Zwift Event Idea: vEverest Climb Portal

General Discussion
1

The vEveresting badge is the final badge I have left to earn on Zwift. Most riders seem to favor Alpe du Zwift, a few choose Ven-Top, and a recent event tackled vEveresting on The Grade. I’d love to see Zwift create a special Climb Portal that climbs the full height of Mt. Everest: 29,032 ft (8,848 m) in one continuous ascent.

To motivate riders going for the full route, while also rewarding those who only complete part of it, the route could keep the existing 10 evenly spaced banners with 750 XP awarded at each one. Combined with the 5,000 XP vEveresting completion badge, that would total 12,500 XP for riders earning the badge for the first time, which could generate a lot of interest.

Rather than making it available as a free ride, the vEverest Climb Portal could appear on the official event calendar as a limited-time event once or twice each year. Riders could choose a start time that works for them and take on the challenge alongside other crazy Zwifters.

For reference, vEveresting on Ven-Top covers the required 8,848 m of climbing in roughly 208 km, while Alpe du Zwift comes in around 220 km. By removing the descents, this route would target approximately 115 km (71 miles) of continuous climbing. Split into 10 sections, each portal banner would represent about 11.5 km of distance and 885 m of elevation.

To keep the climb engaging, I wouldn’t make it one endless, constant gradient. It would be great to include switchbacks and changes in gradient while averaging around 8.5% overall. That would keep the climbing feeling natural and give riders a sense of steady progress to the summit.

Everest Climb Portal
Everest Climb Portal1672×941 256 KB

As part of the event, I’d also love to see an exclusive in-game kit unlock. I’ve suggested this in another thread, but the current vEveresting badge already features Tibetan prayer flags, and I think a jersey inspired by that design would make a fitting reward.

vEverestingJerseyUnlock
vEverestingJerseyUnlock1000×1000 106 KB
vEverestingJerseyMockUp
vEverestingJerseyMockUp666×1000 99.5 KB

What are your thoughts? Is this an event you’d sign up for?

2

Love the idea, but dont think I would sign up for it.

3

The thing with Everesting is that it ordinarily involves repeats of a hill which allows recovery on the decent.
What you’re proposing is one continuous climb.

Whilst it will reduce the time to do it it’ll make things very tough.

4

Love the idea and the jersey mockup! I tried a vEveresting on AdZ about 7 years ago and only made it to base camp. I might try one again some day, and I do think that it would motivate me to do it with a load of like-minded people.

Whether people would actually go for it, I don’t know. The descents are a welcome break. Of course, riders can always just stop at the side of the climb - but no “free” XP. =)

Also, I think the climb portal graphics might be a bit much for an 12-24 hour ride…

I note that they’ve relaxed the trainer difficulty rules. It had to be at 100% TD when I tried it

5

Fair enough! :joy: I think a lot of Zwifters might feel that way. 8848m in one go is pretty insane.

It would definitely add an additional challenge without the downhill breaks. Zwifters would have to pause on the uphill…but they would get a ~90 minute descent from the top.

That’s good to hear. I feel like I would be more motivated to take this one on if I had a bunch of other Zwifters on the ascent and in the chat. The existing climb portal graphics could be a challenge for half a day though!

6

Not even as an experiment?

I might be tempted by it - but not soon as I have my own elevation challenge I am finishing.

For the bonus, just give people a badge and 500,000 drops once to prevent farming by bots.

A jersey should be given manually only once the activity is verified by a real person, cutting out bots and workarounds. Finishing this would automatically send a notification for the activity to be verified.

If found to be a bot or something else dubious, no jersey, the XP and drops are reverted.

7

That’s why I suggested awarding XP at each of the 10 banners. If the only XP or Drops bonus comes from completing the entire event, it could discourage riders who aren’t confident they’ll finish. Breaking the rewards into milestones gives casual riders a reason to participate, knowing they can still earn something even if their legs eventually say, “no more.”

As for the jersey, I think making these organized events would help. Having results posted on ZwiftPower would make weight dopers, bots, and other cheaters much more visible. I’m not sure how jersey verification would work, though. I imagine it isn’t something Zwift’s current framework supports, and manually reviewing every finisher would be a huge burden on the team.

Like many in-game rewards, we may just have to accept that a small percentage of people wearing the jersey didn’t legitimately earn it. Ideally, there would be a way to report obvious cases so the jersey could be removed retroactively. I believe James from Zwift mentioned something along those lines for suspect accounts in the active Sticky Watts discussion.

