Why should i want this inside a game? Why would someone love micromanaging things when it comes down to raw power output why should someone being forced to steer or whatever?
Besides implementing a velodrome currently doesn’t do much.
Why? The drafting inside Zwift is still far from real life.
Although FTP / W/kg is equal … IRL:
When pushing 4 W/kg @ 80 kg (320 W) IRL with a 60 kg rider @ my rear wheel pushing 240 W (4 W/kg) will loose my wheel after ~20 min
When pushing 5 W/kg @ 80 kg (400 W) IRL with a 60 kg rider @ my rear wheel pushing 300 W (5 W/kg) will loose my wheel after ~10 min
When pushing 6 W/kg @ 80 kg (480 W) IRL with a 60 kg rider @ my rear wheel pushing 360 W (6 W/kg) will loose my wheel after ~3 to 5 min
When pushing 7 W/kg @ 80 kg (560 W) IRL with a 60 kg rider @ my rear wheel pushing 420 W (7 W/kg) will loose my wheel after ~1 to 2 min.
In all cases the heavier rider will win (FTP / W/kg is equal). Even when creating the tip of the drafting pack (peloton) if high wattage is online the lighter rider are forced more and more and will loose very soon. Not in Zwift.
This is what you can see currently. Most if not all races are equal. Pushing hard @ the climbs far beyond 6 w/kg and push 3 to max. 4 W/kg in the Flat. All riders chill - light and heavy riders. No difference. The drafting bonus inside a pack is sooo huge (even behind a rider it’s juge already) that it doesnt make any fun anymore. Its just alot easier for a 60 kg athlet to come up to 5 - 6W FTP compared to a 80 kg athlet who is been forced to maintain around 400 to 480 w/kg FTP because everything comes down to W/kg even in the flat. When pushing around 450 W @ 80 kg in the flat light riders will fly off your wheels extremly fast … a few minutes and your alone. A rider around 60 kg must push around 360 even more to stay behind the wheel i guess even more and groups split like crazy.
The point is mass always wins when FTP is equal in the flat IRL!
Most if not all one day classics are won by heavy riders around 70 to 80 kg! Ask yourself why …
In Zwift its different its far from real! It’s a joke!
When creating a game and push it more and more into a simulation everything must be as perfect as possible. The Key in cycling is to draft as good as possible. A good team with heavier riders can still win when pushing hard in the flats to make ligher guys fly off their wheels. You can see this often times in the eraly Tour de France races when EPO wasn’t available.
In Zwift it’s still not as easy as compared to IRL physics. I don’t why? Why voting for a velodrom world when drafting still is off!
Zwift staff please if their is only one update i could vote for i would always go for the most IRL physics possible inside this game close to a genius source code which allows for easy implementation of any kind of idea/request. Keep it up!
true.
Is it accurate to release updates with even more or equal bugs than before?
Is it accurate to give lighter riders no handicaps in the flats or in other words is it accurate to use the ‘w/kg model’ without limitation in the flat?
The second is ill-founded I believe. Lighter riders would tend to have a smaller frontal area, and lower drag coefficient. At the same power, they would ride at the same speed or faster than larger riders on the flat.
Besides, I don’t believe Zwift only takes W/kg into account. They do use height and weight to vary drag coefficient as I understand it. ZwiftInsider tests bear this out.
Well i made a dozen test with friends of mine and on outdoor velodroms. But if you say so look how much the winners of Paris Roubaix weight in the last decades …
Isn’t this pretty much how it works in the real world as well, especially if you’re last in the sprinters’ lane and simply can’t believe that everybody to your right managed to squeeze further ahead by the finish line, hence the need for the blinkenlights devices on the handlebars in UCI races?
The difference between Zwift and IRL, though, is that IRL everyone sees the same thing. You may not think those folks have time to pass you before the line, but if they do it is there for all the world to see. In Zwift, however, you may appear to be the last person across the line (as seen on your screen) but NOT actually be the last person across the line (from the game’s perspective). I’ve seen numerous instances in Zwift where the person who wins the race visually actually gets placed 2nd or 3rd because what is displayed is not what’s actually happening.
I don’t know if I’d say ‘bug’ as much as it being due to differences in the processing power of the device on which each user is running Zwift and the distance of each user from the Zwift servers.
Well i encountered a serious problem with powermeter data transfer.
Each time i push into the pedals the information on ‘how much power has been produced’ takes ~4 s long.
So in a Sprint finish you have to bypass the delay of 4 s! But how?
Match this with the inproper pictures you get (details see here):
you have probably even more delay in order to react to an attack situation if you overlay both data transfer delay as well as the inconsistencies what is person A and what is person B seeing.
“Everyone seeing the same thing” isn’t really how perception works, especially at high speed and/or in the heat of the moment (I’d give some references to the psychology of eyewitness testimony but I don’t like explaining my quips to death )
Sure, better real-time position tracking would definitely be nice to have, but pushing for the finish line as hard as you can and trusting the results wouldn’t be a total non-starter at least for me, either. There are some obvious technical constraints (network latency etc.) that may be limiters.
For me personally, the most interesting events would be ones where steering would definitely have to be a factor (scratch, points race, maybe even match sprint). As for the TT events, a step one easiest to implement would be just flat timed segments closer to the kilo and pursuit in length (think Fuego Flats reverse but shorter).
The latency you are seeing with the power may just be due to your display being set up to show 3-second average power, as opposed to instantaneous power. Check your settings for this.
This is true enough, but it’s a problem that Zwift are no doubt very aware of. The game wasn’t produced from the ground up with esports in mind; indeed, I don’t think they ever envisaged it. The community kinda forced racing on Zwift by us going ahead and doing it anyway.
We already know that what I see isn’t what you see. I think maybe they’ve unified day/night phases now, but we don’t see the same people on screen, doing the same thing, or even in the same place necessarily. This was particularly noticeable to me at a Wahoo/Zwift event last year where there were three Zwift stations set up besides each other. The views on each screen didn’t completely tie up with each other.
This is all acceptable for casual riding, group rides etc.
But for it to be taken seriously in racing, these issues need to be addressed I’d say.
With facilities closed, many of us track riders are not able to train on a velodrome during this time. It would be great to consider a velodrome - would be great to have a virtual ride around some popular velodromes across the world and maybe host some races. I know it’s us just riding in circles, but for some of us we could get some good specific training and racing in and it would give more exposure to the track cycling world. Would be a cool feature!
Would a Velo introduction potentially open the door for an option to select custom gear ratios for fixed gear Zwift riders?
eg; the ability to toggle on your IRL gearing ratios [48x16, 50x15, etc.] I feel this would create a more realistic “ride” since fixed gear bike’s cadence is directly related to wheel rpm / speed on a track bike…
Either way…still incredibly happy with my Zwift experience thus far!
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