DNF still unavoidable occasionally…Punctures or a mechanical….
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Yee, and on Zwift it can be impossible to distinguish a genuine technical issue (network drop-out) causing a genuine DNF from a deliberately induced technical issue (e.g. turn off wifi or unplug network cable).
At the moment for ZRS there isnt. And since it is not know what Zwift comes up with we just have to wait.
For the zracing.app I think you need to do a percentage of your 90 day values. So zone 2’ing the whole race will not tank your score. But staying with the front group and taking it easy the last kilometer and finishing 25th instead of 4th will.
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I thought ZRL races didnt count towards you race score or has that changed?
They did last week too, but it doesn’t show on the results screen
Until talk becomes action as regards seed score and other Racing Score tweaks, I’m back in Racing Score purgatory, at 85% of my seed score under the current bonkers formula.
The question is, will my seed score lower under the current bonkers formula next week before the talked about formula change and if so, will it lower enough so that 85% seed score drops below the current default pen E threshold of 180?
Racing the current default pen D is a thankless task, I set a new recent best 20mins and improved my recent estimated Lactate Threshold Heart Rate (based on 98% of 20mins) in the Monday 1710 GMT Zmonthly, finishing 113th of 135 in the full results list. Part of small straggling group until I was dropped up the first ramp on forward KOM.
Winner pen D finished in 37mins, me 42min43secs.
Hopefully, when the anti tanking measures are incorporated, the need for a 85% floor will disappear.
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That will very much depend on what bonkers criteria are implemented when deciding if a rider is trying to tank their score.
If the seed score was robust enough, results should speak for themselves without a need for a seed floor.
But without score modifications for different route parcours, a universal score for essentially flat/rolling/hilly/mountain is doomed to failure… Especially when the universal score is being set on an essentially flat route.
That crossed my mind also. The starting point from ZRS is wrong if they calculated it on a flat route.
Lets keep it easy and say we have 3 type of routes on Zwift where we can catagorize the routes:
Flat
Hilly
Mountains
If the starting point for the seed score would be on the Hilly route it would get a lot closer imho than when starting on a flat route. If you start at hilly you can only go down or up one group so the abilities or riders would be closer together.
And not have light riders on flat or sprinters on mountains having to race up/down two.
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Hey Zwifters, here’s our update from last week’s post about upcoming changes to ZRS.
Our simulations and validations are wrapping up on the new seed formula, and we are excited to share more information about what the rollout will look like. Our main goal with updating the seed formula is to improve the accuracy of the starting point that new racers have when first getting started with racing using their Zwift Racing Score. Additionally, since this value is used to calculate a Zwifter’s floor, or minimum score, we also want to ensure that this mechanism will still create a protection from intentionally lowering a score to enter an unfair subgroup.
The rollout will involve applying the new seed formula and then immediately reprocessing historical ZRS race results since the last score reset on Sep 25, 2024. This means the race result history will be rewritten as if everybody had raced with the new seed formula. Because we are taking this approach to reprocess (and not reset), individual racing progress will not be lost.
From our simulations, most Zwifters should expect their score to change. Once the reprocessing is complete, we expect scores to change less than 100 points for a majority of Zwifters. Since one of our main goals of this change was addressing inaccurately seeded racers, some may see scores change even more due to being inaccurately seeded with the old formula. A promising result of our simulations is we expect far fewer Zwifters to be sitting at their floor.
It’s important to note that since everybody’s score is shuffling, a score increase or decrease doesn’t mean racing will be harder or easier. Racing subgroup difficulty will be relative to where others landed, but the main goal here is to ensure the groups feel fun and competitive.
And because everybody’s score is shuffling, we will be revising our standard category ranges in Zwift events starting January. The overall score distribution is not changing drastically though, so we are comfortable releasing the V2 seed formula ahead of that adjustment.
More to come next week as we get the rollout started, including more information about what elements are included in the V2 seed formula and how we developed it!
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I happened to be in that race, near the top because I jump back and forth between D & C. I usually last a couple of races in C before I get dropped back down, so I get both experiences.
