For the love of god can they just make the out of game knuckle headed stuff possible. Just today I signed back up cause I need some race goals in the short term to keep motivation high in the snowy north and was pissed off within 20 minutes.
Zwiftpower and the zwift main site are jokes. How does the ‘filter’ not let me pick a date range? I dont care about 1000 races today, i want to see races between 10 and 2 tomorrow. I actually work in the field, and i honestly cant understand how this is not a filter option. Show me the series for people +/- .5 w/Kg of me! Let me sort by time. Let me sort by people in my class in past events.
I am a new racer, how do i find a team? (on the TR team, but I need a team with folks my speed and timezone for this to be fun over time)
How do i search for race series’ that may fit my needs? You have a list of series in a dropdown, WTF is anyone supposed to do with this.
How do I get notified of recurring events? I found a D class only xmas event, it has the word series in the name. It has no info, no links to other races in the series, nothing. If i cant figure this mess out as someone in the web development field how the hell do they expect non tech folks to have any chance at all?
I refuse to use facebook, what do you mean you have no form of communication?
They have hundreds of millions and are using a hacked on phpBB as their race platform? Are you f&*king kidding me? They are a joke, and they are destined to fail. I will race there cause its what we have right now, but they have no moat. Someone will make something at least passable and this will die overnight.
Zwiftpower used to be an independent third party site that was put together to try to have some semblance of order to the Zwift racing scene since Zwift didn’t even used to store event results within an activity. Zwift bought them out and have done nothing with it. Like you mention with your other complaints about simple things like event filtering, I can’t see it getting improved anytime soon. But hey, 4km of new roads!!!
I used to be really into triathlon and we used to say a good triathlete was someone who was mediocre at all three sports. That’s pretty much what Zwift is in my opinion, they have a lot of features and they are just ok at all of them. Their workout mode is very mediocre (compared to TR), Racing is totally half baked, Road expansion is insanely slow, clubs started and then stopped, and on and on. Literally events are the only thing they are good at and I’ll give them credit for that as I do enjoy doing their big tours and other big events. Put it all together and they are pretty good. I guess…
Despite all of their half baked features and lack of focus it’s still kinda fun. There is no way I could go all in and use them as my sole platform, but as a secondary “just for fun” option they work. Just gotta keep your expectations very low.
The hodgepodge of tools needed to use Zwift is weird. There’s zwift, the zwift companion, the abysmal zwift web site, zwift insider, zwift hacks for the best event finder Events and tracking which routes I’ve done Routes , zwift power for when I want to know how I “really” did in a race, WhatsonZwift.com for reviewing workout plans, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That’s about it.
I think I lost the thread there, but you get the point.
Exactly…they keep coming up with band-aids to put on the problems instead of fixing the root causes.
I fully get that the original framework probably wasn’t designed with this level of use and feature integration in mind…but man, when you client base are the ones developing the band-aids and you keep ignoring the problems, that isn’t a good sign.
My take is that for the average cyclist, myself included, it’s not a bad deal. Also, for those of us living in larger cities, it seems people were willing to pay $30 for a single spin class at a trendy studio. For those people, Zwift, Peloton, etc… anything that let’s them workout all month for the price they were paying for a single class makes a lot of sense, before, during and after COVID.
Of course, if you’re a dedicated cyclist primarily focused on getting faster and interested in structured training, then TR is the place to be. But that is a minority of cyclists.
The original smart trainer maker with their own training app that included multi-user access and lots of features that are still seen in “new” apps. To their detriment, CompuTrainer stalled out on development and stayed at their level, while others came along and pushed further in the related industries (Wahoo & Zwift in particular).
The Mayan bridge is a really nice piece of road, especially for those of us with a Neo and get the road feel. Very fun section and I can see myself riding the Serpentine 8 a lot in the future. I hope they add a pace partner for that route.
I haven’t ridden it, but from watching Shane’s video, the Epic KOM Bypass looks amazing too. That and the Mayan one are really nice options for otherwise large loops that take some bigger commitment.
The Zwift UI refresh is like the new healthcare plan in a relatively-well-known country not far from here - it’s going to be released in two weeks. Since three years.
That was explained as something targeted only for the Apple TV experience, and was killed around the solidification of the Covid shutdowns.
Meaning, that sweater they were knitting was only for a tiny subset of users, and has been eliminated entirely. This is covered in a ZwiftCast episode from a few months ago. So there is nothing coming for UI AFAIK.
We are gonna have the greatest : UI update , believe me. No one has ever had a UI update like this. A big beautiful UI update. Everyones going to get it and love it, and you wont have to pay for it.
That Covid is the most used excuse in the world since “the check is in the mail” got derated by snail-mail and checks going the way of dinosaurs, and “the dog ate my homework” got derated by online filing.
Agreed. At the same time, they are spending loads of efforts “making onboarding easier” - meaning hiring lots of support people to explain the wonky UI to new users.
The procedure to create and link a ZwiftPower account has to top the insanity list. It feels like an OS update process in the MS-DOS days, minus the floppies.
Agreed on the need for UI improvement. From what I heard, I think they recognize that. If I understand the limited info correctly, the change here was to drop a rather limited reach aspect (ATV) and planning to do something more far reaching (all platforms?) down the road. No idea what that really means and I could be totally off base too. I gave up guessing too hard on Z plans a while ago
100% agree with this! Even within something as key as Zwift Academy I couldn’t plan ahead when I would do the races until a few days prior. RIDICULOUS!
Totally agree. Their focus is on getting casual riders set up quickly and smooth (even if that means supporting 10 year old laptops and operating systems). I can’t totally fault them for this, but I would love to see new anti-cheating controls (as my own interest in Z is racing focused).
