Did the Jett Endurance 100 today. I’m required to enter Cat A, yet finished last overall with 3 B riders ahead of me. So perplexing…
zwiftpower dot com /events.php?zid=1149606
(And what’s the point of having an image upload option here, but then it tells me I can’t embed it in a post? Apparently I can’t post links either? How did Dave do it above?)
You have to have made a certain number of posts to be able to attach images. It’ll be an anti-spam protection measure.
You were traveling alone.
Three people of Cat B were cycling in a group.
And one Cat B rider provided max avg power in the race.
It is a proper race result.
Steve - Thank you
Blue - Drafting. I get it. In this case, those B riders were not on the field and not available to me, otherwise I might have latched onto them.
I’m whining because I feel stuck in A Cat and am discouraged by finishing last almost every time. If I can’t hang with A, which I consistently can’t, and lots of B riders are finishing ahead of me, which they do, then I should be B. It’s as if the wrong metrics are used to calculate category. It’s just a platform and I’ll get used to it or otherwise accept it, I suppose.
How about the open category(Cat E) race?
How about the age category(for example Cat A 40 under, Cat B 40 over) race?
I don’t think it’s good for you to stick to Cat A race.
It is sure that a PWR category of Zwift is feces.
Therefore let’s do another cat race.
Just race B, ignore the ZwiftPower gibberish. Enjoy yourself.
Posting alternative results after a race has finished, after it has been ruined by cheaters. Absolutely pointless.
A full 3rd of the people racing are partially cheating or in the wrong category. If you dominate the Bs, obviously move up. It’s up to you. The results are utterly meaningless. A VAST portion of people have incorrect weights. Trainers are not all power accurate. It’s really just a poorly executed, rather dated looking online game. One that you pay your hard earned (or easily, I don’t know 
) cash to use.
Zwift don’t care in the slightest about the racing or category cheating.
It’s your money, use the platform how you want, while not ruining it for others.
Get amongst it.
That is not good advice @TheBandit.
Zwift and Zwiftpower has rules and we need to play by the rules even if they are not enforced.
Seems WTRL are streaks ahead in the results game. They have an auto select for category enforcement on results. Also results are published within mins.
I would have previously agreed with you Gerrie, but I’ve given up caring.
The problem is just so rampant, and Zwift just don’t seem to care. I race as many as four races a day, all the while I’m just watching the never ending category cheating. Especially in D grade.
When Zwift implements a functional system, I’ll be all for it.
I’m not saying race down a category and ruin anybody’s race, I’m saying, if you’re in the mix in B, race B. Just be honest with yourself, if you’re too strong for the grade, move up.
I raced the 3R Greater London 8 Hilly today. Entered B and got DQ’ed for wrong Cat, which I was aware would happen.
My finish time put me last in A (of 3), and 4th in B (of 9). My 20m W/KG was 3.9. Very typical result for me… last in A and middle-of-pack (non-podium) B. If I ever hit the podium in B, you have my work I will go back to A (assuming I haven’t been naturally downgraded by then).
The system has rules as well as punishment for breaking the rules (if they catch you). For now, the punishment (just loss of points?) is less severe than the demoralizing feeling of being last in Cat every time. Sure, technically I was still last, but for the time being it feels different; like some sort of peaceful protest.
All I’m asking for is an overall average of W/KG as opposed to an average of the three highest, which I claim is unfair to anyone who only occasionally (and barely) performs above the Cat threshold.
@Mike_Monterusso, wouldn’t the simplest and most intuitive solution to your problem be for the system to auto-move you down a cat? Not for doing so and so many Watt but rather for placing among the last in A repeatedly. And then if you kept placing in the top back in B, then the system would move you up again.
Wouldn’t it also be simpler and more intuitive if you couldn’t enter a category you didn’t belong to? And that you could never get DQ’d for entering a race that you were allowed to enter, regardless of how well you did?
Just sayin’… There would be no rules to break. No averages to calculate. No sandbaggers.