I don’t see how adjust seed scoring and tweaks to the algorithm is going to make any dramatic changes. It feels like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. The range in abilities in a given pen is just too large and no amount of tweaking will fix that.
I really don’t understand why Zwift doesn’t at least trial adding more pens for the highly attended races. I get that implementing dynamic pens or adding another pen would require development work.
But right now all they need to do is create 2 events with different score ranges. There’s clearly enough people doing the ZRacing events (Looking at the history for the past 2 days, theres maybe 3 timeslots that can’t support more pens)
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That won’t work until the seed scores are fixed, right now there is a huge spread in ability of riders at the same score. No number of pens can fix that.
We currently have both more pens than CE, and a higher spread of ability in each pen.
Presumably this seed score adjustment will tighten the ability range at any given score, and the flow on from that is the lowest ability bottom of pen rider will much closer to the highest ability top of pen rider.
Maybe more pens will be needed too, but fixing the seed is needed first.
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You might be right that there is a higher spread of ability in each pen, or that there may be too many outliers with the way the 30s power counts, I don’t have any statistics. However, if I look at the race linked above, it’s mostly 300’s at the front of the race, with scores lower as you get to the back so it’s not like it’s completely out to lunch.
If that race had been split into 2 groups, it would have been a much better experience for the people at the lower end. And there was 135 people in the race, so it seems like a pure win overall.
There’s only 5 pens now, and if you assume that the top pen will have people nearing 6w/kg, and beginners are <2w/kg, a given pen will have a 1w/kg spread which is too much. And that’s assuming racing score correlates to FTP, so the spread in a given pen will be even larger. (And would be for any other metric, eg. 2 minute power)
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No, the people on the lower end would be on the lower end again. There would be three more podiums - but one more lower end, too…
I understand you, my situation was the same for the last 5 years - lower end C.
But it is how it is - somebody wins, somebody loses.
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Random idea that I don’t think has been brought up before…
Bonus points for the podium or even top ten, depending on field size, become a fixed addition to the seed score for “x” number of weeks?
For example, my current seed is ~266 and I’m at my 85% floor of 223. I get third somehow in Tiny Race this weekend, giving me 5 podium bonus points.
My 85% floor now becomes 228 for four weeks.
Obviously the person who came last would still struggled, but there’s a huge chunk in the middle who would have had a better time.
There’s another issue with large races too, in that the accordion effect on climbs really splits the groups quite badly on it’s own. If you’re too far back the back at the base of a climb in a group of >100, you might as well just say goodbye unless you’re one of the strongest people there and ready for a major effort. I would be surprised if people on average thought that a >100person race is more fun than a <50 person race.
Long term I much prefer dynamic pens so that it’s not always the same people who are at the top of a pen, but I understand that comes with a development cost whereas just creating more pens can be done now.
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I think you also need a mechanism to lock a rider into a category upgrade for a fixed amount of time, you shouldn’t be able to drop down almost immediately after an upgrade. E.g. that becomes your new scoring floor for a month, 3 months, something along those lines.
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Races using the ZRapp categories can be set up to use the 30-day or 90-day maximum value, so while the score can drop as it should for poor results, the player is still locked in a higher pen.
A similar system with ZRS would be great though I think it’s better done as part of the event set up rather than artificially locking scores at various levels.
It could still be manipulated by allowing your score to drop if you’re getting too close to a boundary, but no one anti-tanking method will ever be perfect.
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I wish the scores (incl. podium points) were scaled depending on the size of the field.
Now in a race with just 8 participants you can get a huge bump in your ZRS - even if the other riders don’t have any particularly high ZRS.
I think I read in the FAQ that the scoring depends on the field size but it doesn’t look like it, in that case it has been turned upside down (higher ZRS bump if the field is small).
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You should consider evaluating the existing zFTP formula (w/kg) and apply a filter to not disadvantage lighter riders. You can scale to 0-1000 as you wish.
Then, the seed scores would be similar to what we used in CE but added the ability to be promoted to higher pen (for high end riders, this would be my case) and down a pen (for low end). Isn’t that what the community asked for?
I would much rather race in CE-B than ZRS-B as a CE-C rider.
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