what happened to the serious organized races? the kiss series seems to be alive, but ztr, cvr, all gone?
There are more - and more varied - options than before. As the platform has grown, I think you’re just seeing more diversity. In the case of CVR, they’ve left to do their own thing from the ground up. We’ll (meaning Zwift… I work for them) be doing a lot more as we expand in eSports more generally - https://zwift.com/news/10822-kiss-super-league/
*is there something better than zwiftpower to find races in? *
Not right now. But we’re working to make zwift.com/events/ more robust in this regard. ZwiftHacks’ Event calendar is also great - https://zwifthacks.com/app/events/
is there anywhere where people discuss the races after?
The Facebook pages for the various groups, most typically. Though we just launched our own forum as well that you can feel free to use as well because we actively monitor it (we could never monitor all the facebook groups) - https://forums.zwift.com/
why/how do people get the DRAFT tag on their names? does it mean something?
DRAFT is a “team” (or club) like KISS, 3R (formerly WBR), DIRT, etc.
i see other little acronyms and stuff after names. are those teams?
Yup. Well, almost always. You might see something like ZHQ (Zwift Headquarters) for those of us that also have the little orange Z indicating we are Zwift staff.
*i have KISS/ZTR A on my name cause i added them back when you had to to get results. do you still need that? *
ZwiftPower still uses that stuff for filtering.
*is there any audio chat planned? often when i am trying to make breakaways stick, i wish i could talk. *
We’ve certainly talked about it. Discord seems to be the go-to for now, but I suspect we may consider this more strongly as a built-in feature as eSports grows. No planned ETA for it currently though.
*is everyone happy with double draft? i find its very hard to get away now, and if you get elbowed out of the pack, it is exceedingly difficult to get back on. *
Very mixed. Modifications to the double draft algorithm is one of the projects I am currently working on and which will be a focus of mine in January.
*further to that, is it just luck when you get pushed out of the draft? or is there like a technique? *
There’s a lot of technique. There are certain things that we do algorithmically that it takes some time to get the “feel” of - and it will also depend on your own particular setup a bit as well.
sometimes i see people have little messages bubble after their name. how the heck are they typing while racing?
it’s pretty easy with Zwift Companion and the speech-to-text built into most smartphones. Some people also used some of the keyboard apps that allow for quick built in text-shortcuts to generate commonly used phrases with only a couple keystrokes.
Racing has evolved on Zwift pretty organically. We’re aiming to preserve that but also give some more structure to it with our focus on eSports. Certainly plenty of people who know a lot more about racing on Zwift than I do in terms of tactics/teams/etc. I’ve done my share of races, but I much prefer Zwift as a training platform (though races are certainly fantastic training). But on any of the technical side, I’m happy to answer what questions I can.
Any ideas? And yes Ive tried entering the promo code again…nothing.