It’s much more than slight. It’s a huge advantage and I say that as someone who benefits from that advantage. Just load up zwifterbikes . com and you can see the massive difference in speed between light and heavy people.
Do you ride flat routes only? Try some hilly ones 
Personally, I have a relatively decent 1-2 minute power so I can survive a lot of zwift style climbs, but yeah, there is a point at which I have no chance, especially if it’s a hilltop finish. Generally the hillier the route the more tricks I have to employ to survive the climbs. I find most climbs under 3-4% I can still get a pretty good draft.
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1-2 minutes is no climb, IMHO.
I’ve won plenty of hilly races under the old zwiftpower groups and pace groups where lighter riders behind me have been upgraded and/or given a zwiftpower DQ.
The short steep climbs are harder for heavier riders to win on because the lightweights can do a higher w/kg without going over the category limits.
He did say “Zwift style climbs” however. Which might mean short.
HC type are very rare in Zwift and we are unlikely to ever see any more of them as part of normal routes.
Yeah, I’m not particularly picky with routes and I find most routes don’t have a climb that’s longer than 3 minutes. The only ones I can think of that are always just “too hard” that show up on occasion are the London climbs because they’re steep enough you don’t get a draft, and long enough.
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Can ZRS be broken, if it never really worked in the first place?
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One interesting thing is even on the climbs like ADZ the draft indicator shows the effect happening, but at 14-17km/h I doubt how much benefit there really is, I haven’t noticed much.
Back to normal programming. 
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IIRC B cat was >3.2wkg for 20min and 250w FTP, one rider was notorious for being able to pump out 4.4wkg in B and stay there as his FTP was marginally under 250
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If you’re talking about CE categories, it was 3.36W/kg zFTP with a Watt floor of 200W zFTP, but zFTP is usually more than 20 min power. I did 3.48W/kg 20 min and ended up at 3.35W/kg zFTP, still in C. I have seen a few people do more than 3.5W/kg 20 min and stay under the threshold.
was more the original wkg before CE, i got the FTP incorrect, it was 200 not 250
A+ 4.6 wkg and 300 w FTP
A 4.0 wkg and 250 w FTP
B 3.2 wkg and 200 w FTP
C 2.5 wkg and 150 w FTP
zFTP was longer than 40mins, often close to 60mins, prediction not actual.
Yeah those were the ZwiftPower categories and as you can see the CE categories basically added 5% to the zFTP threshold, which I think was the same as the extra margin applied before giving someone an automatic WKG DQ under the previous system.
which just allowed certain sized people to sandbag further
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Adding that extra 5% was possibly due to three reasons?
- to negate the 95% taken from average of best three 20 minutes.
- To deal with the fact that zFTP (CP?) was not quite the same as FTP. [Is CP actually higher than FTP?]
- To placate all those racers who had been sitting nicely at the top of a category from being moved up into the next category.
HRM does nothing. I can create a HR data file on the fly pretty easily, and like I said, HR is so individual it’s very difficult to say anything is impossible based just on HR.
Honestly there’s nothing beyond showing up in-person, using independently maintained and tested trainers and secondary power sources, and doing in-person height and weight measurement to make it fair. But if we’re going to those lengths I’d rather race real bikes than Zwift bikes. It’s for fun. Yes, there are some people cheating, but there aren’t really good, practical, affordable solutions available in the near term.
Longer term? - Encrypting the trainer (or power source) to Zwift link would be a very good step. There’s a man-in-the-middle spoofing attack available for a small fee with a GUI for anyone who can’t do such programming themselves. But requiring this will mean obsolescence of any existing trainers that can’t be upgraded. And even then they won’t protect against physical alteration of trainers, misconfiguring pedals (wrong crank length)
And that’s completely separate from absolutely fictional power being sent to the game, which is also possible. And to vary that in a relatively realistic manner is a fairly trivial problem.
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