I've only logged three rides with Zwift so far but I learned the roller lesson the hard way this weekend. Slightly mentally spaced out and swerved to avoid a stopped rider (yes, a virtual one). Oops.

I'm up in the Dallas area and do most of my rides on Zwift using rollers too. I haven't had the steering problem on Zwift, but that is just because I did steer off the rollers this winter the first time I used the Sufferfest - The Rookie, and that made me conscious of the possibility.

Exactly. I'm a little concerned that I might become too comfortable plowing through riders in zwift without steering. That would not translate well to the real world.

I just need another post apparently. I have one on the left the my shoulder bounces off when I wander too far that direction. Just happened to swerve right while Zwifting. I could train my dog to bark at my feet and get an even more real world experience.

How does this work? I tried Zwift yesterday but it didn't seem to know anything about my KICKR although it did detect my Quarq and used that for power.

When you search for power meters it should find both a KICKR and your Quarq. If you want interactive resistance you'll have to use the KICKR as the power source currently.

Jon

You really should wear a helmet Francois, you never know when a pesky bird or firefly will fly right into you.

I guess we zwifted together today? ;)

Ah yes Scott Bowe. I remember seeing your name today.

Jon:

How's the App coming along? My wife is yelling at me for sweating all over the wireless keyboard ;)

Thanks!

ha, I have the same problem...minus the wife. looking forward to the app

Did my first ride this morning. Dashboard shows distance and time but no ride. I uploaded to Strava but it still hasn't shown up. Looks like at least two others encountered same thing, no rides shown today on Strava segments (March 3). Ahhhhh welcome to Beta Testing.

It's pretty cool though, my 200 lbs definitely was shown by my reduction in speed going up those hills.....

I had my first ride on yesterday too (mac user) and my strava upload was also a "no show". I figured it was me that did something wrong, but maybe there are issues to be resolved there.

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What's that Truck icon I see on the screen?

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Cervelo R3 and Cannondale Synapse, Argon18 Electron Track Bike

Go this tip on the Zwift community: You can upload the file to Strava by going to My Documents/Zwift/Activities folder. Sure enough when I looked in that folder I found some files with file extension .fit. I then uploaded to Strava and there it was. Don't click on Stationary Trainer, otherwise the map and segments won't show up.

Ah, thanks.

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It's a power-up. Each lap you get a new one randomly drawn, or at least I think you do. I always get the beginning one but have never actually used one since my keyboard isn't accessible to me while riding, you hit space bar to use it.

There are a few different types, one that presumably makes you more aero, one that makes you lighter, I dunno what the truck one does, maybe faster downhill.

They all seem to be one of the most controversial features of the 'game' and I suppose that is the crux of it, whether you consider Zwift a game or more of a serious training tool. When it comes to KOMs, leaderboards or any other time of PRs I think the powerups cheapens things to a degree but I don't really think you can take any of that stuff too seriously.

The KOMs will always be somewhat meaningless due to the vast differences in type, accuracy and calibration of sensors providing the data and the fact that it's very easy to manipulate the system by simply reducing your profile weight.

Correct - Space uses the power up. You get one at every banner - Polka dot/red kom, green sprint, orange lap. Below is the list of powerup's I can remember. Feather and burrito are shorter times then Aero and Truck.

Aero helmet - Aero advantage
Truck - Draft is like a box truck. Does no good if you don't have someone to draft.
feather - drops weight so w/kg go up - good for climbing
burrito - no one can draft you - good to shake a wheel sucker - stinks in pack racing so I only use going uphill unless I want to be a jerk.
+ sign - extra points toward your rider score - each level unlocks things and points get you new levels.

To change the subject - thank you OP for this - I didn't even know this existed. Very excited to try this out!

I have a feeling there are either tons of people on trainers that are not on the right curve or they put their weight in wrong. I can get the green jersey almost every time I ride on 5 second powertap power in the mid 800s as I am on a QR. It comes out to 6.5-6.54 most of the time. I am 174 in real life and on the game and the amount of people that can beat me up the Mtn KOM is crazy compared to the sprint. I hope that the future use of the game allows you to either manually correct a trainer (to ride with friends at least), put in a handicap, or have groupings that are real power or virtual power but not mixed. I do like seeing the w/kg on there when riding though. Tried to hand with Lawson Craddock and it was cool to see. Need to loose some weight.

Even for riders who are both riding with power I think you'll still see some big differences between someone riding with a true erg trainer versus someone riding a regular turbo trainer with power.

Take that sprint for example, it comes after a series of downhills where the KICKR dumps almost all of my resistance and I spin out on my compact. That's much as it would be in real life and I dig that personally, but as I wind around that final bend into the sprint I'm shifting and trying to bring my watts back up from basically coasting to an all out sprint. Contrast that to someone on a non-erg trainer who can just sweet-spot their wattage independent of terrain whenever they want.

Agree with you though, some sort of variable handicap / resistance feature would go a long way to making the experience a lot more fun for riding with friends. Or hell, even with random acquaintances for that matter, I'd love to be able to tune the resistance so I could make a competitive go out of riding with others rather than always searching for that elusive person who's right in your sweetspot.

If they did add such a feature, I think you could tastefully make it so that users can increase their resistance to their liking, but no one can decrease it past the baseline so you don't have people turning it way down and flying around the map any more then they do already by dropping the profile weight.

Thats a good idea. You could do it like golf handicaps combined with the trainer road idea of estimating ftp based on previous efforts and throw riders together like that so that on any given day a group of 40 random people should be within seconds of each other on the KOM or a lap around the island at the same perceived effort at least.

Zwift crashed on me 4 times tonight while on a mac.

ANT+ would sync, then drop a few times. I restarted the App and it would sync.

It would crash before i got to the start/finish line.

I've got 3 previous rides with no troubles, so just an off day.

Doh. So when mac crashes you have the option to "Report", and can then see a whole bunch of info. If you mail that pile of info to support@zwift.com it's like gold to me. The issue will typically get fixed. The next mac update goes out soon so if you're seeing a crash there's 24 hours left for a fix for that to get in the next update.

Did your ride eventually show up? We didn't have any outage on our end so maybe the strava upload API was down for some time today? I see plenty of rides uploaded to strava today so maybe it was just a brief issue.