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Everyone knows Zwift With riders entering categories well below their fitness level or full-time strength (FTP), the racing category is a complete mess.
So most serious Zwift racers use Zwift Power, which forces you to ride in the correct category based on your FTP. If you race a Cat B and you are a Cat A driver, you will be disqualified.
A well-known trick for manipulating this is known as sandbags, where riders may deliberately underperform in a race (either physically or by setting their weights incorrectly) so they can race in lower categories.
Recently, however, a Zwift user exposed an even more insidious cheat that allowed riders to change weight mid-race with no sign of cheating in the race results.
This is also very easy to do. You just change your weight mid-race through the Zwift companion app and make sure to get back to the correct weight before the race is over.
User Luciano (/SnooCookies1153), the issue is publicly documented (web archive copy), hopefully it will force Zwifts to hand and disable cheats. It’s not a particularly difficult problem to solve, you just have to prevent users from changing their weight in the app, or even prevent them from changing any user settings while they are riding. I’m pretty sure this won’t be more than a few hours’ worth of work, and I bet someone can make this change in minutes.
Luciano specifically asked Zwift to fix this in his post. He does not recommend users to do this kind of cheating.
Unfortunately for Luciano, Zwift doesn’t see it that way, they see it as Luciano’s publicity of cheating, and thus ban him from taking certain actions for violating the terms of service. At first, it looked like he was banned outright by the platform, but according to Zwift’s PR director, Chris Snook, Luciano was banned from interacting with other users for 30 days and prevented them from appearing in events, competitions, and competition results”, rather than excluding them from the platform entirely.
Understandably, this has sparked a backlash from the community, with many claiming that Zwift is trying to cover up the issue.
Apparently, this problem has been around for a long time. It’s unclear if or how many times users reported this issue to Zwift, or if Luciano informed Zwift about the issue before it was publicly posted.
However, in a WTRL post, they stated that they were/was aware of the issue and actively enforced disqualification. But if the vulnerability is known, why hasn’t it been fixed?
Considering Zwift has been trying to market the game as a serious esports platform, you’d think they’d be more proactive about fixing simple bugs.
