Zwift Needs Better Incentives for Climbing

General Discussion
1

I’ve commented on this in a few other threads over the past year, but I wanted to make it a standalone post because I think it’s a broader game design issue and I’d love to hear from other Zwifters on the topic. I also wanted to include a few constructive ideas that would require relatively little R&D and should be straightforward for Zwift to implement. It’s easy to point out problems, but I’d rather suggest tangible improvements that could make climbing more rewarding for everyone.

Right now, nearly every progression system on the platform favors distance over elevation. If your goal is to maximize XP, drops, or level progression, the most efficient strategy is usually to sit behind a robopacer on a flat route. As a result, the north side of Watopia is constantly busy with riders covering the same circuits. The south side of Watopia, along with many of Zwift’s other worlds, often feels deserted.

XP is almost entirely distance-based, which means climbing actually slows your progression. The extra drops earned from climbing don’t make up the difference either, since you’ll generally earn more drops overall by riding steady on flatter routes with a robopacer at the 2.5x multiplier.

Climb Portals are the exception, with 10 banners that can award either 10 XP or a 250 XP bonus. However, previous XP changes have made them much less compelling. I complete a few Climb Portals each week and almost never see a 250 XP bonus, even on longer climbs at 100% difficulty. At that point, it’s hard to justify the Climb Portal when flat routes are simply the better choice for progression.

The same distance focus exists with bike unlocks. Nearly every premium bike is unlocked by distance. The Specialized Aethos is one of the few meaningful climbing bikes, but there’s no true halo climbing bike to work toward, and the new Aethos 2 isn’t in the game yet.

I think Zwift could make climbing much more appealing with a few targeted changes:

  • Award XP for elevation gained (for example, +150 XP per 1,000 feet or +300 meters climbed).
  • Increase the odds of earning the 250 XP bonus on longer Climb Portals ridden at 100% or 125% difficulty.
  • Add more climb-based bike unlocks, including a true halo climbing bike (Aethos 2 or Pantani’s Bianchi Specialissima???).
  • Place robopacers on hillier climbing routes and increase the drop multipliers (3x-5x) to better reflect the additional effort.
  • Expand summit rewards with a bonus spinner on every major climb, replacing clothing items with just XP and drops.
  • Launch climbing focused challenges like the current indoor/outdoor distance challenge (again with the distance!). ie XP bonuses for hitting 5k ft, 25k ft, 50k ft, and 100k ft in a month.

Why focus on climbing? Because it’s where many cyclists do their best training. Whether you’re a pro or an amateur, hills and long climbs are some of the most effective ways to build fitness. Rewarding elevation alongside distance would better align the game with how many people actually train while encouraging riders to spread out across Zwift’s road network instead of concentrating on the same handful of flat routes.

Below is my version of what the Specialissima could look like.

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2

I don’t think you’ll get much support for this. I suspect there would be more support for greater incentives to ride further on flat routes.

I can already hear the cries of Nooooooo! :rofl:

Sending the robopacers back on the Epic KOM like what used to happen (Anquetil robopacer) would be okay, it isn’t too difficult. Though you’d need to keep the pace on uphill sections steady - all the folks who say the robopacers are too slow on climbs will probably have other ideas if the robopacer is going at that increased pace for 20 minutes or more with no let up on actual climbs. :wink:

I wouldn’t want them on Ventop or Alpe, that would just be used for teleport cheating to get free distance.

The Alpe spinner is already one of the better ones since you get reasonable XP bonuses on that, if you have the items already. The wheels give you 1000XP if you already have them.

A higher drops multiplier would be interesting, it could be applied if the rider is in sim mode as an incentive to ride in sim mode on those big climbs.

I have long thought some new climbing bikes would be great. I have a Canyon Ultimate CF Evo 10.0 LTD sitting right beside me now, UCI illegal lightweight climbing monster of a machine, it is even reasonably aero as well compared to a lot of other climbing bikes.

That would be so easy to do in Zwift, the frame is already there - just needs to be repainted to look like an EVO and have the THM cranks and brakes.

3

I agree, Chris, and thanks for the reply. The current community consensus seems to be to avoid hills and climbs whenever possible, which made me wonder if people genuinely don’t enjoy climbing, or if the incentives are just misaligned.

