Understating weight

I noticed one of my zwift friends always having low cadence and low watts but achieving hight speeds and PB’S , he’s not on zwift power so you cant see his weight, over eight months I calculated he dropped his weight from near eighty kg to now 50kg, I can’t understand how zwift doesn’t red flag this behaviour

I think you have to cut him some slack. Today I looked at the pictures of people “I rode with “. One of them looked way over a hundred kilograms. I myself got sick four years ago. I lost 16Kg in seven days. I don’t have any fat. Actually, I’m jealous of people who can get fat.

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I see plenty of interesting performances on Alpe du Zwift, what looked like a team rider (with a tick) going up there at 205w and 5.0w/kg for instance.

All you can do is flag them.

I wish weight and height would be shown again. Weight is easy to work out with watts divided by wkg so I don’t see why they don’t just show it.

The bad thing is when everyone decides to start doing this.

I never bothered flagging with zwift Chris but I did leave a comment regarding his 50kg weight on one of his strava posts, so easy to see he was cheating but even after that he was getting comments regarding fabulous ride etc etc

My guess would be that calculating the weight of a rider based on the numbers shown in the UI would be very tricky. I don’t think all the numbers shown in the HUD are in sync and there are probably some averages applied over time, too.

If i recall correctly, it used to be possible to change your weight on the fly in the past - you started your ride the regular way in the app, and while riding updated your weight through a different channel. The updated weight would be picked up by the app, but if you changed it back before completing the ride, the change would not be recorded anywhere and no one would notice. This i believe has been spotted and fixed by Zwift, although i never tried.

Depending on how tech-savvy your friend is, they might be able to do something similar by changing values directly in the memory while the game is running, since Zwift is not protecting that in any way.

There are probably many other ways to trick the system - more or less complex. As Chris said, we see heroic performances very often and there’s really nothing to do about it. Yes, you can flag them, but i not once seen that having any effect. So what i do is that i try to stay away from rides where these accounts regularly appear. :woman_shrugging:t2:

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Weight shaming is quite literally the reason why.

That said; maybe forcing it to be visible on races wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world.

All of this goes both ways; we’re now dealing with a rider who hasn’t updated his weight since he joined ZP, so 3 years ago come a few weeks.
Meanwhile a photo of him on Strava shows that he is most certainly not that weight anymore, and he’s gone up to A+ on ZP, and destroying races due to Zwift’s physics leaning a bit into w/kg, where he’s holding 6-7w/kg for 10 minutes (I don’t think so…)

I hate to say it, but folks who aren’t updating their weight to accurate numbers, are indeed damaging races, rides, and the enjoyment of Zwift for many; more for the people affected, and likely never by the folks doing it.

As indoor cycling is on the downard trend, ZHQ really needs to spend some time on the whole fairness aspect, as I would suspect going forward that less people are likely to keep doing Zwift, if “cheaters” (obvious ones, or not; and those doing it on purpose vs those who aren’t as just mentioned), have become more prevalent in literally the past few months than I’ve seen since I started.