Riding with friends is one of the best things about Zwift, and an upcoming feature Zwift announced this week aims to make it even easier. “Rider Teleport” lets you magically join friends or RoboPacer groups who are riding in the same world as you, whenever and as often as you’d like.
How does it work exactly? I’m glad you asked…
How Rider Teleport Works
Rider Teleport lets you instantly move within your current world to join a friend or particular RoboPacer.
To teleport, bring up the action bar and navigate to the new teleport icon. You can choose between a list of online friends or Pacer Groups. Select a friend or RoboPacer and the game will relocate you to their side. Easy!
(Don’t worry – the game will confirm your teleport command so you aren’t surprised by a sudden change of locale.)
Your current activity will continue when teleporting – you could teleport multiple times in a session and it will all be recorded as one activity.
Rider Teleport Rules
- Zwifters don’t get distance credit or XP for the distance covered while teleporting.
- Zwifters will get credit for any routes or segments completed during their ride, as long as they don’t Teleport in or out during that route or segment.
- Zwifters cannot Teleport into or out of events.
- You can only Teleport to Zwifters you follow who also follow you back.
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Use Cases
How will riders use Rider Teleport? I’m sure we’ll see lots of creativity from the community. Here are six ideas:
- RoboPacer Intervals: replace a structured workout by bouncing between RoboPacers holding particular w/kg. (I, for example, could bounce between Jaques and Constance for an Over-Under workout.)
- RoboPacer Ladder Challenge: start with an easy RoboPacer, then move to the next hardest after 5 minutes. Keep going until you can’t keep up! (Stronger riders may need to increase the interval length to 10 minutes or more.)
- Visiting Friends: it’s an easy day. Make some social calls! Go down your list of joinable friends and pop into each of their rides to say hello and wish them well.
- Easy Rejoin: ever joined a friend or RoboPacer only to realize you are on the wrong bike, or need to fill your water bottles or grab a towel? Coffee Stop may help, or you could simply stop riding, do what you need to do, then use Teleport to re-join the friend or Pacer Group you were in.
- Post-Race Cooldown: racing in Watopia or Makuri Islands? Once your race ends, you don’t need to end your activity and start a new one to cooldown. Just pick a RoboPacer group and teleport in to spin out your legs and cool down.
- Endless Everesting: turn any climb into endless elevation by parking a friend at the bottom so you can Teleport down to them once you reach the top. (Note: I don’t see anything in the official vEveresting rules prohibiting this, but it could lead to faster vEveresting times, so we may see those rules get updated.)
The Activity Map (and Strava) Question
After finishing the ride, your avatar’s movement during a Teleport will appear as a straight line on your post-activity map. Zwift has customized their maps (in Companion and on the web) so the line is more obviously a teleportation, but what about Strava?
My sources in Zwift say that, while they’ve talked to Strava about implementing some updates to make teleportations a bit clearer, they don’t anticipate Strava rolling out changes in time to support this update. So Zwift is moving ahead anyway.
Sounds like a smart move to me. Teleportation travel shouldn’t count toward your Strava activity distance anyway, so it’s really just a visual improvement we’d like to see.
Availability
Zwift says Rider Teleport is coming “this summer.” I bet it will launch between June and August 2023.
Questions or Comments?
How would you use Rider Teleport today? Got questions about this feature? Share it all below!
I had been hoping to use Coffee Break to solve the problem of joining a pace partner on a gravel bike by mistake, but figured that wouldn’t work due to being still moving. As you point out above, this would be the perfect solution to that issue. Looking forward to it.
Any word on if any of the new features recently announced have key commands associated with them? I would LOVE not having to navigate that action bar.
None that I know of. But I’m with ya – I love my keyboard shortcuts!
Give it a few days of everyone zig-zagging across Watopia and Strava will suddenly find the resources to make the map look intelligible.
Though honestly so long as Strava doesn’t give you distance credit for the teleport, it isn’t the end of the world IMO.
I expect they’ll soon get fed up with everyone cropping their rides.
I can see myself using this feature a lot. The only difficulty is spending the next few months wishing it was already active!
Seems like you missed the most obvious use of teleport to warm up with an easier robopacer, then jump to your target wattage without having to start a new activity
Can also be used for harvesting XP by parking a friend on top of AdZ/Ventoux and riding the descent over and over again…
already possible
That is a use that I had not previously thought of, it would make that process a lot easier.
This kind of misses the point of Zwift though, doesn’t it??!?
I imagine on Strava this will be essentially like when you pause an activity and forget to unpause before you start moving again. The activity shows a straight line but it has no impact on the stats.
I am particularly interested in the teleport for when I get dropped in a race :). I am guessing Zwift will prevent this type of teleport?
correct – cannot teleport into or out of events
this is perfect to situations that you want to pace near to your limit but you need to warmup
Completely agree. Looking forward to it for this reason.
I have often wished for this. Might also be useful for a cool down.
Does anyone else really dislike the sound of this feature doe to the big lines that it will leave across the map?? Also it is pretty much useless if you care about leveling up faster as all the progress on the route will be lost. It could be useful if I was a more social, chill rider, but I want the route badges so will probably almost never use this feature.
I never look back at my Strava or Zwift maps after the initial upload, so no, the straight lines will not bother me. Zwift is a training tool for me and this feature will allow me to spend 15 minutes with Coco, then flip to Jacques until my legs and lungs hurt, then back to Coco, etc. How that looks on Strava is irrelevant.
And all of the time spent actually riding will still count as XP – you are only missing the bits where you have teleported and not actually ridden, so you are not losing anything.
Getting badges is nice, but fairly quickly you end up where the only badges not already gained are the ones that you don’t really want to bother with – for me that is any route under 10 miles and any route over 70 miles. I’ll get them at some point, but I’m not actively planning on picking them up any time soon. So 90% of my riding is on routes where I already have the badge, so it becomes irrelevant whether I complete a whole route or not.
I’m for them rolling out ideas that don’t affect stability and reliability for the most common use cases. Sure, other people might change a coffee break to 90s or 5 mins and some people might not want the teleport — and hey, If you use a new feature, yeah that might bring new problems, but that’s all baked in.
If I’m worried about anything with this (or anything) it’s the possibility of people spamming or causing huge server/lag spikes (for example in events) or just making the UI utterly unbearable. But I’m choosing to trust they’ve thought about all that and will make sure none of that can happen.
super pour les entrainements avec les paces partners et la pause cafe
Nice! I already do the robopacer ladder challenge, and have thought how much smoother it would go if I could just jump from one pacer to the next. Looking forward to it.
Loving this!……..just what I need to join robo-pacers and ride effectively without an event or a workout. Looking forward to joining friends with this feature.