ZwiftPower upgrades should be closer to permanent, not 90 days

I absolutely love ZwiftPower and use it daily. It’s one of the best things about Zwift racing, and I love the ZPoints system and other ways of extending the meta-competitions beyond just one individual race. But since the rise of things like Tiny Race (which I also love!) it’s really common to see cat A-B riders not having enough populated 20 minute data in the last 90 days to get accurately sorted into ZwiftPower cats. The #1 ranked cat D in ZPoints, for example, is an awesome cat A rider who is simply too busy to ride 20+ minute races while he focuses on outdoor races. This is no fault of his own! He chooses to race in cat A in the shorter races, but ZwiftPower still has him as a cat D, which messes up the legitimacy of the ranking systems for the other leaderboards.

Is there any way that these could be modified? Perhaps, if you’ve ever previously upgraded two full cats above, you are permanently listed within 1 cat of your best. ie: Cat A riders with no recent 90 day data are displayed now as cat B riders on ZwiftPower, rather than cat D. Cat B riders with no recent 90 day data are displayed now as cat C, and so on. This still leaves room for potential flaws, but would be far closer to accurate overall, and would still properly account for riders who legitimately have gone through either a huge change in fitness and/or body size that places their new w/kg in a lower category where they are right to be competing now.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. I’m unsure who handles the ZwiftPower end of these things specifically or if this is even the right discussion place, but I just wanted to put this out there!

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Tiny Races use Category Enforcement system (CE) for cats, not ZP’s 95% of 20min/top3. CE looks at a riders best performances (from all rides) over the 2min - 50min power curve for past 60 days. So quite different to the 90day/95%/20min ZP cats. You don’t get to see other riders Cat’s like you do in ZP but riders can only enter a Cat they are entitled to race in.

The anomaly at play here is that ZP ranking system has been outgrown by organisers innovation to offer unique race events - Tiny Races are a good example of this but plenty of other examples around.

Zwift are building a new ranking system so you wont see any material changes to ZP.

Correct, but since we do still have the ZPoints rankings on ZwiftPower, don’t you think it would make sense to apply some kind of restriction to that? It seems odd that the #1 cat D rider would actually be a cat A, haha :slight_smile:

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Yep, it’s odd but the ZP ranking system has been broken for a long time and the more novel races like these really highlight the need to get the new ranking system in place asap.

I long gave up on ranking due to how easily it is gamed so I would rather dev efforts went into finishing the new system.

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I agree with your OP and liked your post.

ZP does not deal with category calculation well and those riders doing only short races do get assigned a very low category. Luckily CE knows their shorter duration power and calculates their category accordingly. The rider who is ranked number one D cat racer in ZP has gained his ranking based on racing in short races in Cat B and mostly A races. This does mess up the ranking of other leaderboards as you say.

I notice that you are in fact No. 2 ranked D racer although this may of course have absolutely nothing to do with why you raise the issue.

Ranking systems (and therefore leaderboards) work best when racers of similar ability race against each other. Ranking systems (and in particular the ZP ranking) don’t work so well when somebody races well out of their ability. In fact in ZP ranking system I have noticed that as a low cat rider you almost can’t fail to achieve a ranking gain if you race in Cat A races.

I wonder whether selecting appropriate A cat races, as a D cat racer, doesn’t also mess up the legitamacy of the ranking systems for the other leaderboards?

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