It’s April Fools’ Day, and you know what that means – the game team at Zwift is going to have a little fun!
This is our 6th April Fools’ Day on Zwift, and each year the HQ has come up with something fun for the community. Last year we were burning rubber, and the year before that it was Paperboy. 2017 we had big heads, 2016 gave us the old-timey effect, and 2015 we rode big wheels on Jarvis.
This year we’re going back to 1989 with rad neon kits, brightly-painted steel bikes, and tube socks.
Use the color slider to change your frame’s colors, and enjoy the silliness. We all need a bit of a laugh these days!
Love it! I’m planning a big outdoor ride tomorrow but I may try a little spin in Watopia and enjoy the kit!!👏👏👏
Was the Big Wheels only for April Fools, or did they bring it back some other time too (Halloween)?
I remember riding it, just can’t remember when
Where is the bike I purchased weeks ago
I’m guessing back in the future 😊
So now I can’t finish the March elevation mission? Nice.
Contact support. I’m in the same boat. Hopefully they’ll credit us anyway…
It is April, too late for the March Mission
Well…it’s not March anymore.
It was still April 1st in North America when this started. Fortunately I finished the Scott mission a few days ago. If I had planned it for today I would be pretty frustrated.
It was stupid… I’m paying good money to have a blurry screen
For one day!!! Get over yourself!
I got over it! I just wish there would have been some way to bypass it, because it was stupid!
Each year they do a stupid April 1st joke. I think they are all stupid.
I like Scot think there should be a way to bypass it. I think when you start you have the pointless changes but then you have the ability to press a button to end it and go back to normal. I know I’d press the button as soon as it became available.
Annoyingly the crappy bike you had to ride was slow which messed up my planned attempt for an annual Alpe speed attempt. I destroyed by 12 month power PB up the climb yet it was only my 3rd fastest climb. Damn annoying for people who try and do serious training in Zwift.
He’s a paying customer and is under no obligation to “get over himself”.
My screen looks like a blurry mess, lame! This isn’t wait I’m paying for.
It’s horrible, super poor video quality. Disappointing.
Wasn’t that the point?
The sad thing is that the graphics of 2020 Zwift is very similar to the 1989 Zwift
How about have a speed test on this?
lame, do retro, but dont make the screen look like garbage. so much for zwifting tonight
This is super annoying. Do something fun like a bike option or kit, but the terrible graphics are just so stupid. This is going to ruin a race I was stoked about for tomorrow.
Ok boomer
haha! This is awesome!
Going to be a funny race tonight!
Lord folks, lighten up. Yeah, I’m bummed I won’t be able to knock out the Cape Epic mission but it’s pretend bikes in a pretend world. There are far more important things in the actual world right now and I hope you are all well. Stop and get some perspective though, this doesn’t matter. And as far as bad graphics y’all have clearly never played an Odyssey on a CRT with bad vertical hold and it shows.
well not so much when you have 200m of elevation left that you decided to spare from yesterday’s ride. but i’ll get over it
The Cape Epic mission ended yesterday anyway, right? (through Mar 31 https://zwift.com/events/series/absa-cape-epic-mission/ )
Disregard my comment… I just noticed you posted this yesterday. Yeah, that sucks.
I was still March 31st in North America when this started. Prime Time for evening riders in the U.S. and Canada
I was still early evening March 31st in North America when this nonsense started.
The Retro is really cool! But I’ve been trying for 2-1/2 hours to get my Cape Mission back on track. My wife is not in retro and still racking up elevation on her Scott RC. I’m disappointed and giving up. Put a little damper on a planned epic evening. It is what it is and Zwift is still awesome!
This is horrible. It’s literally unusable.
I like reading all the complaints. Zwift mixes things up a handful of times a year. At about $0.50 USD a day to subscribe, I want to see who has the strongest opinion or the most energy and dreams of achievement tied into the platform. Let yourselves be heard and may you never be silenced, for there is too much at stake!
April fools easter eggs are great, but have a look at other games. What other devs do.
If the Zwift team changed the bikes, kit etc. as they did, but left out the damn graphics filter, that makes half the people dizzy, it would be completely fine. Or at least provide a very easy one click solution to turn it off, when it’s just a simple post processing filter.
