who are paying, I think zwift need to figure out their core gameplay and one of those is racing - it’s a niche thing but they need to figure out how it works rather than making it up as they go along imo. I mean steering - is that supposed to mimic real life or be an arcade thing like pole position?
For most others it’s primarily that you look at features in terms of making them engaging while you’re riding along in zwift. Making people look at them and, for some ideas, interact with them while they’re riding along and to make riding along more interesting and engaging than just staring at virtual cyclist.
And the first thing to realise is putting stuff on the hud in a bland, boring numerical way is dull (and it doesn’t work because you can’t read the existing hud on most of the platforms it supports anyway - most of the way you could potentially engage with zwift I can’t because I can’t read the screen) - but there’s a world of creative possibilities to explore here. e.g the robopacers and your own pacers that you chase are engaging, but, once you’ve overtaken your ghost it’s gone and you’re back to that empty road not sure how your pace compares. There could be so much more information presented graphically in the environment, on the road, by the side of the road, on other riders - and if that information is engaging then people will be cycling along looking at zwift whilst time ticks by and maybe trying to push a little harder.
It’s like my intuition tells me to keep up with a robopacer (at least on the flat), with virtual gearing, I should only need to be in the same gear as the robopacer and do the same cadence - whatever the wattage is should be a side effect. In reality it’s just so tedious trying to keep with the robopacers without either dropping them or them dropping you. You end up doing exactly the opposite of why you wanted pacing in the first place. Doing 75 watts hoping they’ll catch up and then 250 watts to try and get back - constantly varying your pace. And that’s if it’s a robopacer that you can easily out pace. If you try with one where you want to see how long you can sit on - well you can’t because the game doesn’t let you ride at the same speed as anyone else - it doesn’t give you the information you need to do that and the physics don’t appear to work as they should. Specifically the newer virtual gearing. That should be fixed.
If virtual gearing works as it should, give us information about what gear / cadence we need - could be graphical. The existing ‘you’re a few meters’ away doesn’t work very well, neither does our distance from the group. If virtual gearing doesn’t work how it should then that’s a key feature to add. i.e if you hit a powerup that adds draft in virtual gearing the bike shouldn’t speed up, but the resistance should drop - the only way the bike should speed up is if you increase cadence or change up and spin a higher gear. That’s how you ride along at the same speed IRL, you use the same gear / cadence (give or take - people obviously prefer difference cadences)
And for my own route holoriders, well put in more stuff, overlay it on the road telling me where I am compared with them, how my current pace compares with how I rode it last time. So that if I’m 30 seconds up from my ghost I’ve still got something to engage with and to pace me, and if I’m behind I can figure out how much more effort to catch up. Stuff that real life doesn’t have because it can’t but is easy because you can paint on the road in a virtual world, put signs at the side of the road, add arches etc etc.
The worst aspect of any indoor training is that ticking clock that goes slower the more effort you’re putting in.
When there are things on the road, like a sprint line with a ghost waiting, an arch in the distance to chase to, I’m generally engaged by zwift - unless I don’t really want to sprint - but it’s for 10-50 seconds or it’s only at the beginning or end of a route that’ll take me over an hour. Entertain me with stuff for the rest of the hour - that’s the tedious part. If I’m riding a route and I want to be pushed the sight of the arch at the end when everyone starts to sprint isn’t that much use - at best you’ll knock 5 or 10 seconds off your time if you speed up for the last 500m. If you’re riding a 25km route and you want to find some time, you need something encouraging your pace the whole way along.
They should think of ideas to engage people for longer. They don’t have to be compulsory and they should stop thinking about the hud as a 2d overlay covering the world up, and see that it’s a 3d world they can put information inside that world. And not necessarily just numbers, in an interesting graphical way. Including drafting (although with virtual gearing we should feel less resistance in the draft now - if that doesn’t work that needs fixing) Something more than just riding along looking at your virtual butt, a wattage figure and the elapsed time - because looking at a clock drags - and we can’t switch it off without losing the whole hud. How many zwifters stop when they hit 30 minutes or an hour or some round figure? Simply because that piece of data is right there. That’s telling you that people are watching the clock.
When I finished my cycling outside it was when I got home not after exactly 1 hour had elapsed.
