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    FeaturedReferenceHow Zwift Works

    Ghosted by the Ghost: the 200-Meter Limit to Zwift’s Invisibility PowerUp

    Eric Schlange
    By Eric Schlange
    July 29, 2022
    13

    Recently I was sitting at my desk here in the Zwift Insider Pain Lab, watching Boone on his Wahoo KICKR Bike trying to hang with the Bs in Crit City.

    Being a faithful teammate, I was in charge of deploying powerups. When Boone got stuck with a ghost/invisibility powerup on the final lap, we decided to hold it until the final ~15 seconds. But when I hit the spacebar to activate, nothing happened! Glancing at the screen, I noticed the ghost powerup icon was greyed out. Disabled?

    This is something I’d never seen before, or heard of anywhere in the Zwiftosphere. Reaching out to a few contacts at ZwiftHQ didn’t clear things up – one told me they vaguely remembered some talk about disabling the ghost in the final 100m of a race, but hadn’t heard if that was in game yet.

    So I decided to test it. Which is a bit of a pain in the but, I have to say! First, you have to find races which include a custom mix of powerups which includes the ghost. (ZwiftHacks’ events app was a lifesaver here.) Then I had to join those races, ride until I got a ghost powerup, then hold it to the finish to see what happened.

    It took some doing, but in the end I believe I’ve confirmed this: the ghost powerup is disabled in races within 200 meters of the finish.

    This has been confirmed in races in NYC, Watopia, and Crit City thus far. So I think it’s safe to assume the powerup behaves this way across all of Zwift.

    Confusion or Opportunity?

    This 200m limit may be viewed differently, depending on whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist, or perhaps whether it’s you holding the ghost into the finish or your opponent.

    A pessimist might say this 200m limit, which isn’t mentioned anywhere in the game, is confusing. (There are no other powerups that get disabled near the finish of races, or anywhere for that matter). This can lead to frustrating situations like what happened with Boone and me, where racers hold the ghost for a final attack but are not able to activate it.

    An optimist might say this is a good game design decision from Zwift, because who wants to lose to someone they can’t see? Plus, if you know it’s disabled in the final 200m, you can strategically choose when to activate your ghost powerup for maximum advantage.

    A bit of math shows that at 50kph, you’ll cover 139 meters in 10s. 72kph covers 200 meters in 10s, but most finishes in Zwift aren’t moving that fast. So realize you’ll need to activate your ghost before the 200m mark, and you’ll become visible again a handful of seconds before the finish line. Good luck!

    Questions or Comments?

    Share below!

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      Eric Schlange
      Eric Schlangehttp://www.zwiftinsider.com
      Eric runs Zwift Insider in his spare time when he isn't on the bike or managing various business interests. He lives in Northern California with his beautiful wife, two kids and dog. Follow on Strava

      13 COMMENTS

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      Rogerio
      Rogerio(@neoprotheus)
      11 days ago

      I suspected this when I was run over by the platoon on arrival!

      1
      Reply
      Gordon
      Gordon
      11 days ago

      I always thought it could be a good idea to disable all power ups within a certain distance from the end. Power ups are fun but not sure they should be the deciding factor in a race.

      0
      Reply
      Zwiftdawg
      Zwiftdawg
      11 days ago
      Reply to  Gordon

      *game. You misspelled it “race”

      4
      Reply
      Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg
      Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg
      11 days ago
      Reply to  Gordon

      yeah, especially aero, which is THE decider in every race in which it exists.

      5
      Reply
      Paul Himes
      Paul Himes
      11 days ago

      Honestly sort of surprised that they’re worried about the optics of being beaten by someone you can’t see when it regularly happens that you see yourself beating someone on your screen only to see the final results show that the opposite happened. Happens often enough even on Zwift Community Live broadcasts that in things like ZRL Premiere Division races that end in a bunch sprint, the announcers say that they can’t announce the winner until the back end data is processed (even if it looked pretty clear who crossed the line first on the screen) because they don’t want to… Read more »

      4
      Reply
      Kelley Wegeng
      Kelley Wegeng(@kwegeng)
      11 days ago

      I think it then becomes a PU for going early, like at the 500 or even 1,000 meter mark. I have twice won ZRL races with the ghost. Once I was at the end and I think my competitors had no idea I had sprinted past them all, and importantly did not see me to catch my wheel when doing so, and once about 1 km out. The second was a race in which we did many laps of a course and there were some riders in the distance the field was going to lap before the finish. I went… Read more »

      1
      Reply
      Curtis
      Curtis
      11 days ago

      Based on my reading about Zwift I though this was a widely known fact/already confirmed?

      5
      Reply
      C.L.F.
      C.L.F.
      9 days ago
      Reply to  Curtis

      I’m puzzled, too. I thought I had read that already. And where else should that have been as on ZwiftInsider? 🙂

      0
      Reply
      Trevor
      Trevor(@freburt)
      11 days ago

      Eric, I wonder if it’s due to how zwift knows when someone crosses the line. If they are invisible, their code might not know you crossed the line and not in the results or finished in the race. Their quick fix to account for that would just not allow it too close to the line. Instead of trying to figure out how to ‘fix’ crossing the line invisible.

      0
      Reply
      Matt Armitage
      Matt Armitage
      10 days ago

      In the last 200m surely everyone going for the win is already sprinting anyway?
      Better to hit it at 500 plus and take a flyer off the front …

      0
      Reply
      Oliver
      Oliver
      10 days ago

      I used one in a race tonight and it seemed that even if you deploy the Ghost before 200 m, when you enter the 200 m zone you become visible again. So the latest you should ever use it is at 325 m, and earlier if you’re going faster than 45 km/h.

      0
      Reply
      Tom
      Tom
      7 days ago

      Eric, I remembered you wrote about this before and yes, I found it, but you mentioned a 100m zone then:
      https://zwiftinsider.com/misused-powerups-cloaking/
      Smartass me 🙂

      1
      Reply
      Eric Schlange
      Author
      Top Member
      Eric Schlange(@eschlange)
      7 days ago
      Reply to  Tom

      Very observant, Tom! Even I forgot I had mentioned it in that post! Now I need to go correct the 100m figure… 🙂

      0
      Reply
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