Ah, but fast is fun so they say and “as long as it doesn’t affect me” is the other regular retort.
What can be done is to put a flag in the rider list beside riders who have dropped more than 5kg in a single day:
Eg; -11kg Rider.Name
That shows exactly how much the rider weight had changed. It won’t stop the folks who are permanently lighter than IRL but it will deter other weight dopers.
So you could see the club leader who has mysteriously gone from regular 87-89kg down to ~60kg to do ADZ in 49 minutes. Not all the altitude training in the world will do that, despite his Strava boast…
It depends on definition. Sandbagging means manipulating the system so that the automatic calculations classify you in the category below your true abilities. Entering a series that the organiser tells you that you have to be honest about your numbers, it’s just cheating without getting caught. Lots of race series and organisers ask you not to do that.
The annoying thing is, none of this is rocket science. It could and was all noted during the V1 summer live testing and Zwift chose to ignore feedback and went ahead with the live release anyway. They were very arrogant in their responses, going as far as patronising their paying customers by saying they knew what they were doing as they had PHDs on it (implying we were not smart enough and shouldn’t question them).
Had they left ZRS in a ‘Beta’ mode and not forced it live for al racing then the community may have been more forgiving, but their arrogance really has annoyed a lot of people.
Well, had they just implemented pen enforcement years ago, that would have improved things while they figured out the next step.
Getting away from 20 min calculation for FTP and adopting a critical power curve was a bit of a detour but still a modest improvement but still showed they were anchored to grouping by power but it did make sand bagging harder but made no sense why setting a new 30 PB would lower your cat.
Results is so welcomed but system will need tweaks.
People also need to realize racing is going to be harder and people may not be able to race 3+ races per week and all that "I’m coming back from injury,illness etc is OVER!!
Could you than please tell me where it says in the rules that in every race you have to reach your top power values.
Cheating is against the rules. Guess we all agree on that one. Entering a pen which Zwift tells us is ok to join is not cheating. The system might be broken, but it is not cheating.
It’s not on the “cheaters”. They are just playing it smart. The problem is they play it in a way we think turns Zwift into a game rather than a sport. And if you race it as a sport and meet people gaming it instead, we feel cheated. Hence why the system needs to prevent things we don’t like.
Personally, I definitely think Zwift should be sports like and that effort should be rewarded. Between two racers, equal in every respect (included tactical sense), where one puts in a hard effort and the other doesn’t, then the one putting in the hard effort deserves to win. That’s the ethics of sports. Any system that promotes the racer who puts in a lower effort against equal opponents is unsportslike and thus undesireable.*
*) “Explaining” differences in effort with so-called “smart drafting” is just BS and beside the point, it’s not what we are talking about here.
We should remember also that all this ZRS drama is a year long by now. Remember, a year ago, they’ve promised to roll it out Jan 2024. That never happened and in Feb 2024 the Team working on ZRS got sacked. Then they went radio silence for about 5 month and then in to beta testing in August 2024.
At this moment it really doesn’t matter if Zwift doesn’t know, doesn’t want or can not make it work. The result is the same…
If anything, I can do my iTT races in free programs
Then the racing crowd starts saying “allow e-bikes” and “as long as not in races” and that tarnishes the entire reputation of Zwift.
It just makes it out as the platform of people cheating. So often when you see someone smashing 7-8w/kg, you look and see they have no heart rate, suspiciously stable cadence, or they are having a walk in the park with 120bpm, or the other example, riding effortlessly for hours at 160rpm cadence. Or you see the numerous sub-40min ADZ laps, very few of them are actually genuine.
It’s a nice change when a pro rider is coming along, you can see they are at least real with their performance.
Winning the race is not about doing more power, it’s about finishing ahead of them. If you are good at drafting you might need to out power them at any phase of the race, Just saving an Aero might allow you to over take them in the last 15s doing less power.
We don’t need them to have PHDs, the system doesn’t pass the simplest test. You run a few sims and notice the point gains for big field is less than small field, you know that is a bug. Why would it take 3 versions and a simple bug like that doesn’t get ironed out. It isn’t a hidden bug, people mentioned it all over the place.
30s power. Literally took months before they changed it.
Then they spent weeks figuring out how to improve the broken system. So they removed the 30s power and called it v2.
Which was also an epic failure, so they gave up and copy ZR.app version. This is like knowing you suck doing your job and copy someone’s else work at the last minute and call it your own.
So what did Zwift pay you guys to do the last year if you going to just copy ZR.app after 1 year?
I also said (which is missing form the quote) “It depends on definition” of the word “cheating”. A cursory (or deeper, if you like) search shows that more often than not “cheating” is defined as breaking both explicit rules but also exploiting loopholes and going against the spirt of the game. At best, gaming the rules is a grey area.
The power based system was indeed broken but there is dividing line between coming back from a summer zwift break and smashing a few races before ending in the right category from carefully monitoring power curves, live in a race, to avoid levelling up. Those that do this, know very well what they are doing.
Are they cheaters? I said, depends on the definition one choses to use and the expectations of the group they are entering.
That could easily be soilved by Zwift if they check on a HRM before the start of a race just as they do with a PM. Suggested that lots of times, but they still refuse which I find weird. When a HRM is mandatory you should enforce that.
This is where it goes wrong a lot. Riders expect to be competative all the time, when they simply can not. When you just get promoted to a new group you should lose a lot otherwise it is wrong also if you can compete right away.
When I got promoted from D to C in the CE system I was shocked how fast they went in C and got dropped every race. After a while and with hard work I got better and after even more time of dedication and training I ended up at the top of C. Now with ZRS I am at the bottom again and am once again trying to improve to have better races.
I feel like the sandbagger card is drawn way too soon in a lot of cases. People can improve themselves also, but it looks like they want the easy ride to wins and demand the system to be changed instead of putting in an effort and get better themself.
