Herd runs them, just not now - Herd Winter Racing. Last one I raced I got a ZRS increase despite being a mid-to-good C rider. (was 430-ish then, 444 now)
I think this is a problem with ZRS score adjustment behavior, not with the race format.
I’ve no idea if racers are simply being honest and joining pen D of the Tiny Races after their Racing Score has gone above the pen E threshold of 230…
Or has the longstanding problem of Racing Score adjustments and consequent pen exclusion before the next Tiny Race finally been fixed?
For example, Andy Willis won pen E Tiny Race 1 at 1600 BST (at least from Zwiftpower registered racers) and his score increased to 237. He’s currently racing pen D Tiny Race 2.
Incidentally, ZWIFT ZRS v3 by VirtuSlo says after his performance a few days ago of 270W at 83Kg for 5mins, his 100% seed score is 281.
It’s been written so many times, that the Zwift software should simply disallow significant height and weight changes.
I’d limit height decreases to approx 1cm per year for anyone over approx 21 years old (I discovered I was no longer 178cm and I’m now 177cm aged 51).
As for weight changes, for men I’d limit changes to 1Kg at a time every 24+ hours.
For riders doing extreme changes like your example, I hope any power records that would lower their seed score are ignored by this diabolical Racing Score system.
I like the ZRS. For me it’s a bit like a golf handicapping system, it’s a good measure of where your at. Far better than just using average watts/kg categories which are such a blunt instrument. Agree that a bit of transparency over changes over time might be good but not super essential, people would just move on to critiquing the calculation. For me I know when I’ve raced well or badly and this nearly always gets reflected in a RS change.
Score history trending might be nice but then I track this sort of stuff in a spreadsheet.
PS Not related to RS but I don’t think height should be a factor in determining speed. Weight and power I can do something to improve, I can’t influence my height.
With Racing Score, you could have the best performance race of the week or your life, but still get a Racing Score decrease because you finished in the lower half of your pen even though everyone who finished above you were always stronger racers that should finish ahead of you.
Yes, your seed score might increase in above example by setting a new 5min best which might maintain or even increase your Racing Score, but equally in a race with only a few in your pen you might still get a net Racing Score decrease because of your finish position.
Racing Score is nothing like a golf handicap system IMO, because Racing Score is affected by where you finish in your start pen regardless of relative ability, while your golf handicap is simply based on how many shots it takes you to complete the course (what others do has no affect as far as I’m aware).
There are so many racers racing at least one pen below their true ability in Racing Score, because ZRS can drop 15% below their ability seed score metric (5mins effort at a given weight) through results, rather than using 100% seed score as the minimum possible ZRS.
With a 5min effort of 260W at 96Kg, ZWIFT ZRS v3 by VirtuSlo says my 100% seed score should be 207, which puts me just 3 points under the threshold for “range 2” pen E Zmonthly races if I ever did one.
But my ZRS has been approx 170-182 for months, while competing almost exclusively in Tiny Races pen E, which has a threshold ZRS of 230… Where I’m potentially and often competing against others who have a 100% seed score of up to 270, so on a 5min climb I’m doing 2.7W/Kg against others who can do ~3.25W/Kg (eg. 244W at 75Kg).
Under Category Enforcement (usually a 4 pen system), doing 3.25W/Kg for 5mins in pen D would seriously risk a ZMAP promotion to pen C, but under ZRS they can do this with no risk in pen E of a 5 pen system because of the 85% seed score ZRS floor.
Purely as an example, Andy Willis came 2nd in pen E Tiny Race 1 in zone 2 on Saturday and then got a pen promotion. He did 270W at 83Kg last week, so his 100% seed score is 281 (solid Tiny Races pen D). He was then solidly mid pack of the zwiftpower finishers in pen D for races 2-4 inclusive.
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Given how low the attendance usually is for Zwift TT Club events, I find it completely nuts how they affect Racing Score.
Yesterday I did week 3’s Handful Of Gravel.
