Hey Zwifters! Over the past few weeks you may have noticed part one of our support for group rides - the Ride Leader Beacons and other special designations our awesome community ride leaders have demonstrated. Today we’re taking it to the next level.
With this update we’re going to start publicly testing part two, which includes the ability to join proper mass start rides. Over the next couple of weeks, expect to see these test events take place. Anybody is welcome to join in and help test them out! We’ll be announcing more details over the coming days on Facebook via official channels and groups like “Zwift Riders”. Don’t worry, we aren’t looking to re-invent the ride calendar - many of the big community created rides will end up scheduled in game and take advantage of this new functionality very soon.
So here’s a preview of how it works.
If an event or group ride is scheduled to occur in the next hour, you’ll see it listed at the top right corner of your “RIDE” screen once in-game. To join, just click on a group A through D, with the A group being the fastest, and D group being the slowest. After you select a ride you’re interested in, simply click the normal “RIDE” button and go about your Zwifting as usual.
When it’s nearing time for the event to start, you’ll see a popup letting you know it’s time to officially register and get to the starting line. This will teleport you to the starting gate automatically so there’s no need to get off the bike to click anything if you don’t want to. You may also click on “JOIN EVENT” at the bottom left for up to half an hour before an event officially starts.
Finally, you’ll be brought in from the course to the starting area where you can chat with your fellow riders or warm up (without going anywhere). Once the countdown hits 0:00, you’re off to enjoy the ride! The rest should be pretty self explanatory.
As always, we welcome your feedback. Part three of group ride functionality will include some of the obvious omissions, but keep the feedback coming so we can make sure we’ve got everyone covered as we polish these features.
PS. We’ve also bundled in quite a few major changes under the hood to support some of our upcoming changes for the summer and fall, and while we don’t anticipate any issues we’re here and ready to investigate if you experience any problems with this update. Don’t hesitate to contact us.
Get out there, keep your eyes peeled for a test event and Ride On.
The Team at Zwift
NOTE : A small patch was released on 5/8 to bring Zwift from 11783 to 11841. This is to try to address some of the issues with the Zwift Mobile Link phone connection, as well as fix a few issues the community helped us find during our first few test events. We will ramp up our public testing of event functionality this week so hopefully everybody who’s interested will be able to experience it first hand.