In this morning’s Zwift Unlocked B race, I noticed the lead pack started harder than usual. Yeah, starts are always challenging for a Diesel like me but I can usually hang without getting into severe oxygen debt. That wasn’t the case today and I discovered why after the race when I looked at the results in Zwiftpower: The top five finishers in the B race, 390-510 ZRS, were all A class racers with ZRS’s well above 600. The winner had a ZRS of 714! The first finisher in B that was correctly penned with 6th place. This is the kind of thing that was supposed to be solved with CE and then ZRS.
It is linked to recent ZRS updates and returning riders whose score decayed - see this thread. They are essentially allowed to race much below their abilities.
If you check the first two in your race, their ZRS is shown as arrow down (as it is from ZRS in their last race) but in fact it went up if you considered the ZRS at the start of your race. That is why they were allowed to enter.
Some of these may be gifted multiple podiums before they are put back where they should be. Sad, but it is what it is…
This is just lovely, another example of ZHQ letting the lower cats pay for their inability to setup fair racing for all. In my race the winner had a ZRS two hundred points higher that should’ve been allowed. Sorry, I don’t see how that rider’s ZRS decayed to the point where it was acceptable to be included in a 390-510 pen. Defies comprehension.
The silence from zwift hq on the impact of the change is very much expected and somehow telling.
Screw the experience of existing paying members for another unneeded or unwarranted change.. It’s a bold plan from a company to take existing customers for granted in this way.
Zwift will never be able to solve all the problems without expensive hardware options which people will just use the excuse they cannot afford to be an actual verified rider anyway. Zwift would have to start running fully verified rider only events, the complete lack of numbers in them will improve your chances of getting a podium finish.
Lets get honest here you don’t even need my ability in electronics to just jump a couple of rider categories. I could creep my way up to Cat A or Cat B from CAT D in a few months or just come in with a whole new account and go straight into being a top CAT A racer overnight.
Its pretty frustrating sure but I then scan the results and look for people in the 50+ that are my weight and then start making direct performance comparisons.
You have to simply take most of the top results with a grain of salt.
One thing that’s never known.. ie. when or if anyone at Zwift ever reads a post that isn’t a “Bug”, “Feature Request", or “Known Issue” thread? Maybe this should be moved to Bugs, and should have every name you can think of that is at Zwift and that sometimes engages in these forums, also tagged on the post, such as @shooj@evan-zwift@Rowdy@Ryy etc..
It would be super nice, but also really valuable, if zwift would clarify what they wanted to achieve with ZRS decay and what they think about the feedback they have received.
The communications when it was introduced indicated this was about removing prestige from riders who don’t race (I’m sure some people see ZRS as something to maximise) but its clear that the impact that people are annoyed about is that it lets strong riders into lower pens after the summer break.
I love zwift, but on racing theyre so lucky they have a sticky population as they consistently make poor decisions (even when a bunch of the community are advising them).
Communication is not one of Zwift’s strongest points. Both directions. They’ve got this forum but it’s not well advertised so we’ve got about 30 people regularly posting in these threads. Really, I think that’s about right. And that’s out of what 100k of subscribers? So unless you post a problem that’s going to affect the subscriber base, you’re not going to be heard.
These racing problems affect about 5% of the base and they’re not the kind of problems that bring things to a halt just the “This isn’t fair” problems. It is quite evident ZHQ doesn’t care about this stuff; we’re just shouting in the wind.
We hardly ever get any response from anyone at ZHQ and it’s not on a regular basis at any rate. Think about the things we complain about on this forum and how often they get addressed. Here’s a good one that’s be asked for many times in the last several years: Please eliminate or give us the ability to eliminate the stupid name tags that block things we really want to see. I’ve never, ever needed or wanted those things and I don’t know anyone that has. Absolutely no response from ZHQ. None.
And that’s how this is going go with the ZRS decay BS…
Thank you for raising this up @Mark_Crane_TOG_G_65y. I’ve shared this at Zwift HQ with the racing development team. If there’s a bug here, we’ll track it as such. Otherwise, I’ll make sure it’s captured as feedback for further improvements to Zwift Racing Score functionality.
Thank you @Rowdy for acknowledging the problem. It’s really not fair to penalize lower pen riders with allowing athletes with much greater power to foul up these events just because they’ve been off the platform for a few months kickin’ ass IRL. Older and/or slower riders want to have good competitive events and the addition of The Big Kids doesn’t make that possible. In the event in question, I knew something was up at the start. And I wasn’t wrong.
I truly hope this is the dawn of a new day here on the forum. I often say hope should not be considered a viable solution but sometimes that’s all we have. Thanks again!
@Ryy you really need to turn decay off for people that are still racing in non-ZRS races. This weekend one of my teammates who is an A+ cat racer was able to join the C pen in a race because he never does ZRS races. Guess who won the race? This is so incredibly unfair for people in lower pens, he should’ve never been allowed to join the C pen.
The amount of money Zwift has spent in ZRS with development hours, fixing bugs and consultant service fees (from the guy who build vELO), It surely would have been enough to buy vELO and use it in the first place.
Maybe what could be more effective, would be to open a Support Ticket instead of just posting in this forum and waiting for a random acknowledgment from Zwift staff.
At least there, they would have to respond the flood of tickets…might even get more visibility internally as their support team probably needs to report to upper management on the amount of tickets and the most brought up issues.
What I don’t get is why higher Cat riders even do this. Who do they think they’re fooling? Just themselves. And where’s the fun for them? The whole point of racing is to test yourself.
Anyone allowed to enter a pen far below their ability should do that so there is good data about how the system is (not) working. They should not paper over its flaws.
Just like every other northern hemisphere autumn, loads of racers are being allowed to invade pens below their ability.
But under ZRS, it’s even worse than Category Enforcement and the old Zwiftpower system, because of the ridiculous decay feature that’s been re-introduced a month or two ago, as well as the ZRS score flaw being 85% of a rider’s true ability set by the 5min seed score.
There are still other fundamental issues with ZRS, but decay and 85% score flaw are making a bad system even worse.
Are any event organisers now using the option of ZRS pen allocation based on a rider’s highest ZRS score in the last 30 days, presuming this custom option is now live?
@Eric-Schlange-ZI do you have plans to implement this 30 days highest ZRS to allocate riders to pens for Tiny Races?
I would say people should do what they want, if they want to go up a pen when not forced to then Zwift would have the data for what people want to do with the system both ways. I mean if everyone naturally wanted to race to their ability Zwift wouldn’t have needed to invest in cat enforcement at all! Turns out that’s not what most people want to do though, seems like a lot of people want to just smash lower categories to pieces
With the pace of ZRS changes (and how they prioritized decay over more meaningful ways to get people into the correct categories quickly) it’s hard to see how they are going to get it to a solid point anytime soon unfortunately.
