ZwiftPower Update [March 2021]

Racing ZwiftPower Community
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Hi everyone,

We wanted to give you an update on ZwiftPower which will - hopefully - address some concerns and answer some questions you may have around the site.

First and foremost, I want to personally say thank you to every one of you who has helped us identify issues by providing links to races, writing into us with log files, screenshots, or any information around the issues you saw with a particular aspect of ZwiftPower. It’s immensely helpful and the power of you all as a competitive community within the community of Zwift is something I never fail to appreciate. Thank you!

ZwiftPower is an incredible tool that was built when Zwift was a very young and much smaller product than it is today. It filled gaps in the competitive landscape of Zwift which it still continues to fill today. Competition on Zwift has been given nuance and depth because of ZwiftPower, and the issues with the site in the last months have demanded equal nuance and depth in their solutions and subsequent implementation. The biggest issues as I see them for you all as Zwift racers are:

  • Live Data and WTRL Events: Perhaps the most frustrating part of the user experience with ZwiftPower the last few weeks, both for you as racers and for us here at Zwift and WTRL. The solution for getting live data up and running in the way we all know it has proven to be elusive, and we’re continuing working on it now.
  • The state and health of ZwiftPower: Since Zwiftpower moved under the Zwift umbrella, we have seen a number of posts believing this to be the end. Let me assure you now, this is certainly not the case. From a personal standpoint I can tell you that the discussions around ZwiftPower are as numerous as they are intricate.
  • “We’re working on it”: Perhaps one of the more frustrating statements to hear from a user perspective. When I say - and have said - that we’re working on it, it is never meant to simply brush people off in the hope it buys us time. Ultimately ZwiftPower has proven to require more work than first anticipated and I hope to unpick some of that for you below.

More and more Zwifters are engaging with ZwiftPower through things like larger GCs, community interest in racing, and of course the great events run by community organizations like WTRL. The success of the Zwift Racing League is fantastic to see but it’s placed immense strain on ZwiftPower. ZwiftPower was first built as a community tool when Zwift was much smaller than it is today and put simply, it can no longer cope with the increased loads now being placed through its system.

Fixes in the past used to come quickly, and this was fantastic from a user perspective. These days however, quick fixes are no longer possible because they cannot scale fast enough. We have now put in place measures that we believe will help in the short term but instead of focusing on patch fixes, we are now unpicking the fabric of ZwiftPower to rebuild it in a way that can handle this increased load in the future.

With the success of events like the Zwift Racing League, Zwift Duathlon League and the WTRL TTT Series, I understand there has been increased frustration within the community racing scene - unable to track races or get results in a timely manner. We’ve been working closely with Martin at WTRL and believe we have found a solution to make these events run seamlessly in the future. I will post an update on this matter in a separate thread as soon as we have confirmed the timings.

From a user standpoint, I understand your comments throughout the forums completely. Were I in your position, I’d likely be asking the same things.

We’re aware that the changes you’ve seen in ZwiftPower in the last few months have been a stark contrast to how ZwiftPower used to be, and we’re not asking you to ignore that. What I want to try to convey by saying all of this is that there is so much more going on at Zwift when it comes to ZwiftPower, the details of which I will continue to communicate as they unfold. We’re a small and passionate team that work on ZwiftPower here and I hope you hear me when I say we’ve not simply picked up ZwiftPower and hidden it in the back closet to one day be forgotten. It is an important platform to support racing and it will be improved, which I will keep sharing with you as I’ve been doing.

Ride On.

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A good start here, Flint. I would strongly suggest keeping this updated much more regularly than we’ve seen with these things in the past.

Please keep in mind that the posters on this forum are a very, very small subset of Zwift users and if you’re seeing lots of posts complaining about how things are going it is a very small fraction of frustrated Zwifters out there. Nearly all of the Zwifters I know, don’t come on here (most of those aren’t even aware of the forum) but they’ve expressed the same frustrations you’re reading here.

Ride On…

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Thanks for keeping us informed. Communication is essential toward building a better relationship. I hope the team will prioritize gc events. The Tour de Zwift was lacking significance without a final gc board. More true race events for non-pro Zwifters will be greatly appreciated by all.

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@xflintx many thanks for the reply.

Given the ongoing issues with live data has there been any consideration to excluding live race data from the calculation of race categories on Zwiftpower. As I understand it, the live data is not necessarily accurate however a large number of results for many riders have not had their FIT files processed after many days of waiting, so categories are being skewed by often incorrect live data.

Given major events such as WTRL strictly control race entry based on Zwiftpower categories, this could cause a large number of riders in the wrong category as we head into season 3.

