Zwift Companion 3.0 has just released, and its biggest feature is Meetups: the ability for any Zwifter to organize and lead a group event. This is big news, and it’s going to take Zwift to the next level as a social platform. Here’s how it all works…
Organizing a Meetup
Meetups are organized entirely via Zwift Companion. Click “Events” then tap the trio of people near the top. Time to create a meetup! (Go ahead and give it a try–you can test out most of the features without actually creating the Meetup.)
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- Click “Create Meetup” and get started!
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- Choose your Meetup time, route, and distance, then click to invite friends.
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- You can only invite Zwifters from your followers list
Requesting a Quick Meetup
You can also click any currently active follower and request a meetup directly with them. This is useful for those times when you hop on Zwift and notice a friend riding and want to join them.
Joining a Meetup
Meetups behave like any other Zwift event, so you can RSVP from Companion or the Zwift startup screen. Here’s how the invite appears in Companion:
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- Click blue message to learn about the meetup
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- Click to RSVP
Once you are in-game you will be notified when the Meetup is starting, and you will be taken to a starting area to wait for your group. Once the ride begins you will see the usual progress meter at the top of your screen. Members of your meetup have a green highlight in the riders list so they stand out nicely.
Any in-meetup chat is visible only to those in the meetup. Nice!
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- You’ll get the standard event popup.
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- If you organized the Meetup, you get the leader beacon!
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- Off and riding!
Important Details
There are a few important limitations in this first iteration of Meetups:
- You can only invite people who follow you. This was a decision made by Zwift to limit spamming and let the Meetups feature be tested by smaller groups before it expands.
- You are limited to inviting 50 followers (for the same reasons above)
- You can only ride on the course (world) scheduled at the time of your meetup
- Meetups can be scheduled up to 7 days in advance
- There is no late joining of meetups
- You can only create three meetups per 24 hours perdio at this time. So be careful if you’re messing around with creating meetups, because the system will lock you out after three!
Zwift sees the massive potential of Meetups, but they want to make sure the features are stable and user-friendly before expanding. This is a smart move for sure.
Future Functionality
The core functionality just released is quite powerful, but there is certainly more to come for Meetups. Expanded features I can envision include:
- Easy invites: a unique URL you can easily to share to let others join your ride without being followers
- Off-calendar rides: give Meetups access to every route in Zwift
- Culled riders: this feature already exists for events, but it would be nice if organizers could set Meetups to hide all other riders except those in the group
- Audio chat: sure, we have Discord. But wouldn’t it be great if we could easily voice chat with those in our Meetup?
- Event types: let organizers define what type of event this is. Can we do a group workout? How about a race, where a leaderboard is shown at the end?
- All late join: we all have “that friend” who shows up late to every ride. An option to allow late joining for your Meetup would be nice.
I’m excited about the new Meetups feature, and I know there’s even more to come.
What do you think of the new Meetups feature, and what additional functionality would you like to see? Please share your thoughts below!
Can’t wait to give it a whirl. Feel free to invite me as well if you start a meetup! Peace
Brilliant
Tested a creation of a meet up. everything seems ok but i agree with you Eric:
Off-calendar rides: give Meetups access to every route in Zwift
Event types: let organizers define what type of event this is. Can we do a group workout? How about a race, where a leaderboard is shown at the end?
Those 2 are importants
A missed opportunity to introduce a world swap
A definite plus, but a big shame about the fact You can only ride on the course (world) scheduled at the time of your meetup Why are they so against world swap. The other thing I would like to know is does this give rider cull without it its a bit of a dead duck as the group would soon get lost. in the melee.
Does anyone know if you only see the riders in the group?
You see all riders on course, not just your group. But riders in your group have a green highlight in the riders list.
Great news. I’ve been waiting for this exact thing for a while now.
Defined event types next please!
What’s happened if I create a meetup in Watopia including Alpe du Zwift and invite people who aren’t at Level 12?
I bet it works, just like joining any other event. But haven’t tested to confirm!
I’ve got a meet-up at 8pm tonight (my first) but racing at 7 so I’m not sure if I’ll get there in time. A lot of our casual group rides have people joining late for similar reasons so I think late join is crucial.
Agreed, Rachael!
Cool thing…! Now we only miss adding a workout, that both can ride. That would really be cool.
VERY cool. Hopefully soon.
Before this new cool feature can become really popular this needs to be added:
Important ones:
* Easy invites: a unique URL you can easily to share to let others join your ride without being followers
* Off-calendar rides: give Meetups access to every route in Zwift
* Off-calender combined routes: Give the possibility to design a combination of routes. For example: Start by going up EPIC KOM and then up to the antenna. Then down to the jungle and up the Alpe Du Zwift. Down the Alpe Du Zwift and finish by going down through Italy villages and to the start line.
* World Shift: Let meetups be arranged in all worlds at any given time
Nice-to-have ones:
* Culled riders: this feature already exists for events, but it would be nice if organizers could set Meetups to hide all other riders except those in the group
* Event types: let organizers define what type of event this is. Can we do a group workout? How about a race, where a leaderboard is shown at the end?
One additional thing I’d like to see: when I see that fellow Zwifters that I follow are online, I want to be able to see where they are on the map. Meetup might be overkill if I just want to ride with them for a few moments. If I highlight their position on the map or even navigate to them in the shortest way possible, that would be awesome.
