This continues my series of broad, foundationless speculation regarding Zwift feature development. One of my favourite pastimes!
First I took a high-level view of what could be next for Zwift. This generated over 300 comments, and even more on social media platforms. Cleary feature development is a subject that Zwifters love to debate. Following this, I took a deep dive into the future of racing on the platform, specifically how a ranking-based matchmaking system could work.
Today I will be looking specifically at Zwift Clubs – a FutureWorks feature that will hopefully see a broader release and some significant development progress in 2021.
What is Zwift Clubs today?
Zwift Clubs has been rolled out to a select beta audience made up mostly of the larger clubs and event organisers on the platform. The current feature set is quite limited; you can join a club, message within the club, and see total statistics for the club’s riders.
For a more detailed breakdown of Clubs as it exists today, please see Eric’s most recent Clubs feature breakdown.
Clubs homepage Event editing Member list tools
What type of clubs are there?
Before we look at the potential of this “system”, it is important to understand the types of groups that would consider themselves clubs, as their usage and use-cases can differ significantly.
- Zwift virtual clubs – these are the likes of DIRT, CryoGen, BRT, and my own Socks4Watts. Communities of Zwift users who for the most part may have never met in real life, but come together under the same banner for Zwift races or events. Their numbers can be in the thousands, and for event series like the ZRL they may manage dozens of teams. They are also the most common hosts of official Zwift events.
- Real-life clubs – often governing-body affiliated, these clubs typically organize real-life group rides and events with formal (paid) membership. (My understanding is that much of the boom in Meetups at the start of lockdown came from real-life clubs organizing group rides for their members.) They are typically interested in being able to arrange rides, group workouts, or events directly through the platform for their membership base.
- Less formal clubs – maybe groups of friends that like to ride together in real life, or are using Zwift as a way to keep in touch and keep fit at the same time. They would use clubs as a way to better engage with their friends and share the content that Zwift has to offer. For example, they could see which rides their club mates have signed up to, or challenge each other for most miles/kms in a month.
It’s worth noting that a given individual may identify themselves as part of all three types of clubs.
What features can be contained within Clubs?
Meetups and Races
Within a club, you should be able to organize a meetup and invite everyone in the club with one click. It should be possible to plan these far in the future, and have a calendar of future meetups visible that you can join or decline. It should be possible to stage these meetups as races or time trials with full race capability, including start pens and finish lines. These types of events are only visible to club members.
Hosted events
These are events hosted by the club that are publicly visible, much like the events that we see today in the Companion app. It should be possible for club members to view and attend club-organised events from the club page. It should also be possible for club admins to create and submit events from this page. It is likely that Zwift would need to grant public event capability to certain clubs, and approve events once they are submitted.
Target club races/rides
A club should be able to flag publicly available rides or races as target events for the club. These should be visible in the club calendar for members to join.
Club kit
This is a big one, but not an easy one. Clubs that already have an in-game kit, should be able to access a setting that grants the kit to all of the club’s members. If somebody leaves the club, they lose access to the kit.
For clubs without an in-game kit, a basic kit selector should be available. With a selection of colours and patterns, most clubs should be able to closely replicate their real-life kit, or at least select something unique to identify themselves with the game.
Communication
Within the Clubs portal, it should be possible to message members and post announcements. It is unrealistic that you will be able to replicate a feature set like Facebook groups, so the functionality should focus on the key elements to update members, and provide links to Discord, Instagram, club website, Facebook, etc.
Sub teams
Maybe an advanced feature, but it should be possible to subdivide a club with a parent-child relationship. This allows for a club to keep its portal relatively clean while allowing subgroups to communicate privately without clogging up the main feed.
Stats
The Club portal should host all of the club’s statistics – distance and elevation league tables over time, club member rankings, overall club ranking, etc.
How can Zwift Clubs be used in the wider world of Zwift?