It’s a route where TT frame isn’t the quickest option (MTB is according to Zwifterbikes), so with open bike choice, I could be ~1min+ quicker at exactly the same ~200W normalised pacing strategy to someone on Cadex TT.
There were only three of us in pen D (180-350 with minimum score 85% of their 5min ability seed score) at 1720 BST.
Winner did 17mins47secs, 228W average 3W/Kg.
I did 20mins49secs, 207W average 2.2W/Kg
Third did 23mins40secs, 161W average 2.1W/Kg
Massive time differential and I get +10 Racing Score for my troubles! 
Yet on zwiftpower, I’m 10th of 12 right now for this event!
Racing Score adjustments for TTs should happen at the end of the week, comparing all who took part on a stage throughout the week in that pen.
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saw a race yesterday, 2 entrants only in there winner went up, second went down, surely there needs to be a minimum number of entrants for scores to change, we all know its top half of races mostly go up and bottom half mostly go down but 2 entrants its nice and simple to tank a score, might have to do this when the summer is over seeing as i’m still vastly over scored
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Exactly! I rode a Zwift TT Club event a few weeks ago with one other guy in PenC. I beat him by 20 seconds and my ZRS went up 18 points. Then I did one the other day and finished fourth of six, a coupla minutes down from first and my ZRS remained the same. Without purposely sandbagging, which I find reprehensible, I end up in pens with racers nearly 80 points higher and absolutely no chance in any races now.
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And there’s this. I have a ZRS of 464 with a profile like this:
And then here’s the pointy end of the Tiny Races last weekend:
Greg here was mid pack and has a much lower ZRS than me, 446 to 464.
Tell me, how do I compete with that kind of short game. I am a Diesel, always have been and will continue to be so. Getting penned with this kind of power is nonsensical. I don’t win races, sh*t I rarely place in anything that means anything. With the current system in place, racing is about as fun as it was before CE and the lower cats were rife with sandbaggers from the A and B pens. For a short time when ZRS started, racing was fun with packed pelotons all racing hard. That is not the case anymore; five minutes into a race and we’re all strung out. ZRS 3.0 is not an improvement over anything.
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@Mark_Crane_TOG_G_65y work on Top line power 1 min 15 sec, see your on wrong side of the power numbers , So work on it.
Dude, I’m 68. That ship has sailed. As I said in my post, I’m a Diesel, always have been and always will. I work on it in workouts and stuff but I’m NEVER going to be putting down more than about 7.5w/kg for 15 or more than 6.0 for 60. Ever.
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Love it when I drop 393 to 378. Back to C then 3 racers to go back up when back down after one. I felt like Jack and Jill haha
You don’t. You choose to do those races to get better at short power OR you choose to focus on races that are more to your strengths.
Tiny Races are great but they have three issues for ZRS
- large fields so very slow progression on winning/top50%
- some only race tiny races
- You don’t need to show how strong you actually are for 10min+, and ZRS doesn’t care how easily you win.
Tell me @Matt_Wheeler how do I focus on races that are more to my strengths? My FTP is very nearly the same as the referenced Zwifters above the difference is their short game. I am not going to and will never approach those kind of numbers no matter how hard I train my sprint. It’s beyond ludicrous to expect to be competitive in any race with a ZRS of 464 with a one minute of 4.8w/kg. I can hang on the 10-20 minute efforts but once the racing goes short, I’m in the grupetto with the three or four other guys/gals with no short game but B level FTP. I’m not the only one with this problem and that’s reflected in the current fields for races.
I’m so F*CKIN’ tired of people saying you need to do this or do that. The problem lies in how Zwift has implemented their racing score system. For a brief time we had a pretty good system with cohesive packs and good solid competitive races. Now it’s just Greek Comedy.
This is one of the reasons I don’t race much anymore. Just isn’t fun. Like before CE. I’m not sayin’ CE is better but it’s not much worse than what we have now.
