> He decided to publish what he’d found. The post racked up 800k visits in a day.
>
> It wasn’t knowing about the cheat that made someone a cheater, he reasoned. It was using it. The platform disagreed. Zwift issued a shadowban, allowing Pollastri to still ride — but no one could see his results.
So predictable. "Please keep Mr. Feynman away from the locked safes."
It seems really hard to get this 100% fair, because so much relies on physical equipment. E.g. "Elite riders learned the serial codes of batches of smart trainers that overreported a rider’s power, and sought them out on the used market" isn't necessarily "cheating" – if you happen to have one of these trainers but don't know it reports the wrong data. And what's to prevent someone from just hacking these things (e.g. the firmware, or modify it so there's less friction when pedalling, endless possibilities)?
Seems basically impossible to detect all of this without physical access to the equipment. The stupid "cycles better than a doped up Lance Armstrong" ones get caught (what did you expect lol), but the more careful people won't.
It is, for all the reasons you mentioned, and nobody is aiming for that. He just found and demonstrated a cheat (bug) that the platform itself should have no issue detecting - changing weight mid race
Zwift uploads race results to ZwiftPower and removes any cyclists that are outliers and it assumes are cheating. 8w/kg would be a big outlier. But it looks like the platform calculates w/kg based on the cyclists' ending weight. So if you change your weight to 25kg right after the race begins and back to 65kg before the end - while cycling at 200w, then Zwift's cheat detection system calculates your w/kg as ~3w/kg, which is completely reasonable and would not get caught. But cycling at 8w/kg is far far faster than 3w/kg
The article is overblown. He's not trying to end cheating altogether. He found a bug and demonstrated it
> The article is overblown. He's not trying to end cheating altogether. He found a bug and demonstrated it
The article says he did more than demonstrate a bug:
"He became a founding member of FERA, the Fair E-Racing Alliance, where he works with 25 other volunteers to assess suspected cheats across ~60 online cycling teams. The list of ways to cheat on Zwift he amassed? It’s now up to 127."
I think the article is written in a over-sensationalistic way and I would take it with a grain of salt, but also possible that he's really into finding bugs. Based on the reddit post, he's definitely really into racing on Zwift
The whole Zwift w/kg category system is inherently flawed even without cheating.
If you're in a lower category and right near the w/kg limit you could be 70kg and racing against 100kg riders. If the cat limit was 3.2w/kg you could have 224w a maximum vs 320w for the heavier rider.
On the flats they'll destroy you, in the sprints they'll destroy you and on the descents they'll destroy.
On the climbs? They'll hang right with you because you both climb at 3.2w/kg.
If you get fitter you'll just be bumped up to a cat with higher limits but the same issue.
Unless you're an elite cat A rider, where there's no limits, you should treat the races as just a fitness activity.
The heaviest fit rider will always have a massive advantage regardless of the course. So why "race" at all?
Sorta, Zwift doesn't give a lot of insight into how the w/kg system is reflected in terms of in game speed, but it's not the same as outdoors. I'm 190lbs with a 342FTP and I do not pull away from light guys on the flats the way I would expect on the road. But the light guys do pull away as expected on the climbs. Seems heavily weighted toward w/kg and not pure watts.
No not really. Categories are done on points for how you place in previous races. If you win then no matter what you weigh or how much power you put out you move up a category.
Any rider with enough power to ride you off their wheel would be promoted until they couldn't do that any more.
They don't get a special exemption to ride in races with weaker riders simply because they're heavy like on Zwift.
It would the same issue in reverse if they simply grouped riders by absolute wattage without using weight as a component. The light riders would always win in the hilly races and hold their own on the flats. Also weird.
What Zwift needs is an Elo system based on results. Just like in real life.
The pro peloton doesn't use an ELO system. There is a points system based on races placement, but outside of the team promotion/demotion every three years it's basically useless, especially for the individual riders.
Light riders are at an advantage on climbs IRL because "a light rider doesn't need to generate as much power as his heavier competitor because he has less weight to propel up hills." [1]
That's why I said "almost always". It's not like any branch of bicycle racing has weight classes. You always compete with people in your category no matter how much power they generate or how much they weigh.
I mean the same thing can be said of many sports that break amateurs into categories for subcompetition. They're all arbitrary at some point, and even if they're based on competition results, it doesn't distinguish between "took five years to reach this point" and "incidentally passing this category by on their whirlwind to XYZ much higher rank".
For example I compete in high power three position. Your classification (unranked, marksman, sharpshooter, expert, master, high master) is based on whether you scored X% of points for three consecutive matches (or your first two matches for initial rank). I've shot Master scores in every single match bar one, including my first match. But in the second match, there was some confusing misfire on one string (like faulty ammo related? Still don't know to this day lol), which dropped something like 20 points, which is basically enough to kick you down. Which means for the subsequent three matches, I was effectively sandbagging in Expert, and scoring high expert, and getting some pocket change for it (like $20, a fraction of the ammo cost). But I've never pieced together three high master, and may never get there. Meanwhile, we've got a couple people in the area who are literal national champions, and they score so close to perfection every time it's untouchable for the rest of us. It's like they're competing in a much more difficult sport than we are, like smallbore (actually one of the guys went to the Olympics for air rifle so that makes sense lol, air rifle is way harder than high power, score-wise and competition-depth -wise). If one of them shows up to the match, it's a guarantee they win, even if they're massively sick during the match.
