I knew that. But not everyone treats every race as a race eventhough they joined it.
I’ll give an example :
If I see a race on a route where I still need the route badge and its only that race in the timeslot I have available, but have raced the day before and have a new planned for the next day I might still join the race to get that route badge, but not treat it as a race so than I would pick Easy or Sweet.
Plenty will be joining the Community Festival races to simply get double XP and/or route badges.
Others might go slow to finish in lower half and drop towards 15% below their seed score, especially if that means a pen demotion, which currently has an awful formula and awful time intervals.
There’s no obligation to race a race event.
In the old days I wouldn’t find myself stuck in Cat 2 for no reason other than doing some stop sign sprints on a lazy Sunday ride.
Dont even think I could manage 35 days of consecutive racing full throttle.
A quartet of Tiny Races leaves me absolutely drained these days and it’s very rare I’ll be able to race/ride anywhere close to that pace until the following Saturday. Since around April, 5min at 3W/Kg is rare, the previous 12 months I had the odd marginal zMAP pen promotion, if my unfrequently calibrated turbo was telling the truth.
Back before long covid hit, I’d often race full effort on Zwift more days than I rode easy.
easy for us to say though… if people didn’t want to feel like they were in it, zwiftpower wouldn’t have been made
when i’m getting old in the distant future i’m gonna appreciate category systems a whole lot more than i do today
In the 350-520 category, there’s a range of riders from A to D going by the old system… I’m sitting at 400, can’t hold the wheels on flat courses and my score went up last race despite being almost last… I get that someone has to be at the back but I can’t even get the illusion of racing… sort it out Zwift…
Providing your seed score (based on 30secs and 10mins power) is under 411, finishing a few Racing Score races right near the back of the field should drop your Racing Score to 15% under your seed score and allow you to enter the 180-350 pen.
For example, you could join Mountain Massif Micro races at 1820 and 1840 BST, both ~3Km long.
Back in the old days, you could just erode your 90 day data into a better VELO and then go nuts on one of those flawed systems like Chasing Tour, where you can outperform your cat and not get upgraded regardless of result/performance.
Tough times in ZRS land.
Intentional sandbagging can never be avoided completely. Punishing people for training on the same platform they race on is stupid.
yeah… it’s Zwift’s job to make you faster… get to work Zwift!
for reference my ZRS is 373, my last race on Tuesday’s ZRL I was able to stay with the front group all the way to the end, finished 21st. The winner’s ZRS is 482, 2nd place 546, 3rd 521.
Upgrades should happen but (usually) aren’t the goal.
Goal is to do well in your race. Why else race?
For most people give or take a few degenerates a race should be challenging.
Amen.
There are quite a few riders on Zwift who never raced irl and come from different sports so there’s a lot of discovering what racing actually is going on atm.
Apart from that some in the community may feel blindsided by being the best to getting smashed. So communication or prep wise that could’ve been done better.
There was a guy who looked just like you about 3 years ago who was regularly doing 3.2wkg for 20 minutes as opposed to the 2.5wkg you’re doing now.
Maybe see if you can find him. He’d be reasonably competitive in your category, I reckon.
i got new game i play now in zwift, giving rider hope to come back to the group , but keep them, 5 sec back for 10km https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMdLE78bUbg&t=124s
Hmm. So I just did a ZRS race ( ZwiftPower - Full Gas Experience - Team INOX), but got WKG even though these were set up as ZRS races.
Can I assume that this race is just misconfigured, or is there any reason to mix WKGs with ZRS?
Is it Inox who used to move racers to a higher pen in the zwiftpower results under Category Enforcement, if you exceeded pen limits?
Presumably you still got Racing Score adjustments based on your pre DQ position?
Your place in hell is assured. 
Did The Guy not put in a big effort to close the gap at any point?!?
Yup, went up 10 points, overall 8 points up from last week with 2 points of degradation.
he did little bit ones, some in the 5w/kg range , but i see that i went to the front at 5