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This is appreciated @xflintx
Apart from Zwiftpower, will you guys be able to communicate a bit more about the direction of racing on Zwift as a whole?
I’ve just finished my first WTRL season, and loved it - lots of that is because of the team aspect of it. But Zwift HQ really need to up their game with more development and innovation. WTRL have done a brilliant job in spite of the (lack of) support from Zwift.
If they gave them just a few more tools, WTRL could really bring it on to the next level. Off the top of my head, sprint competitions, climbing competitions, proper TTT start pens, better group chat, team power ups, elimination races etc. etc. would be so cool.
I’m not as bothered anymore in the short term, as the clocks change in the UK in 4 weeks, so I’ll likely be outside a lot more, but it would be great to hear about what is in the road map for the next Autumn / Winter season.

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@xflintx another issues here events.php?zid=1830804
Live data info totally bugged.

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Here’s an update on the live data missing:

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The entire site is unusable this morning, it’s so slow.

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Without doubt and of course any but a casual observer would be able to apply the same conclusion to zwift itself . So I trust that the same honesty is being applied across the entire platform. And the real question which of course you cant answer and we would not expect you to but are the business prepared to properly invest in this and the other technical aspects olf the offering , dare I say it at the expense of marketing and other things. When Zwift is clearly struggling with scale trying to attract more users to the platform would appear short sighted at best . Time and results will allow us to answer that ourselves.

You have started this conversation well and have our support and ear , but hope it is followed up with some idea of how and where you want to take this . It is very easy to blame the tools (especially if it can be pinned on someone else ) , which may well have scaling issues as you say . But what Zwiftpower had was a direction and a vision . Where is the vision for the product now that zwift has taken it over . Without that your good words are at the moment just that .

Please consider to share the vision so we continue to support you .

The one thing I would hope is that at least better integration is pimarly and that rather than try and adapt zwiftpower to the equally broken zwift platform that is creaking on scale and grinding to a halt in terms of real velocity in providing user features you can equally help others adopt the vision , alongside a more clear and joined up vision on zwift itself is long overdue as a to do so in a way that starts to address increasing issues of coherence , scale , reliabililty and velocity of change and improvement,

There is a reason that WTRL who you mention are successul and are bringing users to the platform , after all they also have had technical and scaling issues too but the community dont given them that much of a hard time , in fact the actually rally round them (which was the case before with Zwiftpower) . Simple answer , its that word again vision that we buy into, IMO you could do worse that think on that and perhaps in the next update provide us some basic insight into where zwift is trying to go with all this.

Great , problem stated and many will agree it summarises and shares our current frustrations with Zwift (and thus Zwftpower which is now part of Zwift) , and I am sure there are many here that hope that honesty and approach rubs off across all the product teams at Zwift HQ .

:pray: Good luck , we are rooting for you and your team .

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Hello: Hope this is a good place to post this. I did the Zwift Duathlon League | WTRL - Opt 2 Run (8:45am March 10th). My result has shown up everywhere except in the event results page and my ZwiftPower main profile page. On examination I’ve found ZP has tagged my race as an ‘Activity’ (not an event/race). No biggie, but I’m curious why this happened?

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You are in the event’s non-finishers list (Live results) along with 120 fellow runners (yeah, bizarre!). I’d suggest you send an email off to race control @ WTRL as this has been a problem with many of these Duathlon events and they indicated in the recent past that they can adjust their records.

I’d also send an email off to zwiftpower@zwift.com

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Just a bump to make sure that Zwift doesnt forget to fix this issue. Months later is data/fit files are still being missed. WTRL S3 results are missing most riders data in APAC A div1. The live stream on YouTube also lost live data/results.

Personally I have lost a number of races, often with PB 20mins (including last nights TTT). Given that we are ranked off this, it is more than annoying. WTRL apparently analysed riders last 4 week data, then ranked the teams for the Divisions. Hopefully they didnt use Zwiftpower, as their data is fundamentally flawed.

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Just a (yet another) update to say that ZwiftPower is STILL not properly processing FIT files and displaying accurate power data since Monday’s ‘updates/maintenance’
Example being events.php?zid=1977765 (P.S. Bit stupid that we can’t put the link for the event!) which was one of the Zwift Racing League events last night, where it looks like only about 20% of riders have had their ride data correctly processed!

Have Zwift identified with 100% certainty whether the Live Data functionality and snapshot is or is not part of the root cause of the FIT Files not being processed properly? And if this has not been determined can you explain why more than 6-months after we started getting these issues you’ve still seen fit to not simply completely disable the Live Data process so as to live test and confirm one way or the other whether (once Live Data is taken out of the processing equation) the fit files are then all processed properly (or not) - Surely it should’ve been one of the first things you identified as part of any sensible basic trouble-shooting and testing process “Does this function and associated code being removed from live site processes result in the issues being resolved, or not”. I mean, I work as a tester for a tiny software company with nowhere near the resources of Zwift and that would be top of our list in this situation, I’m baffled why no such approach has been taken by Zwift!!

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I am also having this issue now: none of my fit files from the past 2 weeks processing (though they are set to public and are in the activities page with fit file able to be downloaded). Just adding comment hopefully to get traction on a solution.

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