8

Doesn’t deter them. Like the racer who couldn’t decide across multiple races if he was 45kg or 66kg according to ZwiftPower.

Depending on the event, it changed.

9

Already done such an experiment as you know.

But no, I think my legs would have the least problem with it. But my mind and my ass think differently. Just dont think I would be able to do it. And to be honest, nor do I really want or need to do it. Its is probably the only badge I will never get in Zwift. Well if I just sleep in between I probably could get it done in a week, but that is not how to do it.

And dont believe we can teleport in the climbportal, so no free downhills which is good.

10

Really ? If the event only is once or twice a year it should not be that much work. I dont think there will be hundreds finishing it.

And what timeframe did you had in mind to finish the event ?

11

Fair point. There probably won’t be many people finishing. I looked at a vEveresting on The Grade a few months ago, and those scheduled events had fairly modest registration. I’m sure the number of actual starters, let alone finishers, was much smaller.

I wonder if the jersey distribution is something that could be done in partnership with a Zwift Team/Club, with club admins taking on the responsibility of verifying completions and awarding jerseys. It seems they already have the ability to distribute jerseys for Zwift Racing League, so the framework already exists.

As for my own goal, I can comfortably climb Alpe du Zwift in 50 minutes and Ven-Top in 1 hour 20 minutes. Factoring in breaks and a much more conservative pace, I’d be aiming for an 11-12 hour finish. I recently completed Climb to Kaiser, spending 11 hours on the bike over 155 miles with 16,000 feet of climbing. That day flew by surrounded by the scenery of the Sierra Nevada. Doing the same amount of saddle time indoors on the Climb Portal would be a completely different mental challenge though.

12

Not bad, but since it is an event how do you see it being set up. You cant make it an open ride with no end time, or people will take naps in between en finish it in days. But you also have to consider the more slower people who do finish it. So we are probably looking at an 20 to 24 hours event.

13

You could make the event based on distance, because the elevation will be known for that distance on any given route

14

still have to be strict rules on what is allowed and not, otherwise you will get into tons of discussions with people who think they deserve the badge and kit.

If its only distance that counts people can still take 2 days for it.

15

This is why it should be handled by a community organizer, which in my opinion should be everesting.com. If they made a club, got kit created by Zwift, they could control who got a result in the event and who got the kit unlock. Kit unlock would be done manually as many clubs do, rather than granted upon event completion. It could work with little effort by Zwift. They would also determine the event format, so if they don’t want a single climb to the moon then that would not be part of the event, and of course there is only a tiny chance that Zwift would create the portal climb being discussed here anyway.

16

Luckily, another group has already done this with The Grade on vEveresting Day (December 29). You can see the ZwiftInsider post and the Zwift Event. I’m not seeing any additional event rules other than the ones provided by Everesting.com. As Daren mentioned earlier, the 100% trainer difficulty rule has been relaxed. I think for this one with a jersey unlock, a powermeter and HRM should be required, and the rest can follow the existing rules.

I like this idea, Paul. I might try to reach out to them and see if they have an interest in doing such a thing. I think the hard part would be getting Zwift to fast track the in game jersey approval. From what I’m seeing online, that is not a quick or easy process though. From the Zwift Community Leader form it is graded on these four things:

  1. The Popularity of Your Events
  2. The Frequency of Events
  3. The Size of Your Community
  4. The Quality of the Events

Given that this would be an event held once or twice per year, two is out. One and three would probably be out as well. Four could be a yes. This group would probably have to host training rides leading up to the event to generate any type of community and hope to get a post on ZwiftInsider to reach a large Zwifter base.

Long story short…this one might be dead in the water!

17

They will have to do the hard yards to get the event hugely popular and frequent, have a huge community. Should be no exceptions to that for any clubs/groups.

4 is easy enough, but 1 2 and 3 for a climbing based formula needing 8900m+ (to be safe) is going to be a very hard sell. Never mind the folks doing 18,000m+ (double vEverest) or 26,700m+ (triple vEverest) or worse (quadruple, 35,400m+).

18

Is there a supplemental unlock awarded for enduring the climb portal graphics for the amount of time this would take? :laughing:

19

If everesting.com is interested, it could probably happen by the end of December if approved.

Zwift can make any exception they want to the standard policy.

20

I thought people preferred them to more realistic graphics? :rofl: