George's Weblog

With the cold and snow here in Philly I've been doing plenty of riding on Zwift lately. When I started out using Zwift I was very content to ride solo especially during the beta phase when it was more difficult to match the pace of other riders and drafting didn't work very well. These days it's not uncommon to see several hundred people riding around Watopia at any time of day or night. You can easily find someone who is putting out about the same power as you are and usually other riders welcome the company.

I've also tried a few "group" rides on Zwift. Basically you show up at the start/finish banner, don the recommended jersey (not all riders do this), add some letters to your name to identify yourself as a member of the group (again, not all do it), and wait for the leader to start sending group texts so everyone starts at the same time and maintains the correct pace.

While it's kind of fun to see myself riding along in a big pack of riders reminiscent of past season road racing, there are some challenges with group riding on Zwift. I'm sure these challenges have not gone unnoticed by Zwift development staffers and I'm hopeful that they will give them the excellent attention that they have also devoted to other features within the app. Meanwhile, here is a view from my perspective:

Identification - It's somewhat difficult to discern who you are supposed to be riding with. As a workaround ride leaders have requested donning a particular jersey or adding certain letters to your display name as a way to indicate that you are on that group ride. Not an ideal solution. Some people just don't do it and can't say I blame them much because at the very least it's inconvenient to have to go clicking through screens in the app setup. The jersey idea is a good one if it could be quicker and easier to do. If not a specific jersey for a ride, perhaps a bib instead? That would be really cool. 

As far as adding letters to your name, I think that is a bit of a hack. A more sophisticated way to present the names in the right-hand pane would be to use a unique background color for riders in your group or something along those lines.  I'd also like to see the ability to do some filtering in the user pane so that only your group riders would show up perhaps. Watching the names on the rider list flip around while waiting for riders to catch up or a ride to start is bound to give me A.D.D. eventually. And it would also be nice to have a keystroke that would return my view to myself easily instead of having to find myself in the list and click.

Communication - Although I consider myself to be a descent multi-tasker, I find it difficult to type and bike even with my new Wahoo Fitness Desk. I have heard some folks comment on speech-to-text apps, haven't tried those yet but at least that would keep your hands on the handlebars more of the time and less sweat dripping down into the keyboard. TeamSpeak seems like a good approach and is certainly more natural. Only issue is that it is a third-party app so you have to start it up seperately. Thinking out of the box a bit, if voice could be integrated into the Zwift app it would be really cool to relate the volume you hear to how close the rider is. That way you could yell out to people nearby just like you would on the road. Maybe the leader could override so everyone could hear him/her. That would do away with some of the complexities of the TeamSpeak app like private channels and such.

Exclusivity - You can jump into a group ride or a race without any type of invite. Is this a feature or a challenge? Depends on your point of view. For a group ride I could care less. But if there are people off the front in a race and someone decides to pull them for a few minutes that's not good etiquette. Along the thoughts of eventual scalability of the app maybe races could have there own race course without any other riders on it. Not sure developers thoughts on this but most other online games have followed this model as the number of users grows past the capabilities or asthetics of a single environment.

Graphics - First, I have to comment that the graphics work on Zwift has been excellent! It does seem odd though that you can sprint right up into a big pack of riders and end up on the front. It's like there is no yellow line rule. Not exactly a real racing scenerio. Maybe the algorithm could be tuned a bit so you could actually get "boxed in" and such. That would be more realistic for a race. For a normal group ride probably doesn't matter too much.

Trainer Differences - I can imagine how hard it must be to try to keep everything fair for everyone. So many variables that are beyond the control of developers especially when using old-style trainers without power control. I seem to notice that things are a bit better than they used to be; assuming things are being tuned up within the software to flatten things out. But I still see the occasional person pushing incredible wattages or beating my sprint in half the time. I would also think that it may be difficult to stay with a group if you are on an old-style trainer as I have seen wider fluctuations in power from riders using that equipment.

The good thing out of all this is that group riding is possible whenever you have the urge to jump on the bike and ride. You can meet people from all over the world and then drop them. I've been pretty impressed with the demeanor and courtesy of Zwifters; hopefully this is a reflection of those qualities in the cycling community at large. I'm hoping Zwift continues to be successful and doesn't attract the types of individuals that like to bully, cheat or deny service to others; some of the issues that have arisen in other gaming communties.

Happy Zwifting!