Time for a bit of Zwift bashing and why TR should be careful of this if they do it as a partnership. Even if its an API and the money works you are still hitching your name to theirs, and that is dangerous. They rolled out a new frame. Who cares, I know, but it makes a good example for us. Quotes below for the relevant points, but cliff notes version:
Someone paid money to put this frame in game, someone wrote the code and did the artwork. Its a worse climber than their non climbing frame and a crappy flat land bike. There is literally no reason to use this frame ever.
So either
They think their advertising customers are stupid and dont care about how their money is spent. You expect felt to pay you again in the future?
They think their users are stupid and are fine with whatever crap is given. Everyone uses tron, as a commenter in that article said either get on board with realism or get on board with game balance. Just pick something rather than doing nothing at all.
They are incompetent and setup the thing wrong and have no QA process. This is my real gripe. They are bafoons. This is the 10,000th piece of evidence they have no attention to detail at all. Do you think they wont make mistakes that actually impact stuff when it comes to training if they cant get the easy stuff right. They just dont care enough to bother to get things right, they have shown it in a million ways a million times. They are fine with good enough.
Dont even get me started on how they squandered the tour partnership.
They are going to embarrass you, so make sure its worth it.
It is rated 3 stars for aero and 3 for weight, which means itâs at least somewhat aero and lightweight. But Zwiftâs star ratings arenât precise enough to communicate actual performance in game in a useful way, so we ran the Felt FR through our standard battery of tests.
While Felt bills the FR as their all-around race bike, its performance on Zwift makes it a poor choice in any race situation. Itâs not exceptionally fast on flat/rolling routes, and it lags behind 80% of available frames on long climbs.
This poor performance is due, at least in part, to the Dura-Ace 9200 bug, which adds weight to the frame and increases its Alpe test time by ~19s. Still, we canât help but wonder if this frameâs parameters are misconfigured. Because even with that 19s removed, the Felt FR would still be 2.5s slower than the AR up the Alpe! This shouldnât be the case, given that the FR is billed as a better climber than the pure-aero AR.
âZwiftâs default plansâ isnât really a coherent thing anyway at the moment, the whole thing was a bit of a mess last I looked - thereâs just a load of workouts split into different plans or buckets (based on who made them) and thereâs no concept of a training calendar so it relies on the rider to do them in a sensible order. There were a bunch of workouts made by individual coaches or associated with the Zwift Academy etc etc which donât really stand alone.
So plan compliance is probably pretty low - certainly the people I know who do Zwift workouts donât seem to follow the plans very closely (mostly itâs hard to tell if it is actually supposed to be a coherent plan at all).
Anyway Zwift is to my mind really weak on the workout/training plan front (hence why I have kept TR).
Not relevant but one of my friends (triathleteâŚ) is coached and does his coachâs workouts on Zwift - I noticed one of them was literally a TR workout where the coach hadnât even bothered to change the name, I thought heâd joined TR. I thought that was a bit cheap.
Yeah, thatâs old info. Still plenty of random stuff in the Z catalog, but they have several âofficial plansâ and an actual training plan process with scheduling setup. Itâs far from perfect, but more than what you reference.
A licencing deal (i.e., TR AT into Zwift by API) might be a bit quicker though, obviously a merger could take ages. As neither co. is public they could address it publicly if they wanted, but I agree they wonât (although, Nate isnât a typical CEO!).
Weirdly I donât seem to have got the Zwift survey. Maybe they know I am a TR user alreadyâŚ
Ah, fair enough, my bad - like I said itâs a while since I looked (obviously I decided I would stick with TR!). But given Zwiftâs usual pace of change, thatâs pretty good going by them!
Interesting, I just took a quick look and they have made the plans where you are assigned a given number of workouts per week and you can just do the ride on any day you want now. The first time I tried to do a plan on Zwift, things were mandatory âDo Ride 1 on Mondayâ and you couldnât move them around. That was a long time ago though.
Not sure many people look into it in that detail to be honest - when I first started Zwift I just bought whatever looked better than what I was currently using without much science.
For our ZRL teams I always, without fail, get asked what bike to use (there are quicker options than the Tron for either v flat or v hilly courses, plus a few of our guys donât have it), and I literally just read the relevant Zwift Insider article and advise based on that!
Youâd think that other people could do the same but when I come out with stuff that I have just read on ZI people act like I am some kind of Zwift savant. Even the guy whoâs been on Zwift since betaâŚ
But then I suppose we are talking about this on a cycling training forum which probably skews pretty âbike nerdââŚ
This is all true, and why i said who cares to the bike itself. I was more using it an a handy example from that day of their lack of caring. The issue is not if we are nerds about how the bikes work, its that there is no coherent design to how the bikes work. They just throw things in without any larger plan. No matter if we are nerds about this or not, the person for whom this is their job should certainly be a nerd about it but is not.
Not at all. I think they sent that out to a smaller group than they did for the hardware survey. I was stunned at how long this whole concept took before people really started to take notice. Part of that may have been a limited survey quantity, but I am guessing there.
Yeah, the âflexibleâ plans are a bit better, but they are still in the stone ages compared to TR and other apps. Laughable really, but at least better than the pure pick and choose approach they had for far too long.
There were months (years?) of complaints about the absurdity and lack of flexibility of those training plans on the Zwift forum. It took Zwift almost as long to address that as to figure out one might want to return to the main menu after a ride.
No idea why they have left it as-is for so long? Itâs been a hole in their system for just about the entirety of their existence. I guessed that they saw so little use of their original âofferingsâ that they figured there was no need to âimproveâ it
They essentially made a minimal toolset and left it to the community to manage (which they essentially did). Outside of the Z Academy, there was not much there other than some integration with TP and such.
May be that after the peak of last year they finally see the potential (or are grasping at straws) to add something to Z that will increase the draw for more new users?
I seem to remember one of the Zwift staff saying they had hard coded the training plans into the spaghetti code and thatâs why it was so hard to change the way training sessions were made available to users and you had to wait for the next one.
They seem to envision a single workflow and program to that, with no room for other options. Was evident with the âexitâ button situation and super annoying with Eric M.'s insistence that not following their planned execution was somehow user error.
Thatâs the type of âthey know bestâ mentality all too present in so much of Z, and is why this great unknown scares me like it does.
Zwift is a hot mess. I remember I was using it a while ago and suddenly everyone on the map disappeared⌠it was very early on a 3 hr ride⌠so i kept going like nothing. At the end of the ride it show the app had lost connection to the internet and nothing was saved⌠because apparently it is VERY hard to save locally and then transmit⌠/s
They split years ago (around the time Saris sold PowerTap and consolidated CycleOps under the Saris umbrella) and are no longer connected in a business sense.
But I get your point, with groups trying to build a broader base with full suite of devices and apps.