Once Zwift has developed Clubs, it becomes possible to group riders together elsewhere in Zwift which enables a number of possible functionalities…
Races
Within a race, teammates can be clearly identified in the rider list and mini-map to help with team tactics. Potentially the game mechanics could also be adjusted. Imagine if you could auto-steer to the wheel of a teammate before a break, or if there were team-based powerups that gave all of your teammates in the vicinity an aero or drafting boost. This could increase the ability to execute team tactics.
TTTs
If Zwift can identify teams, it becomes possible to use the conveyor system for TTTs. Drafting could be limited to only your teammates so passing other teams is no longer an issue. It could also then be possible to use TT bikes in TTT events!
Local chat
There should be an option to make in game messages only visible to your club members. That way if you are in a race and spot a teammate, you can privately plan an attack without it being visible to all riders.
Your Comments
Well, that’s my brain dump for the potential of the Clubs feature. How do you think you would use it? What have I missed? What feature set would you like me to explore next time?
Also I would like to be able to set a workout for a club ride. Currently we are using the workaround of joining the group ride then selecting the workout, but you have the hassle of people not finding it,etc. Just let me as an organiser to choose it like the route and it’s just there for everyone
Great idea!
Yes great idea. Even better if you could pre-load a custom workout. Should have included this!
I’ve been wondering how workouts like Ed Laverack’s ZRL Saturday rides could be evolved, and possibly monetised in the game. Ed creates a workout simulating each ZRL race, and then leads the workout, while live-streaming on YouTube. If I could subscribe to a club that had workouts, including real-time video from elite or ex-pro riders that I follow, then I might pay extra for that. I like “free” though!
„Imagine if you could auto-steer to the wheel of a teammate before a break, or if there were team-based powerups that gave all of your teammates in the vicinity an aero or drafting boost.“
Both of this 100x!!
„Drafting could be limited to only your teammates so passing other teams is no longer an issue.“
And all could start same time.
All sounds great – a question though – im interested in racing in a league but lets say I can only make a couple of the start times each week…is there a minimum no of races or do I drop down league in view of small no races…or are results averaged out by no ridden? Have not a clue about how to join a league…im only Cat C…love the idea of joining a club but worried cannot make enough races. Thx
There are lots of race league series. Some of them will have a minimum number of completed events, e.g. 7 race series, 5 best results count. In the ZRL, you can drop in and out of races as it is team based. Most teams will ask for your availability and select a team for each race.
I’m a ride leader for the Herd. We use Meetups a lot for regular rides because time slots aren’t available for group rides. However, the meetups function does not allow you to retain a regular list of riders. You constantly have to go back and re-invite regular riders. Can’t Zwift fix this functionality to retain the complete list of riders you invited to the last ride??
You can go to past meet ups and duplicate. This picks up a lot of the riders previously invited, but you have to manually check still
Yes, I’m aware of this. When you’re running several meetups a week and have 40 or 50 riders per meetup and 30 of them get dropped on the carryover it’s not very helpful and it’s extremely time consuming to keep re-issuing invites for what is essentially the same ride.
I did not know this! I’ve been organising one every week and just discovered the function. Thanks!😋
Not much meat in this article, except a few things of minimal value such as “Drafting could be limited to only your teammates so passing other teams is no longer an issue“. Much of the rest already exists (Meetups & Races = these are Club Events that are only visible to club members & you don’t have to be invited to, Hosted Event basic functionality exists & being improved, Club Chat allows message posting by members, Stats partially implemented) or have been discussed 1000 times (club kits) & on Zwift’s long list of things to do.
If you raced in TTTs drafting limited to your own teammates is of great value
I meant limited in the general sense. Sure, if you race TTTs, it has value. To the general Zwift community, if has almost no value, since only a small percentage of Zwifters race TTTs.
I’d like to think that the value is shown in each of the points listed.
The TTTs would benefit a lot more from a dedicated race mode, which would also create a separate instance of the world for each team. You wouldn’t need “team only” drafting then.
I think that each team riding in it’s own instance of a world would make overtaking impossible. That would certainly reduce the fun!
Maybe. I see it as an optimization.
If you want overtaking, it makes little sense to disable the drafting effect between members of different teams.
