@Eric_Schlange_ZwftIn , please tell us all you are going to adjust the Tiny Races pen ranges for Racing Score.
The easiest pen is littered with Category Enforcement pen Cs every week with a limit of 300, putting out power numbers that would give a Category Enforcement pen promotion (more than 3.2W/Kg for > 6mins, a typical Category Enforcement pen D Tiny Race would be won with approx 2.7 to 3 W/Kg).
Similar can be said of Category Enforcement As and Bs blowing up Racing Score pens B C and D.
Tweaking the pen ranges to equalise the numbers in each pen is not the answer.
Unfortunately it doesn’t matter where you slice the categories.
The broken seeding means that whatever categories you set, there will always be a number of underseeded riders which destroy any notion of fair and competitive racing.
this is an issue about pen ranges. you can see that Zwift for their own races has already made a big tweak to the lower two pens. but in so doing they’ve made the top two pens really wide. The plain and simple truth is that five pens is not enough for the whole range, so either you have to exclude people in a certain range or split the whole lot over two separate races.
While constrained to just five pens, there really is no other way.
Even if you split up the pens by an equal 200 points there’s always going to be a huge difference in abilities and how many 800-1000 racers are there regularly racing?
Our F365 race series has custom boundaries are we’ve decided to put all the big boys over 600 together and have 100 between the old b, c and d cats, we’ll see how this pans out and customise again once if needed when more race data is available
The ZRS pens are a mess my score was 600 before entering tonight’s race I was recommended to choose pen 500-550 but I moved up to 550-600.
The race was pretty hard the winner was clearly strongest of the group. I’m not saying the riders did anything wrong they chose the lowest pen that was available to them but this needs to be corrected for the future.
Hi all,
I was scanning through the discussion and feel one crucial point missing: A need for dynamic starting pens.
There are various ways how to do it exactly, but the key idea would be that the racing score pen thresholds to allocate riders to pens/categories depend on the number of riders signed up. In my mind this is crucial to achieve a balanced racing experience. In one race a rider is a favorite in its category, in another the same rider is an outsider, and often in between. To me, this is essential to keep riders hooked to racing long-term. This system would work very well with the principal idea of the scoring system.
The only variables Zwift would need to implement are:
Minimum number of riders per category (before more categories get added): e.g. 20 riders
Minimum and maximum number of categories: e.g. 3-10
Distribution amongst categories: e.g. linear (could also be bell shaped to have bigger groups in middle pens, but that’s really not the crucial point of this idea)
That would mean:
If 50 people sign up, rank them according to their score and allocate them into 3 pens in their order of ranks (each pen with ~17 riders).
If 80 people sign up, same mechanics, but 4 different pens with 20 each.
If 600 people sign up you would get 10 pens with 60 riders each.
All based on the example numbers above.
Practically, you might need a minute between sign-up closure and race start to allocate the pens, but I don’t think that’s a big issue.
@Ride_Cyclery: Was this idea already considered? Have you found any strong arguments in favor or against it? @all: What does the community think about the idea?
There should be a minimum category number, e.g. 3. As well as a maximum number, e.g. 10, as races with 50+ people are also fun. Those numbers could be set by race organizers to have some variation.
depends which forum poster you ask. but a serious answer… the best people to actually ask are the people who do the racing, ingame. they do run the occasional poll. all these long as hell posts in here are just people who do almost as well in CE as i do trying to get their hustle on
It depends on who you ask. You can’t dictate what people should consider a good race; only the racers themselves can answer that, so why not ask them?
It doesn’t matter if you or I think that a wide range of abilities in the same group, where many get dropped early, is fun or fair and leads to more tactical racing if that’s not what people want.
Many approach Zwift racing differently than IRL racing. It doesn’t need to be highly tactical to deliver a very intense 30-minute workout. What matters most is that it’s engaging for as long as possible, leaving you feeling challenged and pushed to your limits.
That’s not the vibe i get at all, reading (the mostly negative) comment towards the new system. Seems like people want a “fair” system in which they are competitive all the time. Where one riders that’s maybe in the wrong category, ruins their whole day. That’s just not going to happen.
My response wasn’t specifically about the new system, but rather a general impression of Zwift racing that happens to align with how I enjoy it.
As for the ZRS system in its current form, I don’t think it will automatically lead to close, competitive races. Instead, we’ll see a broader range of abilities within each group, meaning some riders will dominate others. It’s like putting sprinters, climbers, and all-arounders in the same race and telling them to “have fun”—this mirrors IRL racing when there’s a smaller pool of potensial participants.
Now that Zwift is adopting a similar approach, I expect we’ll see more specialization. In the past, lightweight riders had to carefully select races to stay competitive under CE. But with this new system, I believe there’s too much focus on 30-second and pure power, which shifts the dynamics. Now lightweight riders are blessed with a low power 30 sec, and will get an advantage, since they will be matched with racers of far less abilities. For example, CE D-racers who excel in sprinting will now struggle in races against those with much higher W/kg, making them more like “cannon fodder” in most races.
I just think this has to play out and hopefully it will be very clear what is wrong and what needs to be done with ZRS.