That does seem simpler. I don’t know how programming this sort of system works, but I suspect that reprogramming is more effort that it’s worth. Zwift admins might speculate that there will be a similar number of “complainers” regardless of what cats are based on.
As was mentioned in another thread, it may take a some viable competition to drive change. In the meantime, Zwift will invest most of its resources in satisfying investors, which means attracting more users. They have us and will only lose us when there’s a viable alternative. Last time I looked at other platforms, there weren’t enough races (which is really all I do) to make it worthwhile joining. Hopefully that changes. I’m giving serious thought to “testing the waters” of another platform for a couple months just to see what it’s like.
I should also probably make a formal ticket/request to change the averaging calculation instead of (or in addition to) venting on the forums.
It’s simpler because it’s what every real sport does to categories/divisions. It’s a proven concept that works and people don’t complain about. Then Zwift as a whole would be a real sport, not just cat A (which already has the the things I mentioned sorted by definition).
But you’re right. There is a lack of competition. There is competition but it’s not up there quite yet. Too little racing, like you mention. As for just running WO’s or free riding there are competitors that offer a much more fun experience but those I have tried still lack a little in the simulation department. But the more visible to the mass market Zwift becomes, and the more established home training becomes in the wake of corona, the more enticing it will be to startups and companies who already have access to a solid game engine to create a better alternative. Zwift is playing a dangerous game focusing, just like you say, on attracting new subscribers at the expense of tending to the ones they already have. There will come a day when their “we’ll take care of that… later…” attitude turns into a death sentence if they don’t change course in time. There are way too many famous examples in the corporate world of the “but… but… we were first to market, it’s ours!” getting overtaken by smart plagiarists who simply do things a little better than the original and then go on to dominate the market. Microsoft and Google spring to mind, just to mention two of them.
This is a long thread, but people don’t understand the limits. They are documented here.
The algorithm has specific variables it looks at to infer FTP: 5 minute, 20 minute, and total race average powers.
To be specific… the formula I’d use is he following:
It probably won’t be long before one of the big online game studios like Bethesda or Electronic Arts recognizes that there’s a lot of money to be made from online training “games”. The gaming studios are lightyears ahead in graphics, interface, servers, number of maps per game AND listening to the paying customers. They can probably just tweak one of their current game engines a bit and have a scalable Zwift that can run on most laptops or look absolutely stunning with the latest graphics cards. They have the server infrastructure.
I like Zwift as a distraction, but it has strange problems. Why can’t I check my stats/ change stuff on the bike without starting a ride? Why can’t I switch maps without closing to desktop? Why is everything menu-related so cumbersome? No big studio would allow that. Too few maps, too many riders per server making the uphills clogged up.
Just wait and see, if Peloton and Zwift continue to grow there will be better alternatives by professional gaming studios. What if Valve released an open-source competitor where fans soon would start to publish mods, think Half-Life? It could happen. And no one would stick to Zwift anymore.
Think it’s very unlikely one of the big studios would put a dedicated effort into what is ultimately a niche market compared to gaming, but what they could do is add ANT+/BT as an input method to one of their existing projects for a bit of fun, just like the GTA mod does. That could be very bad news for Zwift.
The potential is there. I don’t know many people over 25 playing computer games (not me either). What if you could add a game to your studios collection targeting users that mostly don’t buy their products today, ages 25 and upwards? The potential is huge as Peleton shows (even if the stock’s extremely over-priced).
If you take the Valve approach you could let the tech-savvy customers do a lot of the after-release development by making mods (that still require you to pay for the game to be able to use like in the case of the Half-life series). The official studio-published content for that kind of games is but a fraction of the fan-developed and prolong the lifespan of the games by years and years.
What could happen is a small studio currently under (or aiming to get acquired by) a big nasty umbrella publisher decides to enter the home training niche. That could actually happen. Coincidentally, the big publishers own the big game engines (=lower dev costs) and game development with those game engines is relatively easy, if you will. Plus they have the market under their thumb. There’s a scenario, for sure.
