In late July when Zwift took over responsibility for the operation of ZwiftPower, there were a lot of questions surrounding what this may mean for ZwiftPower moving forward. Just a few days ago Zwift posted an update on their forum. You can click to read that discussion, but here’s my summary and comments.
New ZwiftPower Support Team
Zwift has set up a dedicated support email for all things ZwiftPower: [email protected]. If you have questions about your ZwiftPower race results, want to report someone else’s performance, can’t get connected to ZwiftPower, etc, this is the place to go.
Zwift says:
Additional personnel have been added at Zwift HQ to serve the racing community. This specialized team is best able to help you, and can be emailed directly at [email protected]
Additionally, ZwiftPower’s Facebook group and private messaging have been disabled. This was where ZwiftPower’s creator (James Hodges) used to interact with Zwifters, but since Zwift has taken over the support role it makes sense to disable these tools and provide users a clear path to finding support. (Notably, a link to the Facebook page still exists on ZwiftPower’s homepage, and I can’t find any links to the new support email… yet).
No Big Changes Coming Soon
Zwift’s update says that ZwiftPower’s functionality and racing rules won’t be changing anytime soon. That’s good news.
They did mention a couple of minor updates which should happen in September:
- Adding course profiles for France and Paris maps
- Adding Sprint and KOM segments for France and Paris maps
Long-Term Changes
Zwift’s forum post included this rather cryptic final note:
Long-term changes (timing TBD)
Better race data-crunching integrated natively within Zwift
“Better” means different things depending on your POV across a broad spectrum of interests as a race organizer, club owner, and/or racer. As you add your comments, please provide that context for how you use ZwiftPower.
Reading between the lines, I’d say Zwift has no clear goals/vision for further development of ZwiftPower’s features at this point. Instead, they plan to keep the site maintained and functional while developing more “native” race features – effectively replicating some of ZwiftPower’s functionality on Zwift.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this – it makes sense for Zwift to focus on improving the functionality of their own platform and avoid investing major resources in a site developed by a third party. And in the end, isn’t that what we want: for Zwift’s native functionality to include robust features for racers, such as category enforcement, sandbagging controls, and more tools for race organizers?
The questions are: what functionality will Zwift bring to their platform? What improved “race data-crunching” will they prioritize? And when will it happen?
They’re asking for input, and some key racers and event organizers have already shared very useful ideas. If you have thoughts on how Zwift can best support racing with new features on their platform, I’d encourage you to post on the forum topic. I know I’ll be doing that soon.
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