Yeah 100% this. I race the Tuesday ZRL series almost exclusively these days, has far fewer issues with sandbaggers and cheats as alluded to above.
You really need to check the course profile in advance otherwise you can get caught out quite easily - especially if there’s dirt sections or descents into punchy climbs for example. Once the gap goes it is really hard to get it back, so it really helps to be aware of what’s going on.
I find my w/kg is often higher than others in the same race, I think there’s two reasons for this
- I am not good at sprints or short efforts - on the most recent ZRL which had 4 sprints, I have to wind up very early and then keep pushing until well after the sprint in order to not get dropped
- Not good at sitting in the pack, once I drift to the back of the group I tend to panic and put some power out to get back to the front - there’s a natural churn on Zwift as obviously you speed up in the draft and slow down on the front (if everyone was doing the same power and w/kg you would still get a churn). This is just practice though.
I’m the one at 3.8 below. Also my variability (the coloured bar - the difference between AP and NP) is very low compared to the others, which means I am riding much more like a steady state TT than those other guys.
I have my trainer difficulty around 30%, primarily because the front mech doesn’t work on my turbo bike so I need to keep it in the big ring. But I actually think I might be better off with a higher % since it might stop me riding so steady state.
So tl;dr: there’s definitely a skill to it, like any other computer game.