Simon, Shane and Nathan reconvene to consider the state of the Zwift nation. Once the pressing matter of “leg posts” is dealt with, the podcasters move on to discuss the content of Simon’s interview with Zwift’s new hire Mark Cote, the company’s director of programming and content. One of the many strands of Mark’s expansive new role, which he explains in some detail, is to improve the communications between community and company, a move that the Zwiftcasters believe will be welcome.
There’s been yet another Strava shake-up on Watopia and the other Zwift worlds with a whole load of segments vanishing from the public view. Simon chats with Zwift Insider’s head of everything, Eric Schlange, on what it all means, how it came about, and why it might be time for a re-think of how segments are made and managed.
The podcasters range across a cornucopia of Zwift business including signs of Zwift restricting some hardware on some platforms for some users and the reasons why more women than men seem to be getting public sanctions for cheating in racing.
Zwift has recently launched another of its social impact campaigns, this time celebrating the contribution Black athletes have made to the sport. Simon chats to one of the inspirational voices of the initiative, ex-racer and Zwift staffer Rahsaan Bhati.
And in and amongst all that there’s lots of other Zwift-related chat. We hope you enjoy listening.
Unfortunately for Mark Cote, and more so for Theodore, a couple of the biggest issues Zwift appears to be facing yet not facing-up-to and are fundamental to the platform yet also fundamentally flawed are:
1) The current Zwift graphics engine (or how they make use of that engine) is woeful if they want to classify Zwift as a ‘game’, provides little to no local control over graphics level/quality used, and constantly suffers from extreme visual bugs and failures in larger events, and:
2) The current Zwift approach to race data processing (i.e. each rider’s values are processed on their own device) means that different riders in the same exact race on the same piece of virtual road see themselves and other riders in different positions and at different distances from each other which is untenable if the want to classify Zwift as a fair and reliable platform for ‘E-Sports’
So they’re kinda stuck between 2 classifications of the platform and not really working entirely properly as either…and seemingly unwilling to admit or work on addressing either of those core platform issues!
P.S. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Zwift since I started on it back in May, and it’s been both fun and healthy for me, but they do have issues right at the core which just adding new features or improved content scheduling won’t resolve