Eric Min has talked about enabling the community to innovate on the platform, and the biggest innovations are coming from race organisers. Unfortunately due to the lack of configuration options and enforcement in Zwift itself, this has driven race communities away from the core platform, where they manage racers, pens and results on their own websites, through excel, or using Zwift Power after-the-fact.
Category enforcement is now here which is a fantastic first step - but this doesn’t solve the needs of event organisers like TFC for example, who split each category in two for their Mad Monday series, or ZHR Masters Age Group races.
The next most important step, in my opinion, is creating a toolkit for organisers so that they can configure the format of a race. This by default kills off the typically known category system, and at the same time means riders are no longer confined to being consistently at the top or bottom of a category and therefore races. A new ranking system would then be the key metric that riders use to manage progression and inspire performance improvement (although not getting in to the nuances of a ranking system here). This toolkit would also be the same for Clubs Events.
So what could this look like? I envisage a simple improvement and expansion of the existing race settings. I have mocked this up extremely crudely, but it should give you an idea.
I have kept the settings quite simple, but it would be infinitely expandable. For example, settings for drafting enabled or not, Primes points, elimination mode, etc etc. The possibilities are endless. Giving the configuration power to race organisers means the cream rises to the top and Zwift Racers get a vastly increased amount of choice.
The race settings would also be visible for all participants so they can decide to ride the event formats that they want.
Although the current Event Settings UI has improved since it was first imposed, it still requires unnecessary navigation even for simple course changes.
I’d much prefer a spreadsheet format with pull-down menus where suitable. Something like:
Name|World|Course|Laps/Duration|etc
It would also be a huge game-changer if it were open for events much further than a mere one week ahead (I’m thinking a 3-month season)
Drafting options would be a good one, I know that there is double draft or no draft option but maybe an option to halve the draft effect or something similar, possibly on a percentage scale. Not sure if this is even possible? I feel this would make racing and the option to try the odd cheeky breakaway a bit more interesting, the power of the blob is way too op IMO and stops people from even trying to attack and form a breakaway.
Technically this exists, it’s just how your events are created for you. We could in theory create a load into the future and you’d see them. It’s just the system that auto generates events (by default) every 7 days.
I think our thoughts are relatively well aligned and hopefully we can get some traction on this in the future. For some context, we’re currently going through a migration from “old event portal” to “new event portal” and once that is all complete hopefully it should give us more scope to make improvements to our platform, which we can then pass on to yours.
For race series (limited season with different courses each week) it would make more sense to set these up as individual rather than repeating events as standard best practice. The repeating does not really save any work (just moves it to modifying events instead of setting up them) and opens up for mistakes when settings are carried over from the previous week (e.g. mass start races set up with no draft). If the current event admin tools make this unnecessarily difficult, obviously that is then one thing to be improved (it’s not rocket science unlike, say, making a bike frame red)…
