Zwift FTP vs zFTP; this will surely become a point of confusion

I’ll just share these two pictures from today, and hoping that this will point out how confusing the current zFTP system can be to the general public, and why it’s constantly questioned when there are two unique systems in play, and that they don’t agree.

End of tonight’s ride:

Zwift .com:
image


Now personally, I do understand the differences here; however, this is probably something that should be reviewed. I suspected this would be the case, but haven’t had an FTP increase screen in some time, and last time my zFTP didn’t change when my in-game FTP changed that I had noticed.

Point being; it’s a bit silly that currently the game and the website disagree with each other in telling me what my FTP is; and with a 3% difference, things definitely get fuzzy; because as it stands, Zwift the program would still have me in Cat B right now, where the website has upgraded me to A.

Again, personally I recognize the difference; however, I wouldn’t expect everyone else in the world to recognize these differences.

And this is especially problematic in my scenario, where the hard limit into A is 250w; meanwhile, reference picture 1, where the game literally says I’m still below 250w.


Point being; I watched someone upgrade on ZRL to Cat A a few weeks ago; and congratulated them when I saw them the next day… they had no idea they upgraded.

Zwift needs a better system in place for alerting people that they’ve upgraded, because as it stands, it’s quite hidden away; and there are zero alerts when yours does change.

… and then we get stuck with people jumping on the forum asking “why’d I upgrade???”

The confusion between FTP and zFTP was raised when the latter was first introduced.

Zwift dismissed it out of hand.

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Yeah; the reality is the solution here is just quite frankly extremely simple…

Note out / remove the old FTP bump notification completely from the system. Just remove it.
If someone has an FTP bump and / or has a category bump, set a flag on the server end since it seems to be the thing doing all of the calculations now anyways; and have it notify you next time you launch Zwift.

Right now (and to be fair the system we’ve had for what, almost a year now?), is really silly to see the left hand can’t/isn’t talking to the right.

Could also just throw away all the Zwift-branded metrics for CE, use compound score, call it “compound score”

All the confusion was predictable from the moment it was announced

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