That would be nice. http://www.zwiftgps.com gives you that functionality… I’m not sure if it’s planned for Zwift Companion (which only shows nearby riders on the map at this time).
Voice chat would be great but seeing the lack of enthuiasm for Discord, I’m not optimistic.
Yeah, that was kind of a dream request. I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon!
LOVE THIS! We’re getting a bunch of our team’s juniors on Zwift for their winter training and this will make group riding on snowy New England days much easier. Eric Min and company, you’ve done it again!
Hi Eric, Thanks for staying on top of latest news with Zwift. Much appreciated.
You’re very welcome, James. Ride on!
Had fun on an event i created , good addition and bound to get better with refinements. The join event warning to other riders is pretty short, and there seems to be a bug in the sprints and KOm table, its cool that it shows “in event” times only but it only showed my time not other riders.
Be sure to report any bugs to Zwift support! Do so here https://forums.zwift.com/c/bugs-and-support
Would be great if the group would stay together like in the “group workouts” so I can complete the entire ride with my friends and not just start it only to watch them go off in the distance………
Is the chat switched to a group chat rather than world?
Yes, only people in your meetup so your chat.
I was in a group yesterday. No one was public. It was not a group chat.
I agree, As a Triathlon coach, my club would benefit from this option, so we can include all abilities, adding workout’s would be great also..
Briefly tested this so will reply to my own question! It seems as if the chat is still in world-chat mode… 🙁 A bad choice imo as part of the point of riding with friends is the social aspect – don’t want other nearby riders to listen in on our banter.
When we tried it last week, we could still see all the general chat in game, but only those in the meetup could see our chat (we had some team members who were riding with us without being in the “meet up” and confirmed this was the case).
OK This public chat is very bothering and littering group huts.
Great new features. Unfortunately for many (including myself), following the new 3.0 update, the apps map page no longer works.. just a blank page. Uninstall/re-install does not help. Both Android and IOS users are reporting this. Not too much effort put into the testing side for this one.
I’m new to Zwift but it was one of the first questions i asked – how to set up a ride with friends since we all tend to be on the trainer at about the same time. We tried it Saturday morning and had a few hiccups. I hit “Let’s Go” but i stayed sitting on the virtual trainer for probably 5 minutes. We had set the start time as the same time as the group C Bicycletta Donut ride Saturday morning and i actually joined both by accident. So – this may have been my fault. At any rate, when i finally started to move i rode quite hard trying to catch up to either my friends or the C ride. I don’t think i ever caught any of them. It also wasnt clear what the distance of my friend’s meetup was so i did the entire C ride. I apparently went 11 miles further than she did. No sweat – uh, well lots of sweat but that was ok in the long run. I tried to tell her what my kit looked like so she would see me, not knowing what to expect but i was clothed in the Bicycletta jersey for the Donut race so she would never have recognized me anyway. It probably doesnt matter at all but just so you know, i was on the regular Zwift app on my Ipad and the companion app on my iphone. I never saw a “leaderboard” or anything with her name so I wasnt even positive she was there and live. Neither did i see a leaderboard for the race. I did stay on the 30 mile Mountain route so Zwift kept me on the racecourse without any prompting. I hope this feedback helps!
Meetup does not have the category A B C D. You write about another thing.
Any chance of having 1) two organizers, and 2) a sweeper with red beacon on meetup events?
Is there any plan to incorporate the ability to use your brakes? Perhaps some kind of an add-on component to the trainer? This would add a huge degree of realism and the ability to control your speed for real.
For future development, could you add an elastic band so that riders with different w/kg can stay together in a group ride?
Do Meetup rides include tethering? So as long as each member of a group is riding to the same percentage of ftp they will stay together, even if the raw numbers are very different?
Not yet. I’m sure this is coming, though… Meetup Workouts, basically.
Perhaps in easy feature to add to this meetup capability… have all of your friends who have joined the meetup shown at the top of the rider list throughout the duration of the ride. That way you can always see where they are in relation to you. Currently they are highlighted in green and while that is a great improvement, once you lose them on the course, you have no idea where they are. Alternatively, perhaps add a button to the rider list which allows you to toggle between “all riders” and “friends only”.
I agree a sweeper red beacon would be a nice addition to the meetups and perhaps same jersey option available.
Is there a time zone we are supposed to set? I scheduled a Meetup for Sat@8:30am but the banner says tomorrow.
Is there an easy way to share a Discord link for voice chat?
I tried to add it in the invite, but there’s no way for the recipient to click it….
Three things I would like to see:
1. being able to select true draft
2. being able to set the same trainer difficulty of everyone participating to the same value
3. being able to select rubber banding
Reply to my own question. It might be a bug in the timing countdown, but if you set a Meetup time that is 48 hours (2 days) before the event the banner shows the ride starts the next day. I checked the following day and the start time on the banner corrected itself and showed the start time as the following day
The meetup system is brilliant with one exception…. the rubber band effect for the group option. A must have really.
Even with the similar ftp w/kg my wife and I have…. we still can finish 30sec apart or more at times between the ride. Its almost as if other than seeing a beacon and her name in green, not worth the extra effort of creating the meetup. If anything, it limits our workout because one of us is ‘holding back’ waiting.
This is an awesome feature with a lot of potential… just needs more features.