I’d like to see an option for a meet-up leader to be able to use the no-drop feature at the start of a ride and then be able to switch it off at some point during the ride. I organise meet-ups which are coached sessions, it would be great to be able to finish a ride with a burn up at the end. or for example a climbing interval session finishing with an all out sprint to the finish line at the summit.
I would love to get my IRL club, Northampton Cycling Club, formally on Zwift. We already have our jersey in game; however, Zwift told us the beta is closed. We have over a hundred members on Zwift. We currently host four meetups a week. We are surviving, it is just challenging to get club members to follow a few ride leaders so they may get the invitations. Hopefully, this feature is release to a broader audience soon.
I ride with the Herd. We have over 10,000 members and host hundreds of rides of weeks and have been doing so for 2 years. We just got our jersey. Just as a point of reference …
Pardon my pessimism, but how sure can we be that this is still in development? As much as I would enjoy a fully functional Clubs integration within Zwift, I’ve seen too many advertised features turn silent in the last year to hold any hopes.
Great article guys and nice to see a reference to clubs again! Reading this gives me hope that this feature hasn’t just been forgotten about completely (maybe false hope! 😂). I host 4x meetups a week for my local club. We’re getting roughly 30 riders turn out for them, which is great. However trying to keep on top of it via Meetups is a chore :(. Constantly having to select the riders to attend and then trying to run a club race league is really starting to do my head in, when using meetups solely. I can only imagine how… Read more »
I think that an interesting concept for Zwift to think about would be the ability to send generic messages concerning strategy to all club members in the race at once. Zwift could have some preset messages programmed in to the companion app such as “I’m going to attack” or “I’m struggling right now” or even something like “Let’s come to the front and push the pace” I think that this would be a real asset to implementing team tactics in Zwift races because I often struggle to speak clearly on Discord when riding on the limit and out of breath,… Read more »
I like this idea! Relatively easy to implement in the Companion app too.
Would like to be able to set the right hand panel to Club/team members only for races and TTTs. I want to know where my teammates are in the pack in RRs and when passing other teams in TTT. They often fall off the panel and don’t know if they’ve been dropped or got a gap OTF.
It would be nice if there could be some functionality to keep team members together in the field. Today we are randomly thrown left and right, which makes it impossible to hold the team together. There should be some sideways stickiness to other team members to make it possible to work as a team.
Another idea I have seen (https://forums.zwift.com/t/teams/13647), is to set up ad-hook teams before the race (in the pen) for those that are not part of a team. Give them the same kit and let them be a team just for this one race.
We have an active group here in the Northwestern US doing about 200 rides/year and have riders from 15 to 80+ and average pace from 11 to 23. Regroups would be nice with an auto pause feature for the riders out front to wait for the slower riders. Now riders waiting are penalized with a report of a slow pace when some of the ride was spent waiting for others. Our group primarily focuses on outdoor rides, but in the winter here in Oregon the rain dampens the spirit and the turnout suffers. On our summer rides we do not… Read more »
As a Zwift team manager and a. creative technologist by trade, I’ve been really excited about the Club feature since I first heard about it. TEAM LiveByCycling’s core focus is the weekly TTT. Early on, I pondered ways in Zwift’s Clubs feature paired with existing Zwift technology would be a game changer for TTT racing. No more TTT Team Tags. Instead, each club would consist of the parent club, and sub-clubs. Each sub-club would it’s own TTT team. No need for captains to set a delay timer. Instead, Zwift’s existing TT conveyor system would queue each TTT Team. Accurate results. Since… Read more »
I wrote an extensive comment earlier (see above) on how the Clubs feature would be a great benefit to TTTs. As I was getting ready for today’s race and thinking about our team’s 9.5 minute delay…it reminded me of yet another advantage.
As I mentioned earlier, the existing Zwift TT conveyor system could be used, so
1. you wouldn’t have to join the pen early and
2. You could continue spinning to keep your legs warm! Currently you have to spin backwards or do a workaround that isn’t ideal.
Bring on the Clubs feature!