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And the real tragedy here: All of this hand waving and grunting does absolutely nothing. IMHO, nobody at ZHQ pays the slightest attention to these complaints. We’re a minuscule subset of a minuscule subset. Like less than 1.0% of the entire Zwift community. I don’t even know why I get so riled up about this. Zwift is gonna do what Zwift is gonna do and it ain’t gonna be what we want it to be.
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my issue with the use of zwiftpower figures is that it only takes “races” into account, any rider might be able to put out far more power than what is shown there, the 5min effort shown on my zwiftpower profile isn’t a true reflection of that
Zwift have basically done the bare minimum to try to placate the racing community, community racing isn’t something they want to deal with though, too much time and resources needed when those resources could be going into marketing the new collaboration for headphones or play controllers that are unable to be used in zwifts premier race events
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I’ve written so many times in the last ~12 months, but I’ll write it again…
I hate the whole Racing Score system, the fundamentals of it are so poorly concieved.
But the most efficient bandaid would be to ditch 85% seed score being the Racing Score floor and make it 100% seed score.
Seed score uses a quantifiable metric, your best 5mins of power at a given weight, to demonstrate your ability.
Allowing racers to drop 15% below that ability is allowing so many racers to race in a lower pen than their real power ability, ignoring their racing ability.
It’s the equivalent of under the previous Category Enforcement system, allowing weaker As to continuously race in pen B; weaker Bs continually racing in pen C; weaker Cs continually racing in D.
I say continuously, because it doesn’t take much genius to play the Racing Score system and keep close enough to the current 85% seed score floor. So you can beat racers in a lower pen that you should be beating on 5mins ability at will.
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Add that the initial ZRS did not have a floor lower than seed, it was only added because seed V1 was so unbalanced they had to allow people to drop below it.
The podium bonus didn’t exist initially either, but was added because everyone could get to the 85% floor whether they needed to or not. They needed a mechanism to move people who were absolutely dominating races up faster.
Seed is better now, there is no longer a need for the floor to be so much lower.
I’d allow the floor to decay from the date the power record is set, but only allow the score to move down from results.
I think it should be extremely rare for a score to be more than 10% above or 5% below seed.
And I think some sort of terrain handicap is vital for a results based system to function correctly.
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Let’s be completely honest about the Tiny Races though.
Tiny Races are problematic due to their nature in how Zwift handles data. It isn’t the fault of ZRS or anything else… zRacing has issues with Tiny Races just the same (or it used to, I don’t keep up with it anymore, but I know at some point a bandaid was being put in place to handle the issue with these races); because they’re individual unique events.
The only response to the issue with Tiny Races and ZRS is to just … not participate.
As for Mark’s random grouping of folks, honestly that’s still just looking at what types of racing better suits folks; at the end of the day, it is what it is.
Race them because you enjoy them, not because you expect to win.
That’s never going to change; racing is all about Vo2 endurance.. nobody is going to want to do 4 hour races on Zwift, and even if they do, it’s still going to come down to who can hold on a climb together before they disappear forever.
You can’t expect every format to be enjoyable nor be suited for you.
Regardless, Tiny Races are NOT the places to be looking at, because they’re damaging to the way ZRS and vELO works behind the scenes.
The real “tragedy” is that Zwift racing just frankly isn’t that good. It’s still a tiny fraction of the userbase, and very dependent on seasons and location. If you want good races on Zwift, you know where they are because people have been saying it for ages; FRR, ECRO, SISU, etc.
I only come in here to laugh at these complaints about ZRS once in a blue moon because you guys are constantly crying at 10-30 point separations and saying that’s unfair…
Come join us A’s still, who are stuck with a range that includes as low as Cat C’s that I’ve seen, out to folks that are on the record banned by the UCI for substance abuse… 350 points range in ZRS, and of course folks with inaccurate trainers.
You want unfair.. there’s a reason why A/Advanced continues to fail in the public events. You guys are complaining about peanuts.
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