I get to see weight doping is still happing so people can get a higher ZRS. losing over 10kg in days Well done Zwift
With such little regard currently for W/Kg in the power seed score under Racing Score, expect to see racers going on extreme diets in the coming weeks/months.
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Just wish they got a gap of this now of many thing letting Zwift down.
What is needed is a way to detect and automatically flag sudden weight changes of more than 10 or 20kg, for instance when a rider who is 87-90kg on Zwift power the other day suddenly does a 49 minute ADZ at 252w average power for the Strava segment.
You can work out the approximate weight for that to be possible, it’s around 60kg.
No amount of IRL riding at altitude is going to provide that kind of sudden improvement.
It is trivial to detect this and most of the rest of the cheating programmatically. At this point, I think it is safe to assume Zwift is hesitant to pursue fragile egos when revenue is involved.
I would embrace a commercially viable and hilarious solution;
- create a series of programmatic triggers that suggest “highly likely cheating”
- ghost status the rider in-game (this functionality already exists) meaning they can see you, you can’t see them.
- block data uploads to results, strava, zwift power.
- Ping them with an email stating the trigger, and steps to correct.
- Finally… create family accounts so there is no “well my kid was using it” issue.
Some form of “Hey Champ, it looks like you want to be done with this ride quicker or haven’t calibrated your equipment. We will hide you from other riders and block your strava/zpower/results for now. If you want to calibrate your equipment, start here.”
If you wanted to get really spicy, you would also keep a rolling power verification on the top 20 ZRS scores, repeat after they calibrate, and get a more realistic power.
Triggers could be;
- dramatic weight changes
- height changes
- Power Meter settings (crank length/slope)
- Unrealistic power input patterns
- Sudden jumps in power vs HR (assuming consistent riding)
If enough people want to ride at their “improved” status then maybe there is a need for an “arcade mode” server or permanent ghost status where anything goes.
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60+ doing 7092w GOD I would like to be him. Zwift are happy to let to happen its of a game. CoD if only a game be people get ban from that all the time.
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They hit that on a ZWS community race Friday. The account has been doing similar all year though
what is that power graph btw? i see a couple of them. is it an ebike, or, literally, an xbox controller? i know its some BS, obviously… just wondering what flavour. the 420 watts is a nice touch though
I haven’t figured it out. They do have a normal shape after the event but just step change between 3 power values before that.
Maybe a bot with a lazy randomizer
This must be the any game I know where you can cheat and get away with it. That why can see MW got the UCI
Nothing to do with it, MyWash just threw more money at the UCI than Zwift did.
Zwift elite-level races take cheating a lot more seriously than regular Zwift races.
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here’s one i saw… included the HR cos it sort of tracks with human effort, which is why i thought ebike
@Steve_Hammatt Why can’t Zwift do a verify rider/ racer as I would be a happy to doing testing and weight in Videos
They do exactly that for Elite races on Zwift. Riders with a tick by their name in Zwift have been through this process.
But the number of Elite racers is tiny compared with the number of community racers. So who would do all that work and how would it be paid for?
How much do you want to pay for the service?
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In surveys I’ve said $5-$10 a month for a racing pass.
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I pay monthly already
Exactly. So how would Zwift finance verifying all community racers without making it too expensive for them to race, and how long would this take?
Thought that was just for verifying who they are? Chris Pritchard has a tick and I don’t believe he’s ever done elite level racing