Our team is always working to improve the racing experience on Zwift, and today we’re excited to announce that a significant batch of updates for the Zwift Racing Score system is now live. Based on community feedback, these changes are designed to make racing more dynamic, rewarding, and fair for everyone.
We are bundling four powerful features - here’s what you can expect.
1. Re-introducing Zwift Racing Score Decay
To ensure rankings are fresh and reflect current activity, we are re-introducing score decay. If you take an extended break from racing, your score will gradually decrease.
How it works: A 30-day grace period means you won’t be penalized for normal breaks. After that, your score will gently drift downward to a capped floor, allowing for a fairer re-entry into racing. For you nerds… your sigma will increase and mu will decrease to land on your decayed score.
2. Rewarding Personal Bests with Instant Score Updates
Your hard work should be recognized immediately. This update ensures your Racing Score is a true reflection of your peak fitness.
What’s new? When you set a new 90-day Personal Best (PB) in any Zwift activity, your Racing Score will be instantly set to the new, higher “seed” value associated with that performance.
Impact: This bypasses any previous score floor and immediately adjusts your score upwards, whether you’re an active racer, a dedicated trainer, or a rider returning from a break.
3. 30-Day Max Score for Category Enforcement
We’re giving event organizers a powerful new tool to ensure fair competition.
The Feature: Organizers will have the option to use a racer’s peak score from the last 30 days for category enforcement, rather than their current score. The first races utilizing the 30-day max score will be starting in early October.
Transparency: To support this, your 30-Day Max Score will be made visible on your web profile at Zwift.com as part of this release. This will help you understand which category you belong in for events that use this new rule.
4. Score deltas in race results
As requested, we are introducing the ability to see how much each racer’s score changed in race results in both ZC and Zwift.com. These score deltas will now appear as +/- indicators next to each race result.
Regarding score decay, will setting a new 90 day PB reset the 30 day timer for score decay? Also, not all races use ZRS like your flagship Zwift Racing League, will finishing non-ZRS races impact the score decay timer as well? For example, I don’t personally join many ZRS races, but I race about twice a week right now with ZRL and the TTT’s. Will my score decay even though I am still racing multiple times a week?
There are mass start races out there. If you like those, do them. I mostly prefer other races, so race those. If all races were mass start with no other options, I probably wouldn’t be on Zwift.
Curious as to why you don’t like mass start races? The number of racers on zwift is dwindling, at least compared to the peak a few years back, so a lot of races are no longer well attended, leading to a poor overall race experience.
This has been discussed many times on various threads.
Mass start for most races means that only the people at the very top have any chance to animate the race. Everyone else is only trying to hold on.
Mass start works well on very hard courses where the groups will split up - for example the entire zwift world series last year should have been mass start. It should be used where appropriate but absolutely should not be the standard.
Currently, you need to do ranked races to prevent your from score decaying. Great questions/suggestion though - we will discuss whether we should update.
Nice update thanks. hopefully we see some more quick iteration and not a 10 month wait for next fixes.
Two things i would prioritise.
Reducing the amount the floor drops below seed. Think it is currently 15% but it’s really a hangover from when the seed score was poor so does not need to be nearly as generous. Maybe a straight -50 score from seed is best to avoid % affecting the high ranks greater.
Fix the half up half down. This is a big frustration for anyone trying to make sense of results they don’t follow the performance. This is also makes it easy to manipulate your score.
A rider can do 4+ weeks of WTRL, Ladder, FRR & others, get stronger in that period but have decay kick in as they don’t do a ranked zrs race..
Seems counterintuitive.
Also, when will zracing use 30 day max zrs? It’s not necessarily about the sandbagging it’s about improving racing culture and stopping riders needing to deliberately lose or stop 500m from the finish line.
Until score moves according to performance based on the strength of the other racers in the field and considers the terrain, racing score really isn’t as useful at grouping riders into categories as it should be. The data exists…hopefully we can get the will to do it.
Will this be standard for Zwift HQ races? (I saw that it is an option for community race organizers but it wasn’t sure if Zwift organized races would be utilizing it.)
Please Review this cause many riders that do a specific Workout block will get back stronger but Score will decay…so Decay should not happen no matter what you do on Zwift in last 30 days
Workout
Group Ride
Race (ZRS or Wkg)
Crit Race
TTT
ITT
Chase Race
Ladder Race
FRR
etc.
This is a great update…but please review FLOOR ASAP as it is a quick fix.
The Floor % is not working across the range of 0-1000.
Floor should be a fixed number for example -50 from Seed is already very generous.
This is excelent…can’t wait for the update on when can we turn this ON in our Races.
Thank you @Ryy for the updates…i’m sure you are aware it took way to long so i hope next updates will happen faster in the future.