Being a child of the 80’s, I can appreciate the sentiment here, but this was horrible implemented. I just finished a 90 min ride (make up Tour of Watopia Stage 1) ride, and the graphics game me a splitting headache. Who thought the blurry screen and ghosted images was a good idea?
I get migraine headaches and my vision get blurry. This is the same. J lasted 5 min on the bike and had to get off.
I have migraine too, not going to risk it. I guess I try RGT today. Not fun.
Utterly lame and very annoying. Spend the time on sorting out the UI and race controls which were promised rather than wasting time on this cobblers.
Darn. I did bigger loop for the route badge in the hopes of doing the mountain bike swap. Nope.
It’s in 3d. So if you happen to have a pair around, it won’t look blurry ish. I don’t so it just looked like crap for me. They really should have at least given the option to turn it off. If I wasn’t doing a workout using the companion app, I would’ve shut it off.
Because no one ever gets a headache wearing 3D glasses? And while sweating profusely riding a bike? Yea, that’ll be a big fat NO.
this is horrible! Should have a shutoff option!
Ok. No Zwift today. In 3D. With no glasses and no way shut down the option. I feel lost alone. Thank you Zwift.
Love it!
Up early to exercise before work in lockdown. Spent a good 15 mins trying to fix the resolution. Eventually found this post. Started riding. Zwift crashed after 7km. Hilarious! Haven’t stopped laughing since.
Made me feel sick, had to look away from the screen for most of the ride. Awful idea, any new Zwifter who choose today for their first ride won’t be coming back.
They should leave it like this!
Really annoying. Spend your time (and our fee) on fixing the capacity issues with the massive amount of new members and the log in glitches NOT spoiling the ride. At least give 1989 price for 1989 quality. There’s a time and a place guys and you normally get it right but not today… rode a competitor app today for the first time. You wasted my ride trying to log in/out and clear this stupid effect. Off to work to ship medicines to NHS and pharmacy now
So… I spent the whole month training for this evening race on the Alpe and now i cannot compete ’cause we have to use this old bikes? 🙁
Everyone is on the same bike. So the results will be the same. Only slower. Race it today as planned.
Yeah, but i was looking to improve my personal record.. i don’t care about the race placement. So i’ll do the race tomorrow with the proper bike. 🙂
👍
Looks like they disabled it for races mid-day. I saw that it was on in a community stream from last night but no longer in a race I just did, downloaded a small update before that. You do still end up on the steel bike though, but you can change it before start.
Got me fooled! I tought the graphics were in lower quality because there are currently so many people on Zwift because of the corona crisis.
That is what I thought. It was late and I was trying to get a ride in and wasted time trying to fix this problem that was on purpose.
Just done ToW Stage 1 Longer Ride 53km. Raced it. No issues with the retro-ing. Easy to see where everyone else is. The stats screens are normal resolution. Everyone on the same bike for a nice change. Was really fun. It’s only one day a year. Chapeau Zwift. 👍 Only issue is the results are not showing up on Zwift Power ?
ZwiftPower have posted this message: Tour of Watopia results are delayed by 24 hours to preserve site functionality for community events.
Cheers Steve. 👍 I didn’t see that.
What does that actually mean?
What does ‘preserve site functionality for community events’?
What does ‘preserve site functionality for community events’?
What does ‘preserve site functionality for community events’ mean?
Can I sue them for health complications? Makes me dizzy and wanna throw up.
But I am not from the US
Well here’s another Zwift user who will not being using Zwift today.
Fine to have a bit of fun – but let us turn it off or make it only last for a minute or something – there’s certainly no way I’ll be doing the training ride I was planning on doing today.
Now I understand where the $120,000,000 has gone ! Nice one Zwift , great work keep it up 👍
grown adults: ”you ruined my life because you changed my video game” It’s one day and was for fun. Sorry you’re too old and grumpy to relax for 24 hours
The answer to the question “How can we make this game more fun?” is never “Let’s make it look way worse.”
Can I PLEEEZE keep this retro bike!
Do we get to keep the kits?
Don’t like it and want to make your voice heard? Log a support ticket for blurry graphics. 🙂
Awesome idea. I just did that. I wasted time trying to fix the problem last night, so they should have to waste time answering complaints. Morons.
