Zpower is capped at 1200w. He is on a dumb trainer.
Not sure if that was a response/accusation to me or not, but I have yet to intentionally tank a race to drop my racing score. I did the first “live” racing score Tiny Races at the end of September (in a pen full of undercategorized A&B racers). My first-ever tiny races and I went all out (1.1 IF) in the first race to try for a good finish and ended up 34/51. Learned a lesson about conserving energy for the remaining races, but I still put out what I had for the remaining 3 races. Originally expected I’d go up, but ended up with a healthy drop in RS. Due to ZRL my next two RS races were last week. I did well because they were short flat @55 races that suit me well. Score went up. Most recent RS race was this morning. I had to work but I was able to stay in the main pack until the base of the Petit KOM and was quickly left behind. I worked just hard enough to not get passed by the guy behind me and finished 22/30 for another moderate drop in racing score. So I guess if you want to consider it tanking to occasionally choose a race in which I know I’m not likely to do well (i.e., it has a 5+minute climb), I suppose that makes me a tanker.
But on the flip side, without my score being inflated by my non-racing 30s power I’d be much lower anyway. I don’t dispute that I’m in the correct pen, but no way I’m floating near the top of the pen in anything but a completely flat race.
Is this real? Power cap is capped at 2000 watts. How they go above?
I don’t know how they (2nd image) evaded the cap but they set most of those PRs on the ZWS community ride at the weekend.
These are both on “smart trainers” that have been manipulated/badly maintained, so I’m not sure if the cap applies.
Ah okay but Zpower is excluded from 99% if not all races so why does he score at all? That apart from his average heartrate of just over 100 and a max of 120 with high power rates. I think this should be recognised by Zwift and propriarate measures taken.
The scores are based on Zwift results and are “reflected” onto Zwift Power site. Zwiftpower doesn’t include data for a decent portion of the user base so this is the only way. Exclusions and DQs only happen on zwift power, so they are listed in results on Zwift. (Even for obvious things like “HR Required” or “no zpower” races).
If you can get to enter it, you get to score.
There are quite a lot of “runs out of resistance” devices that now show as a power source (not zpower) because of things like the QZ app. This also gets around the device requirement.
Okay thanx
Or has a moped on his Kickr!?
I am extremely frustrated by the new Racing Score. As a C rider I get creamed by B’s and A’s every race now - not standing a chance. Eventhough CE apparently is applied, my racing experience is that there is free access for all categories - even to alledgedly CE’ed races. Excample: Yesterday I raced DBR Pulsure Cup and placed 102nd out of app 160 participants with an avg of 2,9 w/kg for the race and 3,1 w/kg for 20 minutes. The majority of riders in front of me were B’s. I did not experience this last fall when I returned to Zwift and I find that Zwift has got this backwards. I suggest that rider avatars should maintain their fitness level from the previous event - regardless whether that event was 1, 2, 3 or even 7 months ago. As their actual, recorded fitness level declines they can then become eligible to race in the lower categories.
Doubt it makes you feel any better; but I think the changes to include effort checks will help dramatically.
The person who won your event yesterday has a monster 1300+ w sprint; and has been sandbagging all year long (or got a trainer that’s more accurate than whatever they were on at the start of the year). After apparently losing ~60w from their 20 minute high back in March, and almost 100w from their 5 minute power earlier in the year.
But even looking at their ZRApp results pages, they essentially have only done 2 90% effort events (your race yesterday, and one at the start of October), as far back as ZRA shows…
Long story short though, that person used to be a Top Cat B rider through the start of the year.
This again is why the request for a full year lookback should be a thing.
Reality is, there will never be a fix for these outliers who cruise or have had an injury and don’t put in an effort until one specific instance; which … is somewhat what this case was.
Looking at the top 3 for your race, this was actually the case for the whole podium; all 3 returning from not riding all summer, and are down massively from spring power according to ZP.
All 3 have massively weird power profiles too, where they’re super strong 1 minute’s, but abnormally low 5+ minutes.
Having outliers are just normal when the population is large enough. Just like someone ends up being 7’ tall and someone else have dwarfism.
Point being; the changes coming are good.
However, further lookback should still be a priority for ZRS.
90 days will never be enough, and will always cause this post summer whiplash that is unnecessary.
Thank you for continuing to work on this, and for explaining more about how things function with ZRS. Great update.
By the way, did you get a refund from those Phd data scientists who anylized everything and came up with a calculation that after three months have been completly trashed or reworked ?
No refunds on professional services.
ZHQ could’ve saved a bunch of time and money if they had discussed development with the users, or employed anyone who actually uses the platform.
True, but that’s a very poor comparison, and I doubt that anyone is 7’ tall through some trivial cheating …
If there is a race with truly one entrant, the ZRS displayed on the companion app appears to be the seed score. It does not update to Zpower as your ZRS. There is no arrow and no underline.
Edge cases happen!
You have to be a little careful, though. You never know the motivation of the people giving advice. Plenty of people want to be in a lower category to dominate (as demonstrated by the comments on this forum). Trusting the community to design a fair system for the majority of users (rather than just themselves) doesn’t seem entirely possible.
It would have been a good exercise for team managers of racing and event-managing teams.
Yes, you have to make sure you’re not building in bias but I think you can still logically agree a goal that will deliver better racing, not just an advantage to one group or another.
Under the wkg categories, the heavy riders have a big advantage - that’s me so I had an incentive to want to keep the old system but honestly, I don’t.
I want to see a better system in place that lets everyone be competitive so that racing score largely reflects ability in average races - results should be close to a descending order of ZRS.
Heavy riders should be slightly more competitive in really flat races and light riders on hilly ones but on average a rider at the top of a category should be competitive and close to the front.
The implementation up to now doesn’t do that (heavy riders are now disadvantaged on most courses, in part because of the 30s scores presumably but any climb beyond a very short one means the heavies will be dropped so it doesn’t matter how good their sprint is) so hopefully the latest tweaks will help move towards that.