There has to be a point where the XP and drop rewards make climbing feel worthwhile. Right now, you can watch riders peel off in large numbers every time a robopacer heads up Jarvis, Titans Grove, or Petit KOM. If sticking with the pacer group up those climbs earned 4x or 5x drops, plus something like an XP spinner reward at the top, I think a lot more people would stay with the ride instead of bailing.

I’d also love to see Zwift use more of the worlds they’ve already built. London with Box Hill, Yorkshire’s climbs, Scotland’s Sgurr and Brae… there are so many great routes that barely see any traffic. Instead, robopacers and Route of the Week seem to cycle through the same handful of Watopia routes over and over.

I also agree that climbing robopacers would need different pacing. They’d have to hold a steady w/kg on the climbs instead of the current surging behavior. And I agree on leaving Alpe and Ventop out of it. Those would just become teleport exploits for free downhill distance and XP.

I’m thinking more along the lines of longer unused routes with Epic KOM, Box Hill, Jungle, Titans Grove, and similar climbs. I haven’t seen Sugar Cookie in a long time! Give people a reason to ride them regularly, and I think you’d naturally spread the population across more of Zwift instead of funneling everyone onto the same flat loops in northern Watopia.

For the climbing bikes, Canyon doesn’t yet have a Halo. Maybe the Canyon Ultimate CF Evo 10.0 LTD is the answer! That would be an awesome bike to level up on 75,000 meters.

4

The current drop multipliers stack, so you do a huge multiplier when climbing with a pacer. Just that they don’t do it very often, and they really should settle down to the advertised pace instead of holding the increased power up longer climbs.

5

Would people still complain about the robopacers going too slow up climbs in this case?

Might be safer leaving them at the increased power up longer climbs otherwise those people could still complain.

There were actually two of them. The brown one that I have (with E-Tap 11 speed) was 5.8kg in medium, and the orange striped SL was 4.8kg in medium, with SRAM Red 11 speed mechanical. Both awesome bikes. They are very popular in the events like Haute Route (one of the Lanterne Rouge riders has the SL).

Looks innocent enough, but event with alloy wheels, UCI illegal:

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Easy enough to do in Zwift because the old Canyon Ultimate is the same shape frame. IRL, only the carbon material is different between the CF SLX and the Evo, and the remaining differences are the brakes, crankset and some other components. In Zwift we already have the original Meilenstein wheels, just need to do the Obermayer version of them which the Evo came with.

I’d say have them available to users who have done 100x ADZ in a year, or 200x ADZ in a year with some checks to avoid bots trying to get them.

6

Aren’t watts just watts? A steady 9% climb can feel the same as a ride on a flat route if you can change your gearing enough. You just go slower.

7

Can you give an example in Zwift of a big climb that stays at unchanged at a steady 9% for the entire distance of the climb? That’s getting away from the original topic.

There are probably a few others too, what were those super light German bikes, AX Lightness Vial Evo Ultra - it was 4.4kg. I have never seen one nor ridden them, so no idea what it is like, but it must fly up hill, hope it isn’t very flexible. THM Cranks on it, same as the Ultimate CF Evo.

I am seeing talk of Aethos 2 builds coming in at 4.9kg, even a 4.7kg which looks like a very small frame size, also pretty light. That build also had THM cranks, interestingly a 1x setup.

Old Trek Emonda SLR10 was also claimed to be really light at 4.8kg. All of those are real enough bikes, no chopped off bars or other tricks like that.

8

I ride climbs because I like climbs and I don’t care about accumulating distance, partly because distance in Zwift seems really fake, but if they made new incentives for climbing I wouldn’t object. To me the only metrics that matter are time and power. I’m unsure if the distance seekers would become XP seekers if new incentives were added, because they might be looking at Strava where XP is invisible. Anyway I don’t mean to shoot down your proposal. Good luck with it.

9

Oh Hill No? Doesn’t really matter if it’s a steady climb, or 7, 8, or whatever percent. The point is if you want hard resistance on another kind of flatter route, just shift to a harder gear.

10

This would get people living on the climbs, especially the ones in the race to level up. :wink: And it would give an interesting dilemma between those wanting to level up fast but also wanting to have the biggest distance per week.

There are some who exclusively do 2000+km on flattest routes each week (and or teleport to coast downhill so they can “rest their legs”). I know one of them is nearly allergic to hills (despite being a climber weight and having great w/kg), so this might encourage them onto the hills.

This would be almost certainly farmed / bots used for this. You’d need to have a way to prevent the bots being used.

