This is actually not true. It just has to be more fun.
Designing fun is the hard part though 
That’s why the groups of riders who don’t care about their speed, or their kit, or their bike, etc are out there riding with smiles ear to ear, socializing with their circle and doing picnics and other things as a community and a family even outside of cycling. I’m not saying these things aren’t important, but they view cycling as an experience, not a science.
And then you got aero Joe who’s constantly 2 inches away from having an aneurysm because he’s too concerned with e bikes stealing his KOMs, or who had a tailwind, or how he can save 1.2w by shaving his eyebrows.
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Answer below, but I would say that is really up to them to define. I can say that anyone who has gone through their process to race cant tell me it was reasonable with a straight face.
- Ability to sign up for races/fondos/events/whatever weeks and months in advance.
- Ability to find those events.
- Results/info/etc all on the zwift site and within the apps. (having to change your username and then go sign up at some other site they dont advertise or even mention is a HUGE barrier to ever getting casual users to use it. I bet this fact alone stops 7 out of 10 who would otherwise give it a shot)
If i just got a bike and trainer/etc for Christmas and I signed up and did my first ride, I should be able to find a button with ‘Upcoming Events’. It should have 1 day fondo type stuff, and race series and whatever else people want to promote. You should be able to read about them and click a button to sign up for them. What I get instead is a 500 page long list of the events in the next 3 days with a bunch of stuff that makes no sense to new users, has no history, and it turns out is not even the ‘real’ race cause that is in some other site you have never heard of.
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This literally exists in the companion app
This ^. 1000x this. I disagree with the subscription fee, I think it should stay but otherwise 1000%. You turn it into world of warcraft that makes you healthier instead of fatter!
It does? I would like to find a 100k fondo for my friends and I in April. I would then like to see how many people did that race last year and maybe even some reviews. Pretty simple request. Give it a try.
While it is true that they do want to sell bikes, the app is an on-ramp to bike purchase (my daughter is just one recent example). There’s a huge conversion rate (#s provided during the PTON conference call; I don’t have at the moment). Also, they are manufacturing limited for an extended period of time until they can bring Precor manufacturing online (see separate thread)
Yea, let’s throw a request out that a fraction of a fraction of people care about and use that as a basis to bash the entire program. That’s like me trash talking TR because the mobile app is incapable of doing, well pretty much anything up until this latest beta I’m testing.
Zwift sure does have a lot of suckers using it considering how bad it is, Strava too…then again I realize there are some who will make the most of anything and enjoy it, and others who will find anything to complain about so they can be heard
I think this helps illustrate the problem…the Companion app is an example of how Zwift put a band-aid on the problem because (it appears) the core program cannot not accommodate the feature.
I don’t think it is necessary to send people outside the core game / app to find this kind of information. Yes, it “fixes” the problem, but clumsily at best.
Kind of how the TR app can’t show you intervals you’ve done: need to go to the website for that. Schedule a ride? Nah need the website for that. Schedule a plan? Website.
Move my workout to tomorrow? Website
TR obviously had bigger fish to fry before addressing these concerns, Zwift is frying theirs too.
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C’mon…it is Festivus today. This is the Airing of Grievances!! Wait until the Feats of Strengths later…
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Dangit!!! I did my FoS last night and got the order all mixed up
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Perhaps turn it down a notch here. As I pointed out above I (and I suspect others here) dont care all that much. This debate is just more interesting than the work i am supposed to be doing.
Its not a fantastic argument that their product can suck cause TR has issues. There are plenty of threads for TR’s issues. The difference is they are listening and when possible doing something about them.
The point i am jumping on is they could spent pennies on the dollar to make the process not a horrible train wreck. The fixes are not giant lifts or at all unreasonable. I am asking for stuff like a filter by date here… I get that cheating and sandbagging are hard, and very few care. My little brother wanting to see the results of the ‘race’ he did where he only competed against his 6 buddies last week? Easy fix, easy way to keep customers, easy way to get word of mouth. Simple stuff here.