Games are fun and engaging when you have to think “I wonder what the time is” and you’re shocked to see you’ve ridden for 2 hours - that could never happen in zwift because ET is ticking away - it makes the game like being in a dull lesson at school where you stared out the window wishing you were somewhere else, or watched the clock. If you were engaged by the teacher the time just went by.
Cycling outside is engaging and has my focus. I could kill 2 or 3 hours and it wouldn’t feel like a long time. When I’m sim racing I can kill hours. In zwift it’s incredibly difficult to both get to an hour, and then not get off and go inside. When you cycle outside if you ride an hour away from home there’s a big motive to ride home again. No matter how bad outside gets, it can start raining, you can be tired - you’ll ride home. Zwift doesn’t have that as a motive the “I thought I’d come home” thing, and it’s competing with everything that’s inside my home, food, a warm shower, computer games, TV etc - so it needs to be engaging and make us finish that route because you don’t have to ride home in zwift you’re already there - you can get off the bike at any time.
zwift’s core gameplay should be ‘making people look at our screen and not youtube because they’re engaged by the features we’ve added’ and ‘a rider wants a time sink, something they spend potentially hours doing and the time flies by’ - and that’s how the ideas they come up with or looking at other games or other things that have gamification should be assessed - and I think it’s clear that a popup every few days saying “You’ve unlocked the yellow socks” is not that.
And features should be assessed specifically for the target audience of grown ups. Not “well this game other has this kind of thing”. That’s what I think zwift lacks now stuff that would make me ride 2x-3x longer without it feeling a drag. And if the solution at the moment to riding longer that many users have is ‘get a 2nd screen and watch the sopranos’ then I think you can see the gameplay must be lacking. And the drop / update thing is just not even thinking about people playing zwift, it’s just a tired cliche from other games - which, as I say, primarily exists only to either create a revenue stream (like the item / economy system in tf2 et al) or because the age group is kids / teens.
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That’s a good point, but people probably prefer to have flat roads ridden at full 100% difficulty versus a hilly course at lower trainer difficulty.
Perhaps but you are aware it sounds somewhat ridiculous, right? They make TD on 100% to get the real feeling of a flat road and they make it lower to mimic a flatter road on rolling courses. So make it 0% and all is just flat 
.
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Not really, because while you don’t feel the hills in terms of resistance, you’ll still slow down on the hills. If you’re watching TV or something then maybe you won’t notice, but you’ll still be covering less distance and getting less XP (if you care about either of those) than a flat course.
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They did that with the Route Badges. I know many would say that they would never have done the PRL Full or many of the long pretzel routes if it wasn’t for the route badge.
I still haven’t done any of the really long pretzel routes. Yet I’ve done 3 laps of ADZ in a ride.
Mainly because the pretzel routes are just the roads already covered many times so not a lot of interest to do them again making up 150km or something like that just to get a badge.
While IRL I’ve done some quite crazy rides, but those I’m going somewhere and have stunning scenery. We won’t have equivalent in Zwift because those have mountains!
That’s what I do. Have done Uber Pretzel at 0% just to have something to look at. I can’t do a million laps of Tempus Fugit because of my weak mind. Mind you I have not completed Uber Pretzel more than once but it served its purpose and I am grateful for that. It is a bit tedious to creep up the Radio Tower climb at 4kph so I understand why some don’t want that. Personally I don’t think speed or distance in Zwift has any meaning so it’s easy for me to discount the value of that (to zero).
That’s an extremely long-winded post to really end up stating that Zwift is not exactly a video game, and not exactly cycling.
Zwift is Zwift.
It doesn’t have to replicate video game engagement, nor does it have to replicate the joys some people get outdoor riding.
Zwift is… Zwift.
Everyone uses it differently, it’s subscription, so engagement genuinely does not matter, in terms of video game aspects.
Some people may get addicted to tackling badge hunting, missions, XP gains etc. Others are happy to engage ERG and put on a movie.
There is no right or wrong way to use it; however the train of thought that it needs to be more like a video game is probably heading down the wrong path, as I highly suspect there’s next to nobody paying for Zwift subscription purely to unlock a helmet…
I could be wrong, but… I have my doubts.