11

I would spend more time on climbs if the insentives were there… but trying to upgrade bikes you usually need distance.

The new TT bike will be a good one to use on some climbs since its time based and I don’t really care about XP or Drops.

12

It might be a bit better than some of the other TT bikes, but it is still very slow up hill. Even the Cannondale R4000 is better up hill at level 2.

I am upgrading the Speedmax CFR now, it is a long time to do that. I use it to get to the climb, change to Aethos for the climb, then switch to the TT on the downhill. The Aethos is still the fastest uphill by a decent margin.

13

Longer time is fine, need the hours on the bike

14

I agree with you. I love climbing and I was always frustrated that the bike upgrades were mostly all distance based. If there was better xp reward for climbing that was similar reward to flat then I don’t think the ‘flat earthers’ would start climbing but it would great for us elevation enthusiasts!

15

As with anything, you have to incentivize the behavior you want to elicit. In this case, I think the behavior Zwift is trying to elicit is just getting more people to subscribe to Zwift, and Zwift subscribers seem to have indicated that they like flat terrain.

Of course, based on what I’ve read, this conclusion seems to have been arrived at by looking at the numbers of people riding each route. And this could simply be a result of, as the OP noted, the incentives for riding flatter terrain (often with a RP) being greater than those for riding hillier terrain (especially now that the Tron bike may be less of an incentive than it once was).

In theory, Zwift could test this by altering the incentives, even for just a trial period, and see what happens. Maybe something along the lines of the double XP for TdZ (or is it ToW?) events. It may take a few iterations to find the right way to realign (or offer new) rewards for climbing, but doing so could be a great way to better distribute riders across all of the available roads.

16

Laps of Stoneway Sprint were very popular during the Big Spin event.

17
  • and gravel

There’s nothing really to test; we already know how much impact it has, see Big Spin.

Elevation just needs a little adjusting, and gravel needs to be added into the mix.
I’ve said it all over this forum; people don’t spend time on gravel because: we have no flat gravel routes, and Zwift gives no reason for anyone to ride on gravel.

Zwift constantly gives a reason for everyone to ride flat fast routes, it’s in their old motto fun is fast. (And Strava users like to show off big distance / big speeds)

The only real black sheep is that mountain bike upgrades require climbing… but we don’t even have mountain bike / singletrack trails (and the whole MTB experience has seemingly been abandoned)

Meanwhile, gravel bikes require distance…
Yes this stuff is low hanging fruit, but focus seems to be somewhere else.

If Zwift did a double drops on gravel, you can bet Jungle would fill out as soon as word spreads. That’s not really a question; it would happen. (but it would be nice if we had more than just jungle / climbs for our new, aero, gravel frames)

18

In honestly this is because an overwhelming number of people prefer the flat.

I’ve shared this thread with our team so they are aware of the conversation taking place here.

I personally enjoy climbing routes as I find them more motivating but as I said, I’m definitely in a minority on this - I previously tested Robo Pacers on climbing routes and unsurprisingly the numbr of people that rode with them dropped significantly.

19

Even pace partners on mostly-flat routes like Ocean Lava Cliffside Loop see rider accompaniment numbers completely collapse every time it hits the climb to the Epic bypass. Sad.

20

Sure, there will always be many that won’t want to do it and if I were to guess:

Unsteadiness / rolling (even uphill, the changes in grade can be as frustrating as flat rolling lands like the France world); having to shift often.

Speed; people like to show off they did some huge distance online.

I don’t think there’s really a way around that group of people though; this kind of even goes into the complaints about wanting steady paced bots back. Some may return if a climb were extremely steady, but that’d be a small portion I imagine of that group still.. why? my only guess still is people that look at X mileage instead of time or whatever else.
Some of this is a total psychology problem more than anything.

BUT… still, if there were more or better reasons to do more climbing or gravel, or whatever, that outpace distance, there would likely still be a community shift.
You’ll never get the distance people away from that, but I don’t think they should count here; they’re covered.

When almost everything is focused on distance though, a majority will always do as little effort as possible they can while maximizing distance.

See Coco :robot: being much larger rider count than Yumi through the day because it’s more draft/less effort and generally end up going equally as fast as Yumi

That’s my going assumption at least as to why Coco has more riders always than Yumi; some may suspect they can’t keep up… but most that ride Coco are already doing plenty of power to stick to Yumi; but… less people on Yumi, so lower average ground speed, which is what ‘these people’ care about.