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?
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I suspected this when I was run over by the platoon on arrival!
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.
*game. You misspelled it “race”
yeah, especially aero, which is THE decider in every race in which it exists.
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 »
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 »
Based on my reading about Zwift I though this was a widely known fact/already confirmed?
I’m puzzled, too. I thought I had read that already. And where else should that have been as on ZwiftInsider? 🙂
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.
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 …
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.
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 🙂
Very observant, Tom! Even I forgot I had mentioned it in that post! Now I need to go correct the 100m figure… 🙂