Want to try a Race but Zwift Won't Let Me

Any number of tries or offering calculators won’t help users like the OP avoid a trip to the forum. The OP of this thread is not a sandbagger. He didn’t understand what happened because it wasn’t communicated effectively. He had a goofy power record and has probably been misclassified. Imagine if users received a notification saying “Congrats, you crushed it on [this ride] where you achieved [VO2max, MAP, FTP, race result, whatever] of [some value]. From now on, you’ll only be able to enter races in category B or higher. Click here to learn more about how categories work. If you think this calculation is in error, contact support.” Zwift knows they need to do more to communicate this kind of information (page 10, CE101). It should appear on ZwiftPower if nothing else.

I’m sure you’re right that more users benefit from CE than not - it’s a good thing. Victims of sandbagging were disappointed customers too. Turning off CE is not the answer.

I agree those users deserve to be disappointed by CE, but that guy is not the person asking for help. I think well-meaning but confused customers will continue showing up until there is transparency around their category and exactly how it was determined (for them, not in general). They would not have to come here asking what happened and receiving a guess in response.

I rarely use the Companion app now (since the BT bridge stopped being reliable for me).

ZP is my go-to site, though I appreciate there are many Zwifters who don’t even know it exists or couldn’t be bothered with the palaver of registering. Maybe the two cat ratings should be displayed side-by-side on both ZP and ZC (with maybe a pop-up for each explaining the difference in very simple/general terms).

Unless I’ve missed something, it’s not in ZC, in that it’s not displayed in your profile or anywhere obvious.

Yes, you can see it if you try to enter a CE race and see which category it lets you enter. But that’s a very, very different thing (e.g it not being obvious to a lot of users why some events restrict them to certain pens and others don’t).

Most races have a lot of wording explaining how CE works.

Zwift is working on something to indicate CE races.

For most racers the CE and ZP will be the same. Most questions about CE is from those that are on the edge of a category or have done hard rides that is not on ZP.

We are on the early stages of CE and Zwift is improving as we go forward. We have been bugging them to get something out there even if it is not perfect.

This is a clear indication that I am a B.

i agree with your general sentiment but giving out the exact data is a bad idea because it opens up a critical way to exploit the system, which i have reported to staff but i don’t know how they can really prevent it

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Totally agree with this sentiment. The more transparent the system, the easier it will be to game.

Plus, if you provide the raw CE data and it doesn’t agree with the rider’s own derived values (through something like intervals.icu) Zwift will be inundated queries/complaints from riders about being wrongly categorized etc. Another can of worms…

I think we’re talking about two software design goals: security (ensuring that sandbaggers are excluded), and trust (ensuring that the calculation is accurate). We can’t have trust without exposing at least some of the calculation, but can we have security without hiding the calculation? I don’t think these goals have to be in competition, and the best solution I can think of is to add results to the calculation. The reason is that the current algorithm focuses on things a sandbagger doesn’t want (high FTP, high MAP, etc) but results forcus on things a sandbagger does want (winning).

Look at the original post in this thread and solve for it: the user needs to know which event caused him to get upgraded and why. I don’t see a solution for that without showing what happened on a specific ride that triggered the upgrade.

But, if you trust that the system is working as intended (from Zwift’s point of view) the rider doesn’t really need to know which specific event caused the upgrade and why.

Zwift would surely have the answer at their end and the situation could be addressed by them sending a simple message to the rider such as, “Congratulations, your excellent performance today has earned you a category upgrade” or, “We detected a malfunction with your hardware causing an erroneous category upgrade”.

Even if Zwift provided the raw CE values, you’ve no way of checking that they are correct if they are using proprietary algorithms?

Yes, it is “possible” to know your CE category by trying to enter a race and noticing the lowest value you can enter, and then reading the wall of text for the event, but that is not the same as having an end to end experience that is understandable to the user who isn’t on these forums and who just wants to race. It’s more confusing for anyone who is using ZP (which by the way is seen by many as essentially required if you want to race… to the point where people on ZP ignore results from anyone who is not on ZP). If you’re a Zwift Power user, and see “C” as your category, and try to enter a CE race and can’t… even if you start reading the CE text they might not really understand the difference between CE and ZP categories, or why there would indeed be two methods of categorization.

I believe at a minimum they should show you your CE rating as part of your profile somewhere, with a clear link to the FAQ for it. Ideally this would be anywhere you can see your profile (Zwift, Companion, and ZP). I would personally like if they showed your actual CE MAP/CP numbers in the same way ZP shows your 95% of the average top 3 values. It would also be very good if they showed which activity was responsible for the CP/MAP values as well, and sure it would be fun to see a congratulatory message when you bump up a category too.

I don’t think Zwift has to publish the exact algorithm used to determine the CP/MAP however as I imagine they can tweak it to focus more on shorter/longer durations later.

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Trust doesn’t work that way. Trust comes from users when you give them the information they need to trust that the decision was fair. Come back to the thread at hand: the user had anomalous power readings for one ride. You have to identify that ride to solve their problem.

That’s better than nothing, but not as good as telling them which ride triggered the upgrade.

Incorrect, in the case at hand, once the specific ride was identified, the rider understood that it was one with anomalous power readings.