I was trying to ride the Pinarello series, but was very disappointed to see that Trainer Difficulty is turned off for the event. In order to cater to people with various abilities, please make Zwift races more inclusive. I would love to see Zwift take a more deliberate approach to supporting riders with all abilities (highly recommend the AbleGamers APX principles as a starting point)! Some of us want to be able to get a special colorway based on the abilities we have, and that means removing barriers to enjoyment and participation. Thank you for considering.
Hello @Meg_Brown
Shuji at Zwift HQ here. I scanned your server log history and it seems that this is the Pinarello event in question, is that correct?
I flagged your post to our Events team to ask how Trainer Difficulty was set, and it is not locked for the Pinarello event series.
Can you provide a little more context?
- Was the trainer difficulty slider greyed out / not visible at all in the game’s Setting menu? A screenshot of this would be very helpful to see.
- What did you see / feel in game? Looking at your game logs for that event your TD was set to just slightly above the midpoint (53%).
- Were others discussing this in the event chat? Corroboration from others carries a lot of weight.
Would you try something? Next time you log in to Zwift, please choose a free ride route with a climb near the start. Let’s say Watopia Hilly route. Once you drop in to Watopia, please go to the Menu > Settings and screenshot the Trainer Difficulty slider. Does that work as expected?
Thanks @shooj, that was the one. I tried to change the difficulty mid-ride, but there was no available options in the settings (not grayed out, just not there). I was connected to controllable but the ride felt like going through mud. Because of the late join also being disabled, once I exited the ride, to see if I could fix it, I realized I wouldn’t be able to get back in 
I will report back on the experiment and send over a screenshot. Thanks for the help (and for your patience with me expressing my frustration in the post above). That was the only chance I had this week to complete stage 3 so sadly have resigned myself to not getting the colorway.
@Meg_Brown
Thanks for the follow up.
This is definitely weird. You’re correct to call out that the Trainer Difficulty setting is context-aware, and must first be paired to a smart trainer’s Power and Resistance (fka “Controllable”) signals before it appears in the Hardware tab of the game settings menu.
For science - I’m still curious if it works as expected during a free ride vs in an event, or if this is a reproducible bug for other Zwifters. Would you give it a try and report back?
It’s also possible that something’s gone a little hinky on your PC, like a corrupted file. If that’s the case, deleting everything related to Zwift and re-installing might clear this up. Here’s how. This is a more thorough uninstall process than the standard Windows uninstall program - if you have any custom workout files, please don’t skip the step where you move those before deleting everything else.
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For science:
I was able to change the Trainer Difficulty settings prior to and during a pace partner ride this morning with no problems. I’m unable to reproduce the issue, but will try in another race next week and see if there are any hiccups.
We appreciate your efforts for science! Good to hear that you’re not able to reproduce, but please @ tag me if it happens again?
We dug into this for you, and good news - you did get credit for stage 3! So keep going with stages 4 and 5!
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