if you are paying Zwift from a banbk account or credit card etc, they have your name and data anyway.
It’s amazing how many super light weight and powerful riders seem to have these privacy concerns.
True, so Zwift knows. That should be enough. No need for you to know who everyone is. I could come up with dozens of reasons why people want to hide their real name.
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Yep. One of them would appear to be ‘setting your height and weight ludicrously low in Zwift so you can do pro w/kg and dominate Advanced races’
That is most likely one of them indeed. The ones who cheat would probably hide their real name.
But this example has nothing to do with your name. If for a start Zwift would do something about sudden weight and/or height changes it would be a start.
I do agree with you on a lot of things, but there are also a few which doesnt help in your case. And asking for people to give up their privacy, or ask for things that we know will never happen (like verification for every race) I dont think that is even an option for Zwift to consider.
I think you (and we) would have more potential succes if we can come up with small changes which would make it more fair. But it all stands or falls with Zwift caring enough about racing and banning some of their paying customers in the same time.
In the meantime as I suggested to you before. If it bothers you that much stop doing the normal Zwift races and go do something like FRR, SISU or any other non Zwift events where there are stricter rules.
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Why? It’s a game. And it’s fun!
Say folks when someone proposes to clean this up. It’s not difficult to put in validation on the fields that input this data.
Oh you happen to be 1000kg for your teleports and descents? That’s going to take many months to drop that weight down…
Validation to prevent large weight and height changes should be simple enough. But unless everyone really pushes for it nothing will happen.
How many racers (and teams) used the weight and height changes for their advantage to teleport and descend Ventop faster for their bike upgrade schemes when all the bike upgrades first came online? Be honest…
I remember seeing folks going downhill at far above 100km/h with 0 watts.
Just did the weekly cheat party of the Zeal Japan race, and a rider spent most of the race well off the front alone, despite the bunch absolutely flying, at an average of over 47. I mean, orange tick pros and 990+ riders were hitting over 6w/kg for 5 mins, and still couldn’t catch him.
This rider has set his height to 140cm, weight at 68 and ‘only’ averaged 330 for the race, which is the same wattage that I (179cm) had to hold to get dropped with 5km to go (entirely due to the speed ramping up to try and catch this guy)
So, in an entirely flat race, a difference of 40cm in height, is the difference between soloing off the front for most of the race, and winning, and getting dropped.
Incidentally with a height of 140cm and a weight of 68kg, this rider (ZRS 966) is ‘Obese Class I’ on the BMI scale. Yet, he did a 15km solo ride to victory in Zwift’s fastest race.
Zwift has always favoured lighter riders, but now it’s formula is massively favouring smaller riders, in a phenomenally unrealistic and ludicrous manner.
If a downwards adjustment of 40cm is the difference between a solo victory against one of the fastest pelotons in the ‘game’ and getting dropped, it’s easy to see why genuine shorter riders are absolutely flying on the flat, despite average wattage.
Second place in this race only did 214w - I assume his height must also be around that of a child.
There were riders finishing 10+s behind these two vertically challenged individuals doing 400w+ for the duration of the race, which was pancake flat.
Zwift has made a massive error as far as the effect height has on rider speed, which is destroying racing.
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There are so many gaming the system these days that it renders it pointless to do any races, so I don’t bother.
Start with minimum height and weight based on the physics of the game then prevent unreasonable ht and wt changes then flag unreasonable performance.Tell AI to stop making training recommendations and use it to police the platform.
I only race to push myself to my limits. A bunch of anaerobic minutes helps me sleep at night.
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You need to accept that fact that Zwift are not going to do anything about this, then choose whether or not to continue racing on the platform. Posting every time you see this is wasting your energy.
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No. It’s destroying this one race, which appears to be favoured by cheats and at least one extremely stubborn masochist.
“This race is utter BS. I’m going to keep doing it! And then I"m going to moan until the heat death of the universe!!”
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I’d argue it is more than just this one race that the height/weight physics are impacting.
Impacting and destroying are not synonyms, and the post I was replying to only mentioned height. 
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Maybe Zwift could borrow the AI that Strava is using to clean up the cheating mess over there.
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Ahhh the its Friday so James will complain about the Zeal race topic …
Why not take our advice and stop doing these races and participate in races where the organizers actually take their job serious. We all know by now Zwift doesnt, but you keep on doing them.
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Nonsense.
You keep pushing this out all the time, as if to hope this makes it true, which it isn’t. I’m a lighter rider and have absolutely no benefit over heavier riders except when the road goes upwards steeply.
Yes the improperly short riders need to be stopped, but for heavens sake stop peddling this nonsense that all light weight riders somehow have wild advantages everywhere or we are all cheating.
I think you need to build more 20 minute power for your size, because you fall into the range that talented lighter riders in real life absolutely can do, and that’s not to mention the semi-pros. You are at 350w by your claim - you need another 50w and be able to repeat it (eg, 2x20 min) - that’s what folks at your size are doing in real life, and there are some with even more than that.
There is a process for reporting suspicious rider performance:
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If it was one race I had no chance of winning even in my dreams I wouldn’t be too bothered, but it’s not. I did races in level D, with a score of 216, and the cheating goes on even at that level.
I do up to 2 hrs in the saddle with a robo pacer or the tour of the month, then take a 10mg melatonin jelly, works fine & no stress.
There are so many content creator videos out there today. I think it would be fun for one of the content creators to do a test using two subjects. One who is heavier with high power, and one that is very light and short with high w/kg, and show the power differential to stick with each other both in Zwift, and real life.
Would be maybe not the most scientific thing (because how aero each rider is relies on technique etc.), but would be a fun watch to see how closely they match. I feel like many content creators are running out of ideas, so here’s a free one from me - maybe even a series of IRL vs. Zwift power/height tests in various conditions, gradients etc. with two riders of vastly different weights and heights.
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Well this one race appears to have really hit a nerve,
Reality is you are just talking to yourself, The problems could be fixed but it involves Zwift making hardware to actively weigh you as you ride and it would be an added expense that probably not enough people would buy and therefore the number of people in truly verified races just wouldn’t be high enough. While the weight and height remain manually entered numbers, major problems will remain.
Zwift could start to use AI to monitor every rider and build a profile over time by comparing all their data to similar riders of the same age, weight and height because you cannot get around statistics if you have a large enough pool of riders and I beleive Zwift has millions to cross reference. You would also have to start using a heartrate monitor for every single ride and possibly even stop and do a 1 minute heartrate decline recovery measurement as part of the fitness test.
Could be a lot of work to truly clean up the racing and then you have people using out of calibration equipment, Hell I actually repair the WattBike load cells and can calibrate them to read whatever I want them to, so at the end of the day ALL you really have is peoples honesty.
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