The engagement is community; which means the people who do ride on 0% TD and watch a movie, are likely doing more than just that every single ride… I suspect (not sure why they’d be on Zwift if that were the case, but who am I to judge).
As long as Zwift stays on top of community engagement, it’ll be around for a long time.
As soon as that starts to falter… Zwift will more than likely topple quickly.
The competition in this space is improving; but nothing still comes close to what Zwift offers in terms of community rides, events, etc.
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Let’s just leave it at…you’re wrong. but thanks for your opinion. Have a great day.
there’s plenty of nuance to zwift racing, to where i can confidently say that after 1000, closer to 2000 races, there are guys i race both with and against on zwift who just know the game better than me, either they’re more experienced or more perceptive or both. but regardless, sport is a physical enterprise. i’m no bobby fischer, but i am - or was since i don’t have much space for the hobby anymore - a decent enough 3-0 blitz player to tell you that you can be an idiot while not being too shabby at chess either
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They didn’t. I’m talking about engaging with the game while you’re riding. Getting a badge after you’ve ridden a long distance isn’t that. Particularly if you know people who think using zwift is tedious and they only did it because they got a badge - well that’s exactly what I’m saying, make it so it isn’t tedious. Rather than saying “We know it’s tedious but we’ll give you a badge if you stick with it”
Think of it like this you probably wouldn’t ride PRL full IRL while watching The wizard of oz, but you could do that in zwift. Which is fine for fans of Judy Garland.
I’m suggesting zwift think of ideas to make watching zwift while you ride more engaging. Things that make it more engaging and fun while you’re riding. Outdoors it’s easy because if you don’t look you run into a tree. Indoors can be really tedious - and the existence of zwift as an idea is a step towards removing the tedium, but I think they’ve forgotten and their other game ideas are just trite ideas. Like when forums give you a badge for posting. Dull. They’ve put the same lack of imagination into zwifts core gameplay that they have with the forum - except perhaps for a couple of ideas which I mentioned already. They should, imo, work towards making the game more engaging more of the time, not just a long route broken up with the odd sprint. Or a pacer that I either pass and never see again or it rides off into the distance.
There really isn’t. But this is moot. Racing is a very small niche in zwift in any case. There’s still the rest of the game.
Imagine the fantasy scenario of Eric was attracting some of the millions of people cycling. Well racing isn’t going to achieve that. They’ve probably already peaked on racing numbers. Throwing money at UCI, pro riders to try and make it seem like it’s a real thing isn’t going to make zwift hugely popular with ordinary cyclists. Now they’re talking about the olympics. And really in terms of people willing to throw wheelbarrows full of money at things which will never happen mywhoosh seems to have the edge at the moment.
Zwift have burned piles of VC advertising, sponsoring cycling events and building real world routes - and none of that really achieved anything in terms of attracting cyclists because most of the people who are really keen on cycling, joining clubs, doing rides etc aren’t that interested in racing - whether that’s watching other people doing it or doing it themselves. You may as well sponsor crufts as a cycle race as there are probably more dog owners than racing fans (but Eric if you’re reading this, don’t, it was a joke…most dog owners aren’t interesting in crufts either)
That’s what Eric told us was his dream when he spoke with DC rainmaker, tapping the millions of people who cycle around outside and getting them to see cycling inside as a thing. So yeah they’ve a ton of work to do with the racing I can tell just tell by glancing at the threads whining about racing in zwift, but it’s not really going to matter to most potential users - that, imo, requires them to make the core gameplay engaging - when you’re just riding around.
None of the ‘give the user a badge’ ‘give them a pair of socks’ achieves that. They need to think what can we do to make people look at the screen when they’re riding along and interact?
Having an opinion of how flat Kansas is… what???
That’s not how geography works lol
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intersting to read peoples takes on Tempus.
I like riding Tempus, sometimes I just switch off and peddle for time, usually watching something.
sometimes I crank it up, say when the 2.x bots are on.
there are more big climbs then true flat routes, so for alts I’m off to Neokyo, France or London, I do like the NY Park Loop.
Tempus style flat routes are great for recovery rides, as I like (well my body does) to have 2 days on, with 2 days easy in between, be nice for NY map to have road’s outside the park, in the city for example.
All those climby routes, wonder if the total number of riders on those is even close to the tempus number ?
ROI says one more really flat route bro !