Since Zwift’s early days, our avatars would get out of the saddle and sprint if we hit 460 watts or more. It didn’t matter if you were a 50kg climber or a 90kg sprinter–the cutoff was 460 watts for everyone.
But a recent update has changed that.
Now, your rider will get out of the saddle and into a sprinting posture if you exceed 2x your FTP wattage.
Go past 2.5x and your sprinter gets in an even more strenuous position, tilting their head up and down just like the pros in a sprint to the line!
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A Smart Change
This is one of those little changes that just makes so much sense. Kudos to Zwift for making it!
The across the board 460-watt threshold wasn’t ideal, if you think about it–the 1400 watt sprinters haven’t even started working at 460 watts, while the lightweight endurance workhorses may be getting out of their saddles well before they hit 460.
Tying it to each rider’s individual FTP is smart, because it customizes the sprint threshold for each rider, making what we see on the screen with our own avatar and others’ more realistic.
Everyone Sees It
In case you’re wondering: when your avatar gets out of the saddle to sprint, those around you will see it as well.
This is different than the out of the saddle climbing behavior, where all the avatars except yours automatically stand on your screen once they hit a 3% climb, regardless of the rider’s actually cadence.
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Implications
How will this change affect our Zwift experience? Here are some ideas:
- Time to get sneaky.
Before this change, you would see riders out of the saddle quite regularly–at the start of the race, up short climbs, or when attacking off the front. But we’ll be seeing less out of the saddle riding on screen, because for most racers, the sprint posture threshold has increased. This means it will be harder to spot attacks since most are done below that 2x FTP threshold. - See a sprint? That’s a big sprint!
Racers will need to recalibrate their minds around the fact that now, when they see someone out of the saddle sprinting, they are really going for it. Double your FTP is a very hard effort to sustain for more than ~30 seconds. - More standing for less powerful riders.
Some riders rarely, if ever, saw their avatar out of the saddle. I’m talking about riders with an FTP in the sub 200-watt range, which is actually a lot of people. Those Zwifters will be able to get their avatar sprinting more easily now, which makes it all more inclusive. That’s a good thing.
Your Thoughts
What do you think of this change? Share your thoughts below!
WAY better idea.
It makes sense, the thing though is that there are SOOO many annoying bugs in the platform – plenty of things to fix way before getting to how your avatar is sprinting!
Sounds good. Except as some one with high FTP but low Peak power will struggle to get out the saddle much! But I guess realistic to my real life!
Whilst acknowledging the point that there are bugs that need fixing with Zwift (as with any software … any developer will tell you that 100% bug-free software is essentially impossible) it is also the case that once you move away from the 2 or 3 programmers working on it stage of being a development company, you will have some programmers working on bug fixing while others work on new feature development, so that the two things can happen side by side.
Introducing tweaks, changes and new features while there are still bugs can be frustrating for users, but the rollout of new features is important to the continued growth of the platform and the user base (and as a result the company itself), so you can’t drop that in favour of concentrating all efforts on bug fixing. You have to do both, or die in the market.
I have one of the worst sprints of any Zwift racing regular, so anything that can be done to help me go faster is a plus.
On the one hand, this change makes sense. However, it is now easy to game the system to make it so your avatar never gives away that you’re sprinting: simply raise your ftp setting in game to 500 watts
Yep. Or change it to 100 watts and sprint continuously!
Beyond signaling a rider is trying light their tire on fire, do the sprinting positions effect in-game speed?
Im still trying to get a handle on when the game applies bonuses/penalties for my avatar changing position.
They do not. It’s a visual thing only, you don’t get more aero when sprinting, or anything like that. Just checked/confirmed this with HQ!
This is a good point and I think it needs addressing, Maybe riders should be given a generic FTP until a real FTP is established in an actual ride. Manually adjusting your FTP should be disabled.
I’d like to think they ignore your user-set FTP and base it off of their calculation from your last dozen rides or something. If not, they really should.
You can think that, but it’s not the case. 🙂 We tested it!
Same for the tron?
I believe so. Didn’t test it with Tron, but it’s always been the same.
My avatar isn’t in aerodinamic position a lot of time. I see a lot of raiders with no TT bikes crouched holding the handlebar underneath. How is it?