You tend to notice things that alarm you 10x more than things that don't. It's a survival technique. Danger can kill you, no danger (usually) doesn't, so your brain amplifies odd stuff you don't understand to keep you alive. The people that didn't get alarmed when there was an odd rustle in the bushes often ended up as a lion snack before they could have babies, so they didn't pass that gene down. It's not that everybody is weight doping in Zwift, it's more that you just notice the ones that are far more than those that aren't.

I ride on Zwift according to proper protocol and I seem to be about where I should be. There's the occasional person that zooms buy at 600 mph, but since I don't know why their setup is doing that, I don't worry about it.

Another solution is to enjoy your own ride and don't ride in a roadie pack anyway. Those seem to be a giant clusterf*ck on wheels.

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Zen and the Art of Triathlon. Strava Workout Log
Interviews with Chris McCormack, Helle Frederikson, Angela Naeth, and many more.
http://www.zentriathlon.com

I'm curious, was this the Euro version on the Richmond course? I won the A race and didn't see anything real sketchy. Like someone else said, there are a lot of us out there who just race bikes including me. I'm a cat 1 and can do the numbers you mentioned and have results against decent pros in time trials. For reference, my normalized power for the bulk of the race was 339w. I weigh 67kg.

Agreed, but seeing people on there I know and have ridden with posting huge numbers which are just not true just pisses me off, so I'm not going back on there, I race some of them regularly so looking forward to racing them in the summer and seeing just how fast they are in the real world!

Check out some of the Strava segments. I love the ones flooded with 700W for 20-30 minutes.

300-400 watts are "lying" numbers in triathlete's minds lol

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The entire event (IM) is like "death by 1000 cuts" and the best race is minimizing all those cuts and losing less blood than the other guy. - Dev

Hammer hit the nail right on the head. Most of the Cs should be in the B group including me and it's everything I can do to finish mid-pack.

Doesn't really matter if you call yourself B or C. All that really matters is if you're in a group against foes of your own ability. Though it does suck trying to figure out which group to start with.

My hope is that when Zwift rolls out races, there will be an automatic leaderboard which places people in the right group - sort of like a matchmaking effort. Win too many games, or post a w/kg higher than a certain threshold, and you move up.

Not responding to anyone in particular, but just my $.02 from a non-subscriber. In any game I've ever played there have been people who cheat and also people who accuse clean players of being cheaters. For a few games I've been good enough to occasionally be called into the 2nd group of a clean player being accused of cheating. Granted, in video games people tend to cry a lot so this isn't really a BDB, anytime you beat someone they'll either think they lost fair and square or that you're a cheater. A lot of people cannot fathom not being the best so they struggle with being beat by other players.

Perhaps all of this doesn't directly correlate to Zwift. I'd like to think that the integrity of people on Zwift would be better than prepubscent 12 year olds playing the latest COD. I imagine some of it still carries over though. There are going to be those who decide on using "ideal" weight instead of "actual" weight, or people who just blatantly cheat so they can get the e-pen.

My stance in video games has always been to have fun. At the end of the day, that's what zwift is. If you're deriving your fun from competition with others than just realize you need to take it with a grain of salt. Some people may be cheating, other's may legitimately be better than you.

My final thought is this: As a non-subscriber i see several local riders on Zwift. Not a single one of them is posting outrageous numbers from what I've seen on the road. So I'm not sure what kind of people these V-dopers are riding with. Glad the local riders in my strava-network at least have some integrity.

A lot of it simply comes down to the inability to verify. zPower/calibration gets highlighted because the ability to fudge the numbers are more blatantly obvious, but the issue is there with weight as well. If someone blows by me, there's no way to know if it was legit or not, and my ego's first assumption is to look anywhere but my own legs for an answer.

Unfortunately in both cases, there is no easy fix

• Limiting zPower shuts out a large segment of your user base, and more importantly, a large segment of your target market (less costly than a controllable trainer or a power meter).
• No cost effective way to verify weight. You could pull data from Strava - but this doesn't stop people from lying to Strava either.

Until both of those are fixed, you're going to get people cheating, and people who think others are cheating.

I cycle with a group on Zwift named ODZ. We host a handful of rides and races every week.

Part of the issue is that riders on Zwift have bought into the belief that w/kg is the best way to break everyone into categories. On the flatter courses w/kg become s'more irrelevant.

