I cant be the only one who thinks the official Zwift every hour races have been a bad thing for racing overall? - for me they decimate all the other races and really leave you with no choice but to do the hourly ones if you want a decent field size.
Take tonight’s Zwift Games Queen stage - I dont want to do that - the course is so hard that we will all be split up and mainly riding on our own. No other options - all other races no entrants…
Yep it’s a tricky one. Zwift Games is appealing to new racers not that it’s a great experience but it gets people into races.
Does TFC mad monday suit your timing. Even with a smaller field they can be a lot of fun
Ive found a DBR race later this evening that has few - not ideal time wise but I have to get a workout in. I just remember times before the official ‘zwift’ races where riders were spread nicely across a variety of races. You could do whatever took your fancy or how your legs were feeling - a crit, punchy or climby. Now its just a case of take whatever Zwift give you. A week of ‘flat is fast’ was SOO boring it was making me consider other platforms.
Z4 for 30 minutes twice a week is not worth the subscription for me, the races with smaller fields will die over the summer as the points distribution is crazy, 19 points for 3rd out 4 and 17 points for 1st out of 13 makes zero sense and will stop riders picking smaller field races until theres nobody in them.
Theres a few races I do that still using CE instead of ZRS but the numbers in these are starting to dwindle now as well.
imho Zwift Games has been excellent, large fields and a variety of distances, with a GC to boot. FYI The Epic stage with a large field was very good, very tactical for the first half and then a series of attempted breakaways with one guy finally making the break at 2/3 distance to win by 1 minute. Far more like real world tour racing. But agree that the ‘official’ races shouldn’t crowd out the the other events.
They’re killing the other events Mike. I have no issue with Zwift having ‘Official’ races but doing them every hour on the hour will only have one outcome. I love to race - its all I do on Zwift but I dont want to have to do the Zwift official race everyday and repeat all week. Sadly thats what I face atm which has changed the game for me.
Yes, it’s horrible. However they are looking at the wrong metric to determine their own success. Not realizing they are just cannibalizing other races. I’d argue that overall race attendance is lower than if Zwift wouldn’t have started creating all these Zwift races themselves.
Community members starting races are doing it because they care. They will be enthusiastic and convincing others to join. Which slowly leads to more race enthusiasts. These run of the mill races every day don’t. However, it has the name Zwift in it and is advertised on Zwift itself so attracts racers. Not more races than how it could be though… Just cannibalizing.
Unfortunately they don’t realize it themselves. There are easy fixes to make racing so much better and them not cannibalizing would be one (there are other easy wins as well). It’s a shame. Racing was actually better 3 years ago then now, that’s saying something.
They hired someone to run the races that failed to improved club side races for the last few years. Hell you can’t create new races unless you send in a stupid email, where someone has to manually input it. And this platform been around for 10 years.
Then you look at how broken ZRS is like and wonder, wtf went wrong.
Zwift games has had a good variety of courses to suit everyone.
It’s good that they have a longer more hilly ride in there, that’s what a Queen stage is about. If I were running it the Queen stage would be a real queen stage with 145km and 4500m elevation. 
But for every committed daily racer like you there are probably 20 casual racers who want to be able to do the zwift games route at a time that suits them.
Yup, the Zwift Games schedule is killing other races. Sh*t, it’s killing itself! They’ve cut down on “Elite” races for ZRS above 650 to increase participation but done the exact opposite with the rest of the ZG’s. Having a two or three races every hour means we have 18 racers in the B pen this morning AND the C pen had 40 AND the top 6 finished with a faster time than the B 5th place racer (me). We had ten racers blobbed until the first big climb, Epic prologue, and three of us rode together to the bottom of Mayan. After that it didn’t matter but I’m pretty sure the C pen had a 20-30 rider blob and went faster on first 15km of the event.
The ZG races should be every two hours or so and stagger the start times day to day so the start times vary. Like 1200UT one day and 0100UT the next and so on. That way racers have choices to fit their schedules. And don’t do the WTRL stupidity of the FIVE hour gap followed by races every 15 minutes to accomodate a select group called The EU. Yeah, there’s a lot of 'em but you’re never gonna grow participation across the community if you ignore a segment that has been asking for representation.
None of this sh*t matters. The forum is about 0.002% of the Zwift community and as near as we can tell, NOBODY at ZHQ reads this. Ever. 
ZHQ can be a little quieter than would be ideal but more than zero people there read the forums and one recently took some feedback to try to improve some events. The “elite” schedule was even modified to try to give more opportunities to people stuck there.
Yeah, I know. I was using exaggeration to add emphasis but I know it’s not true. I know James from his morning rides and we’ve ridden “together” many times over the years. His exit from that thread was extremely disappointing though and if he thought that was a tough room then it’s evident he hasn’t spent much time here; we were pretty circumspect there.
And then this very afternoon, I saw two posts, yes TWO POSTS from two different ZHQ guys addressing issues in the 1.86 update thread! And there might’ve been more! Man, if hadn’t had those cardiac stents put in last year…
It’s a tricky one.
The number of people on zwift varies significantly through the day, and the hourly ZHQ race is the only race available in the less popular time periods.
This was the case before any events were culled too.
On the other hand, they do obviously take participation away from other any other races that are on at a similar time. And ZHQ are better able to promote their races and offer more incentives such as equipment unlocks, double xp etc that community organisers cannot.
As others have mentioned, an alternating two-hourly schedule might allow community races some room to grow. Or have an alternating schedule during peak times but keep it hourly during non-peak times.
I just realised one reason Zwift races are killing other races.
I went on to ZwiftPower to see what races were available soon. I could join a community race where the category range is 350-520 or I could join a Zwift race where the category range is 270-390.
The split range system used in Zwift’s monthly series means riders can join a category where they aren’t bottom of the field. I wonder how much of a factor that is in other people’s choices of which race they will do because I know it’s a factor in my choice.