There will be a UCI sanctioned world championship this year.
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Let’s revisit this thread in a few years and see where all this ends up.
I’ll place a wager of a Trading Places-inspired $1 that cycling esports will not be part of big UCI or Olympic events (other than Zwift (or other entity) funded PR efforts) or contribute in a meaningful way to the outcome of the competition.
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You’ll likely be right. I’m going to put my £1 on cycling as an eSport being picked up by a gaming house and sitting along Fortnite or Counter Strike rather than Olympic TT or UCI World Championships.
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I was going to walk away after my little bitch fest earlier but…family pricing.
“How do we make sure it’s really a family?”
I mean, what?
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Yeah, his response on that was pretty tepid…and sloughing off other companies as “huge companies” that can provide Family Plans was just a cop-out.
There will be always be some password sharing in any subscription-based service. His reasoning just sounded like price-gouging.
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Penny pinching attitude for sure. Oddly, they are already getting current users “sharing” an account between 2 or more riders (I know of several in my area alone). Each only does this because the price to add more users is prohibitive. If Z would loosen the reins a bit and offer extra users for 50-75% of the regular fee, they’d likely increase revenue via legit users actually being willing to pay for the additional advantage of separate accounts.
More of the same, limited vision displayed as they seem to only be able to view this from their own side, and not step into the mind (or REALLY LISTEN) to their customers.
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Clearly a cop-out. It will always be the honor system but not hard to implement using the Amazon Prime household methodology. And if it is found the 2 adults or children don’t live under the same roof their accts will be terminated.
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Whenever I hear these types of interviews I’m always disappointed at the fact so much of the emphasis is on racing and the future of racing. They spend very little time discussing what’s next for the Zwifter who doesn’t race. Maybe it’s because the racers are the more “vocal” of the community, but I have to imagine a large % of their customer base has no interest in racing at all.
I guess it goes back to the is Zwift a training tool or a video game debate and the answer is different for everyone. I’ve been a subscriber since almost the beginning but have always been in the training tool camp. To me racing is very much in the video game category and it’s great that so many people like it. I just personally wish there was more emphasis on the training tool side of the equation.
Thankfully for people like me we’ve got TR. The more Zwift focuses on racing the more I’ll lean towards TR. I’ll likely always subscribe to both as I like being out on the Zwift roads while doing my TR workout. Throw in an occasional group ride or free ride on Zwift and I think the two combined make a great training tool.
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This is actually one of the things that is easier for them than other service providers - they can limit family plans to shared trainer equipment. If multiple trainers are used, they could periodically require them both to be connected at the same time, thereby making sure the were co-located. This at least would make sure that it was members of the same household were sharing the account. (While Ant+ or bluetooth spoofing is possible, not enough people will do this to make a difference.)
The idea that a couple should spend $360/year to both use zwift seems pretty crazy to me.
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To be fair, that is the same for Trainer Road users in the same family. Unless they now offer a family plan that I’m not aware of, if they do it might tempt me to renew in a month when my membership is up, otherwise after a few years I’ll be dropping it, too many monthly subscriptions, quite often overlapping with what they provide.
Add me to the list of people who found it extremely condescending. Every key update request was met with “ahh, that’s just a really really really minor group of people who are asking for that”. At some point I started asking myself why I was putting money in the guy’s pocket and if I should go back to watching Netflix instead of Zwift as a visual distraction. I’ve been trying it for the last few days. I do miss my heavy music though.
It just shocks me that they sponsor racing, want to create a new mass audience sport, and give almost no real priority to getting power right other than to say “the hardware makers need to fix that”.
Peloton has the same issue with their leaderboard. People are furiously racing one another when they first get the bike and quickly lose interest when they realize how easy it is (intentional or not) to completely alter the output. I own a Peloton that I don’t ride because of this, and Zwift but never ride competitively because of this. I just don’t see any point in racing someone who averages 13 mph on the road and 30mph in Zwift/Peloton.
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I find it crazy that there has been so much emphasis on racing myself. Given that there has been zero thought put into getting the categories right for riders in Zwift. With all of the data they must have on everyone using their platform surely you would think this wouldn’t be a problem. Basically every other recent game I’ve played online has had no problem ranking participants. I’m not sure why Zwift can’t just rank everyone based on their past performances and then automatically put you into the category that’s most representative of your skill level.
I also feel like Eric Min is very condescending almost every time he get’s on a podcast.
There’s so many obvious things Zwift could be doing to make their platform better, but it seems like they choose to focus their efforts on new maps instead.
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Yeah. I used to do 45 minute treadmill runs using Zwift on an iPhone. Battery would go from 90% to 20% in that 45 minutes.
I find it really F**king sad people have to cheat , what’s wrong with these morons , why the hell can’t you train hard, participate , and if you get beaten train harder or smarter until you succeed , I really think these idiots have got something wrong with them , they manage to ruin everything they touch and make it a totally unpleasant experience for all the honest people , I want to be sure I’m racing with straight people who love bikes etc , not some dickhead who feels so inadequate he‘S got to cheat at virtual cycling 
… peace 
.
this is a great point!Virtual cycling allows you to against people in different locations. I love zwift but the online races are boring to watch imo - almost always come down to a sprint with little intrigue along the way. if everyone is in the same place, surely it’s more interesting to do a real bike race? it can’t be compared to things like fortnite in an esports perspective because running around shooting people cannot be recreated legally outside!
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it would make a good psychological study into what motivation someone has to cheat from their own garage, with no reward apart from personal gratification. But how can you be personally gratified when you know you’ve cheated???
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History says it’s pretty common for people to feel gratified even if they succeeded by cheating. Sports, finance, politics, name it.
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Totally but these people aren’t usually doing on on their own where none can see them!
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That’s because when they share it on Strava, their dedicated follows can see it and give them massive kudos etc, despite the fact all they’ve done is a trainer ride. I don’t get it, but a lot of people put huge weight on turbo training these days. It’s just peddling indoors. If you want to induce a venom filled rant from my 2up TT partner, tell him he needs to be on Zwift!!!
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