I don’t know what is more funny, the April fool joke or the ridiculous comments. Looking at the you-tube video I don’t see the big deal.
I looked at it on the youtube video and it didn’t look that bad. It looked much worse in real life. If it had just been the kit/bike changes I wouldn’t have cared at all.
Maybe from the comments you can assume that the actual in-game experience is way worse? If you only looked at youtube and assumed everyone bummed about it is being ridiculous, check your assumptions and give people the benefit of the doubt. Thanks for your super useful insight
So you didn’t actually log in and try the experience for yourself, but just decided to post an angsty comment anyway? It was a lot worse looking at the screen than it was on Llamas screen grab video.
Oh oh, shut down the discussion forum everyone. Gerrie is here again to tell us we’re all wrong.
They should bring back the big heads and make faces Monroe customizable. That way we can actually tell people apart!
Fortunately Im one of the users that thinks this years aprils fool is big fun 👍😁 I Did ToW Stage 3 ( for the second time 🙄 ) today and was placed on the steel bike no matter what I chose, but apparently some was on a yellow “Lego” post/mail bike – anybody knows how to get this ?
I don’t know but I had it this morning in a group event too. I have no idea if it affects your ride but I never did catch the group after being dropped at the start line. Already April 2nd here by then too. (Not a complaint, waiting to see what they did this year was one of the reasons I got on yesterday but I had nothing at all. Maybe because it wasn’t 1st April yet for the servers.)
This was code that was left in from last years event. When they tried to roll back this change it caused this issue. If you pressed the thumbs up icon on your screen it would try to throw a newspaper (which would hover in the air because there were no Scottie targets). Pretty lame IMO
Thanks JimH and Heather 🙂 Apparently Zwifts Aprils Fool code is even more buggy than the normal production code 😉 It’s fine by me since my goal when riding on Zwift is to have fun while riding – and have my mind set for that. But I do understand people that find it anoying when they have planned for a race or some serious hardcore workout 👍
Very funny. But I thought I had to buy a new PC monitor. Thought there was something wrong with it. 🙂
This is the kind of stupid stuff nerds think is cute and laugh about. But I was pushing to get in a ride before bed and thought I had some issues and spent time trying to debut the problem and restarting Zwift. If it was just a kit change and things like that it would have been fine, but the blurry screen and screwed up graphics made me think I had a problem. Why don’t Zwift spend time adding a feature like allowing us to end a ride and start another one without having to exit all the way out instead of doing stuff like this.
I like to see them radial spokes on the front wheel, just like back in the day
I love the theme, it great to have something a bit different. Its only for one day. Great idea from the Zwift team 🙂
I lasted 15 mins. Had to look away from the screen, went light headed and had to climb off. Still feel poorly 1 hour later. Bad form Zwift!!
I want this kit and bike forever!
Ha yeah when I logged into Zwift yesterday (which was March 31 in the US) I thought something broke in my computer ’cause the graphics are so bad. Accepted this was a (very) poorly executed April Fools joke, did my workout, didn’t have the best time but got it done. Normally, I don’t think this would be a huge deal, but everyone on the *planet* is stressed to the max right now. Zwift is one of the only ways I get exercise now (stay at home order is in place here), so it was a bummer that I couldn’t get the experience I really needed to stay sane. I imagine that’s where a lot of the other stress and griping is coming from. Oh, and the fact that the software started April fools at 8pm in the US was real dumb .
Please tell me there is some way we can keep the 80s kit? It’s awesome
Very amusing… but had this “upate” messed with anyone else connectivity on Saris H3? ERG mode won’t work, no response to changes in grade, etc.
Profile says connected and controllable as usual but my smart trainer is not very smart any more.
The 1989 theme destroys the eyes and the experience of using Zwift. Unfortunately, it is not possible to use Zwift as it is now.
Did a race (not ToW), i had my correct team kit and my Madone with Zipp 454, so no complains; retro skin was (at least form me) only in free ride, which was nice and cool, i loved it! Than i logged some km’s on a ToW race because i just was 12km away from level change, and i wanted the doouble XP to make just 6km; no retro skin or blurry effect, but i was placed on the Zwift steel, like averybody else, so still no complaints at all!
After the backlash on social media, they made some rolling changes, including not forcing it in events. The entire thing was pretty lame IMO.