We've started classifying everyone based on actual segment times. 3 laps of original Watopia or 2 laps of Richmond.

At least then you're racing against a category with people who have similar time abilities.

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http://www.teamodz.com
http://www.endurancelab.fit

I race zwift in the A category almost daily. MOST of the racers at the tip of the races are on legitimate setups and have become friendly on FB enough to trust one another having an accurate setup. Allot of the riders have real life friends on their to vouch for their power or have real life results to back their performance. Zpower does come into play from time to time but it is not as common as some people think. When an unbelievable rider plays along we often just ignore them. I know my power and weight is legit so if I'm questioned - I'm honored and will gladly hand over real world race results to back my performance.

Overall you just have to accept it isn't perfect and have fun doing hard work. I would rather do races then hard intervals by myself so I will accept some imperfection for the entertainment part.

I also do ODZ quite often - I'm sure paths have crossed online

C.Schumm...

C.Schumm - M Dangremond here. Glad you enjoy the ODZ rides.

We are hosting two long endurance rides on Sunday mornings - one at 2.5 w/kg and one at 3.0 and sometimes higher. Nice large group rides at steady state.

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http://www.teamodz.com
http://www.endurancelab.fit

Not w/kg but rather w/CdA. That seems to be the thing that the Zwifters who repeat the above are missing. Otherwise the guy who weighs 270lbs and putting out a modest 3 w/kg would just ride me off his wheel on the flats. Oddly enough, that doesn't happen "in real life".

I was on this evening, doing a "TT session" at about the time the Tues training race was starting. It was rather amusing watching all the messages pop up, from guys bitching about cheating and/or sandbagging.

I also discovered, unintentionally, how easy it is for people to boost their wattage via the Kickr spindown. I was getting an extra 40w tonight. So don't rule out that people doing that also -- intentionally or not.

There are also riders that I suspect have modified the slope value on the quarq to goose their watts.

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http://www.teamodz.com
http://www.endurancelab.fit

Are the ODZ rides invite only or open? I don't remember seeing them on the Swift FB page.

The ODZ rides are generally open. We have to date been advertising our coffee and cat and mouse rides on the Zwift Riders Facebook page. We may discontinue doing that and post our rides solely on the Teamup calendar page and our ODZ Facebook page.

The coffee and cat and mouse rides are on Tues and Thurs mornings.

We also have metric century rides on wed and sun mornings.

Message me if you want additional info.

-Mitch

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http://www.teamodz.com
http://www.endurancelab.fit

Not sure that the cheating in the ZTR races is as rampant as some would believe. I've podium'd in a few of the A races and I can tell you I wasn't zipping around at 5wkg.

The racing community seems to be growing, and as mentioned - most of the racers are known RL competitors with very similar results/power outputs outside.

The ones you see zooming around at unbelievable speeds are usually not associated with the events. Most likely oblivious riders on classic trainers..

I had to turn off the group texts because of this. I find the complaining much more irritating than the guys blasting by me at 11 w/kg.

Not to mention the political bent they seem to have lately. I don't need to hear about who you support while I'm working out.

After seeing some ridiculous stuff on zwift, it was nice to go on a real group ride last week and realize I don't suck (that much).

Are people cheating on there... I guess so. I don't Zwift nor do I have the equipment to and honestly at this point I'll probably not even make an effort to stray from my rollers with resistance sweat fest when I work out inside. With this thread in mind I clicked on one of my friends Strava Zwift rides yesterday and checked out some of the KOMs... the first one had someone at 99mph and the next had something similar.

As another poster pointed out, the strava segment leaderboards are meaningless. It is polluted with the (often accidentally) worst configured setup. The "jerseys" used to track the fastest current times for lap/climb/sprint are a little bit better since zwift has some bogo-detection and they only have who is currently on, but they still have a tendency to have some junk data from misconfigured zpower riders (not all, but definitely lots). The races are cleaner still, with a few questionable results, but more accountability since you tend to race with the same people over and over. If someone is an obvious flyer, they are just ignored for the race; no biggie. I think the OP is mainly talking about more subtle zdoping like fudging weights or power meter calibration.

hey a.buzz here ... i've seen you in the EB races a few times. i hate to hijack a thread, but i've found it hard to actually join races. if you pause at the start/finish, the "are you done" window comes up and you can't see anything. if i try to time starting the app on the clock, i usually miss the group. what is the best way?