The feedback on the trials and what does that mean for DIRT Racing Series 4, read on and let’s find out.
For any of you that don’t know, a few weeks back now the DRS team ran some trial races that used the innovative www.zwiftracing.app Race Ranking system to categorise racers. Overall it was a great success; we had well over 500 people give it a go and received lots of great feedback with nearly 100 of you completing our survey. A lot of the feedback was really positive, which is great, and there was some great constructive feedback on stuff that could be improved too.
For the TL;DR crew … 67% of you voted for us to use www.zwiftracing.app as the categorisation for DRS Season 4 with 54% of you saying it was even more competitive than what we did in Season 3.
We hope you do read on to understand why we think that this could be one of the keys to creating the most Competitive Team Racing on Zwift … but most importantly we hope you’ll come along and give it a try in Season 4, even if you are sceptical. We’ll always listen to feedback from those who race, so come give it a go and continue to help shape and improve the DIRT Racing Series. (Registration will be up next week at www.dirtracingseries.com).
Race 1 Summary:
83.1% of you felt that you would be competitive in the Ranking category we placed you in with exactly the same percentage of you feeling it was the right category. What was interesting was that exactly the same number of you felt your category was too high and too low … thanks for the honesty there all!
Race 2 Summary:
79.2% of you felt that you would be competitive in the Ranking category we placed you in with a smidge more of you at 80.5% feeling it was the right category. This time though, there were more of you who felt the category was too high than too low – likely as a result of the hillier terrain.
zwiftracing.app feedback and improvements as a result:
Whilst to have such positive feedback so early on is a fantastic result for the work that Tim Hanson has done with www.zwiftracing.app, we are always the type who want to look at the 17-19% who felt the categorisation wasn’t quite right – and Tim is just the same!
When we read through the qualitative feedback there were maybe 2 key things that could be material contributors to those who felt the categorisation wasn’t quite right yet, and one that had been nagging me for a while now:
- It seemed like heavier riders were being a little bit over-ranked initially.
- An under-ranked outlier who then didn’t rank-up quickly enough could run away with a race
- Concerns that riders who did very low efforts in races would reduce their race ranking (either unintentionally or otherwise).
Tim has already put in place some great improvements– and there is even more in progress. We’ll give you a brief summary here, but head over to the www.zwiftracing.app website and find his Discord server if you’d like to understand more or contribute yourself to its future direction.
- It seemed like there was an offset in the initial ranking where heavier riders were over-ranked a little bit compared to lighter riders.
Chewing through a bunch of data – this did prove to be true. It wasn’t massive but it was a chance to make it even better.
The Improvement:
The hive mind on zwiftracing.app came up with a new algorithm to create the zrCS (zwiftracing.app Compound Score). This means that right from the moment a racer has done a single max 5-minute effort in a race they are really accurately ranked.
- An under-ranked outlier who then didn’t rank-up quickly enough could run away with a race
If a rider hadn’t done a max 5-minute effort in a race prior to January (or had had a period of very fast development) they were ranked lower than they should be.
The Improvement:
Tim took the new zrCS formula and made the system check every race to see whether someone had set a new 5min PB … and if so it jumps their ranking up to the higher of the race ranking result or 200 below their new zrCS; close enough to be in about the right category, but with a little room still to grow for those genuinely improving.
- Concerns that riders who did zone 2 efforts in races would reduce their race ranking (either unintentionally or otherwise.
This was evident in some rider’s numbers (that they had done it unintentionally) so needed fixing.
The Improvement:
There is ongoing work to identify efforts that are too low to be representative races, check out the zwiftracing.app Discord if you’d like to jump down that rabbit hole; but to help race organisers in the meantime prevent this being used to game the system, Tim displayed a Max 30-day Rating on the rider’s dashboard. This is then available to all the race organisers so they can categorise on this and not be concerned about deliberate or accidental reductions in Race Ranking.
The DRS Goal:
Get ready to be part of the most competitive Team Racing on Zwift, open for ALL Zwift racers. In DRS EVERYONE contributes to their team with our well balanced points structure, half-categories and multiple leaderboards.
One of the things that running these trial races did for us, was force us to discuss in a lot of detail … What does “competitive” mean to us?
First and foremost, we think that on the surface what competitive racing means to a lot of us is that the racing is close. That we could get to a pen and not think that we’re just going to be spat out of the back in the first 10-minutes to ride the rest on our own.
As we discussed it in more detail though, we realised that it does mean that … but it also means so much more!
It means that different racers will win different races. In our opinion the top-10 sprinters shouldn’t be at the front of the climbing race … otherwise it’s just the same top-10 racers in every single race. That’s not competitive for the other 50-80 racers! Anyone raced anything like that recently? 👀
When we race under a categorisation based on 20-min w/kg:
- Heavier racers near the top of a category will nearly always trump lighter racers (same 20-min w/kg but the heavier riders have more watts by definition)
- Racers who have a strong sprint and a 20-min w/kg near the top of the category will nearly always be in the top bunch of every race they do
If we race under a race result system, we know that we’ll have a bigger distribution of 20-min w/kgs than we are used to. This might seem daunting at first … but we think that this will bring awesome racing with a bigger distribution of winners and maybe even a few more breakaways in Zwift – how cool would that be?! So hopefully we’ll see:
- Sprinters will win sprinty races
- Punchers creating gaps and breakaways on rolling routes
- Rouleurs putting the pain on during iTTs and longer points races
- Climbers splitting the field up when the route heads to the sky
None of this is really possible under a 20-min power based categorisation, so if we really want to make it as competitive as possible – we have to move towards results based categorisation to mix up the phenotypes!
The Racers Choice:
It seems to us that most of you agree:
Some of the labels are truncated above – but the green colour was what we did in season 2 – use 20min w/kg half categories with a category upgrade if you were within 0.05w/kg of the boundary.
The amber colour was what we did in Season 3 – use 20min w/kg half categories with a category upgrade if you were highly ranked on Zwiftpower. Only 13.8% of you wanted us to use this.
So at this point only 17% of you wanted us to use something we’d done before. And we thought we were doing quite well! 🙈 It’s a good job we’re open to feedback! 😆
The red colour – and 2nd favourite – was to mix 20-min half categories with upgrades based on 1 or 5 min power numbers, but this only had 16% of the votes.
Leaving the overwhelming favourite taking more than two thirds of your votes to use Results Based Race Ranking from zwiftracing.app
You spoke, and so that’s what we’ll do. We’re working like crazy behind the scenes to update our rules, results processing and registration systems to be able to accommodate the Race Ranking categorisation and our hope is to launch registration next week and still be able to hit race 1 on 18th April. But please do bear with us – it’s a ton of work, but we’re up for the challenge if we’ve got your support along the way, because more than anything we do this for you – our DRS racing community.
If all goes well registration will be open next week at www.dirtracingseries.com.
Ride On!
Team DIRT Racing