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“I got a lot of problems with you people…and now, you are gonna hear about it!!”
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That’s purely your opinion, and an overblown one IMO, but you do you
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You sir win! I’d generally say the same but today is finally a day off 
$100k year salary is closer to $200k cost for the company, at least in Canada/Europe.
I’ve spent almost the last two decades in the development field (software developer, manager, architect), so I have a rough idea. 
To be fair to Zwift, development and ongoing support/maintenance of a gaming engine, support for a variety of protocols, a number of devices, low latency network communication, and infrastructure to support tens of thousands concurrent users is a altogether a different beast than an e-commerce site. That’s not to mention anything else they may need to consider outside of general development. Intervals.icu, while very useful (I use it extensively myself!), is a toy project and cannot be compared to a large product.
You seem quite confident. Let’s ask RGT, Rouvy, BKool, FulGaz how confident they are and how investors are flocking to turn a profit so easily. As mentioned before, Covid has offered a lifetime opportunity for a virtual cycling (or truly anything indoor workout related) platform, and we’ve yet to see a threat to Zwift.
And is quite obvious in this thread. I’ve met plenty people locally who just want to ride, get fit, and have fun. Some may even want to race, but want to do it for fun, and have no interest in any kind of a seriousness aspect of the sport.
Other than WTRL race series, I’ve yet to have the desire to sign up for a Zwift even more than a week in advance. Even then, 90% of the time I’m signing up for one less than 24 hours in advance.
You may be confused, but you absolutely do NOT need to sign up for ZwiftPower to race on Zwift. You can go on Zwift website or companion app, find the event, and hit + to register.
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Yeah, I manage a team of 60 implementing a custom platform built on top of Salesforce. And my team is just one of 4 others of the same working for JUST one business unit of a corporation. You’d think with Salesforce as the core that such an implementation would be easy, but it’s not. Not only do you have the hypothetical 3 engineers, but then you have their managers, their product owners, project managers, the testers, the infrastructure guys/gals, performance testers, info security, support guys/gals, and ongoing maintenance. And that’s just the IT side, then think about sales, operations, account management, new business development. It’s kind of amazing how it balloons, once you have to have accountability. I give props to the solo guys doing great things on their own and use several of those types of services, including intervals.icu, zwiftpower, veloviewer, zwifthub, etc, but it doesn’t scale and it’s too dependent on individuals for a corporation or business needing to pay back investors.
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From the very little I know of Salesforce, I would definitely not think that 
You’re on the money with your comment. I’ve had high velocity on very small/contained teams, but in the end, a small team can only deliver a small product. Currently I am a part of a much bigger team, which is responsible for delivering a product and service to several bigger teams. At scale, absolutely nothing moves “fast”, and absolutely no team can match the velocity of a single person with no internal or external dependencies. I too give props to developers of services like intervals.icu, and mean to take absolutely nothing away from them, but you simply cannot compare those services to an actual large scale project like Zwift.
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I work in that ecosystem as well and that is not fair. To compare the oil tanker of baggage and BS that comes with working with SFCC is not even the same ballpark.
Sortof. The way I did it i assume is the same as some others. Sign up for a race in game cause you are bored, have a non ideal experience due to known balance issues, start googling around, discover zwiftpower is even a thing, try to sign up and WTF at it, decide you are locked in the house and what else do you have to do so I will jump through their hoops.
Most of what I think they need to fix is replacing a phpBB site hacked together for free. It IS a toy project. None of what I am bitching about is making a MMORPG game run for thousands, its some simple math and a UI to a database of pretty simple data. Its a lot of data, but not complicated. Honestly I am surprised they have not screwed us all and just turned it off to avoid looking that bad when they are courting big partnerships.
Sorry, but I’ve also managed other custom technology stacks and it’s all the same. Salesforce is no better or worse and no solution is just one thing. Just think about the different skillsets needed to develop for windows, mac, web, ios, android. Software development is not the sexy agile ideal that people assume.