In a previous life I did fencing, and had years long struggles to barely make B (sorta the equivalent of Master in high power 3p I guess). In earlier years of that life, I would get crushed beyond belief by Ds, Cs, and Bs. Eventually I got to the point where I could occasionally beat Bs, and by stringing enough tournaments in there, I got it. But I'd still usually lose to a B. And, just like in 3p above, everything we did was a joke to the serious competitors with national rankings, because they could just walk all over us. The massive gap between random A, and A who is high on the points list and seriously might make the Olympic team isn't shown by the category ratings. On paper they're the same rank as the old high master guys, but there's no real comparison.
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But ... despite all that, breaking into subcategories is a Thing in virtually all competitions, because it encouraged more people to participate. You're less demoralized if there's something hypothetically tangible to work for. It's everywhere - we break colleges into D1-D3 schools, high schools get even more partitioned. We break kids into tiny age brackets.
So you can compete in lower subcategories, but I think you're right in the back of your mind you need to remember you're doing it for fun or exercise (certainly not exercise in high power lol). That's why the people who get super worked up over scores or times or whatever at some middling amateur category look so out of place.
I think you've missed the point. Having categories is not the problem. Getting beaten by more talented riders, able to skilfully make of drafting is not a problem either.
The problem is that the categories are designed in such a way that heavier riders are allowed to put out more power than lighter riders.
At the limits of what the category allows the lighter riders just can not win. If they do put out more power then they get disqualified and bumped up a category.
Moving up a category does not help you and in most races you are not allowed to race against lower cat riders because of power limits are enforced.
In open category races you'll be racing against Cat A riders and they're going win because they have more power than you.
So if you race in Zwift and you're not Cat A, you either have to be the heaviest in your race or accept that you won't get on a podium. Ever.
> So if you race in Zwift and you're not Cat A, you either have to be the heaviest in your race or accept that you won't get on a podium. Ever.
I think you're missing my point. I mean even if you move to a different classification method, you'll still end up with the same problem. Even if you move to some vague skill-based or prior-results-based classification instead of a power metric or weight class or whatever, any amateur subclassification is still going to have almost everyone get crushed by the people who are just sandbagging or blowing through the lower classification on their way up.
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So what I mean is
Yes what you state is a problem. But I posit that even if you fix that problem, you'll still end up with basically the same underlying problem anyways.
A lot of the hacks available to users to cheap are the reason why the eRacing World Championships required riders to use smart trainers provided to them by the UCI. And the situation you state isn't at all the most common method of cheating. The hardest to detect (at least a while ago) was software based, where a third party software injection would intercept the data stream from Zwift and modify the power numbers. Before that, the most common cheating mode was probably either weight/height doping or intentionally using a power meter that reads high (frequently pedals).
(I race on a Zwift Racing League team, completed my 335th race yesterday, and have spent about 500 hours on the platform so far.)
The reality for Zwift is that less than 10% of their user base races and they don't really care about preventing cheating unless it's already in line with their product development plan. I don't think this is why they lost the eRacing WC sponsorship for next year (to oil-funded MyWhoosh), but I'm hoping it will encourage them to take this kind of thing more seriously. Highly doubtful, though, and anyone who trolls their forums already knows the animosity Zwift faces from many (most?) racers re: their refusal to fix stupid bugs.
Strava has the same kind of problems - many of the casual userbase just want to maintain accountability and get kudos from their friends: "Hooray, you kept your heart rate in the fat burn zone for 45 minutes!" Casual Strava users don't care about the top 1% hunting KOMs at the limits of human capacity. Therefore the Strava dev team don't care about that 1% .And the 5% who inadvertently leave their device recording when they drive away from the park, not to mention the 0.1% who ride a bike just above the running KOM to cheat back their record, completely ruin it.
It's very difficult to build a platform capable of fighting intentional fraud, especially when you have limited control of what your users are doing. It's completely hopeless if that fraud has limited impact on your business. Users with limited moderation/review tools trying to fight fraud are fighting a losing battle.
> The stupid "cycles better than a doped up Lance Armstrong" ones get caught (what did you expect lol), but the more careful people won't
I know someone who hacked their college system for applying for classes, it was a points-based system and he gave himself some ridiculous number of points, he got caught, ended up not getting in trouble
They also told him they had fixed the vulnerability. But they hadn’t, so the guy hacked the system again, and he gave himself a high number of points, just not a ridiculous number. He never got caught again
So predictable. "Please keep Mr. Feynman away from the locked safes."
It seems really hard to get this 100% fair, because so much relies on physical equipment. E.g. "Elite riders learned the serial codes of batches of smart trainers that overreported a rider’s power, and sought them out on the used market" isn't necessarily "cheating" – if you happen to have one of these trainers but don't know it reports the wrong data. And what's to prevent someone from just hacking these things (e.g. the firmware, or modify it so there's less friction when pedalling, endless possibilities)?
Seems basically impossible to detect all of this without physical access to the equipment. The stupid "cycles better than a doped up Lance Armstrong" ones get caught (what did you expect lol), but the more careful people won't.