Barriers of entry for said small developer into the home training market? Sure, there always is in any business. But would it be any worse than to go up gainst the competitors in established traditional game genres? No. Not at all. You could even argue for the opposite. Let’s see now…
Need for special technical/scientific knowhow relating to cycling that’s hard to get into, even more so to model accurately? Hah! Any serious developer will have to get into physics to model any 3D game convincingly, or history, or whatever research is needed. Go check out DCS as a true horror example. That’s very advanced physics modeling, and it’s just a game!
Too small a market? Not for a small developer, and certainly not with a subscription payment model. There are many examples of smaller games, even subscription games, with a lasting appeal that are/were still profitable. One of my favorite examples is Trion Worlds, who went up against World of Warcraft during its glory days with their own MMORPG. Yes, it was a small franchise. Niche even. It seemed like a corporate suicide attempt at release. But they were profitable all the way for years, probably still are. They settled for small and had a plan.
They’d have to get into esoteric hardware (smart trainers), would anyone really bite? Not more difficult than getting into any other peripheral like VR sets, or any new generation of graphics cards for that matter. Any trainer manufacturer will gladly offer SDK’s, documentation and consultation to anyone who seems like they could credibly help increase sales. Flash your big publisher business card and you have a sales pitch in your calendar already next week.
They’d have to truly understand the subscribers and they don’t. Any chance any of them does a bit of running, cycling, x-country skiing or similar and has a STRAVA account? How difficult on a scale is it to understand the psyche of a MAMIL? Please… The traditional gaming kids are much harder to please and to get under the skin of. But us? Just dangle some hot hardware in front of us, virtual or real. Just tell us your game isn’t for us but only for hardmen and we’ll buy into it in a heartbeat or we risk losing bragging rights around the coffee machine Monday morning. We’re such an easy sell. The women you catch by proxy later on, delighted that there is a female market at all.
They wouldn’t know how to attract an audience and how to tend to and interact with a community? cough Valve… I rest my case. And they are far from the only experts in the field.
But… if I was such a developer, I’d wait until Zwift had spent its new $450 mill on hardware development and flattened out in their subscriber acquisition and harware sales. Then I’d strike. Let someone else do the hard work claiming territory. Then just relieve them of it.
New Zwift hardware locked to Zwift? Question is if they dare to. They most likely won’t dare to lock out Wahoo, Tacx and Elite anyway. And what a competitor with more muscle would want to do (although not as a first step) is to force an industry standard in smart trainers. A standard set of features any smart trainer is expected to have. We’re not quite there yet. Indoor cycling won’t really take off until that happens.
Anyway, all of this is a ticking bomb and Zwift set it off themselves. And no, I don’t trust them to diffuse it in time. Not at all.
Just look at their move towards gaming, which came all too late. They brought on Ilkka Paanen! Oh dear… I don’t know where to start. It’s just so wrong. Yes, he’s a big name. But in mobile gaming! Mobile gaming isn’t community gaming. They’re cutting themselves so short, not realizing the potential at all. And besides, Paanen’s stardom expertise within gaming is really only one thing, namely how to squeeze out micropayments from people who didn’t really plan to make them. They could have asked any random casino mobster instead. Zwift isnt Pay To Win and will never work as such. And it isn’t micro attention either since you’re looking at subscribers spending hours in the saddle. Just because it’s outdated and simplistic enough to run on a mobile doesn’t make Zwift a mobile game. It’s oh so far removed from mobile gaming. But now with Paanen as an investor they might actually have to listen to the guy and they shouldn’t.
I agree with you, @Daniel_Andersson. In the perfect world it would be Valve themselves going up against the current market players in home training and virtual sports. They’d know exactly where to go next. I talked to Gabe Newell once. Ages ago, way before Steam. He showed me their latest hacks. Cutting edge, super cool stuff. I was drooling. But he himself seemed so utterly uninterested in it. Like he was just bored to death with it and his mind was elsewhere. It took a few years before I understood where that “elsewhere” was: the future. At least I understood immediately that we had to keep an eye on that guy from then on and I did.