msu2001la

Zwift has teased out the possibility of an upcoming new world.

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https://zwiftinsider.com/tokyo-teases/

They are purposefully vague in their postings, but Zwift forum users are speculating that it could be based on Japan - in tune with the 2020(1) Tokyo Olympics. It could be the Olympic race route, or it could be a new Zwift world that is inspired by Japan. I'd personally prefer the latter. I think the GPS-accurate routes (Richmond, Yorkshire, Paris) are cool, but they are limited and I generally just ride laps on these tracks as a workout in ERG mode, so the terrain becomes irrelevant. I find France, Watopia and NYC to be more engaging and fun to explore and push for PR's on segments.

It should be interesting to see what comes out. Sounds like it could be very soon.

atwl77

It's already out, I rode there last night. Very pretty (well, at least by Zwift standards), a nice change of scenery from all the deserts, jungles and snowy peaks that I'm used to seeing. But a bit short - from what I gather on the Internet, you can do all the routes in under 4 hours, and there are people who have already collected all the route badges. It's also mostly flat with just one big hill that isn't too long or too steep.

Doomrider74

Its alright. It looks good, which is a bonus.

There isn't much height to it but the climbs are punchy and fast and can be lapped.

My main complaint is whats with all the gravel roads appearing now? I dont see what benefit the gravel roads bring, other than the aesthetic. This map seems to be 50% gravel, which isn't great.

Also, its about time they did away with the guest calender and just made all worlds available all the time.

unterhausen

There is a zwift gravel bike that makes the gravel routes a bit more pleasant. I haven't ridden enough to get any of the other gravel bikes.

spelger

its virtual gravel. how much better/worse than virtual pavement can it be?

Doomrider74

It means you have to change bikes to get competitive times as the gravel and mountain bikes are faster than road bikes on it.

spelger

i suppose, if you are racing that would be true and you would probably care about that. but then again it is all virtual and full of cheaters.

i only ride one bike now, the tron bike. regardless of the road. me getting faster is just relative to that bike. it works for me.

genejockey 

Just you wait till there's a Kickr Climb upgrade to add rough road simulation. Add that to the steering simulators.

After that, there will be a crash simulator, for when you come into the corner too hot and wash out.

GhostRider62

If you aren't racing, who cares

But if you are racing, you are at the mercy of their crappy algo.

Doomrider74

It also works against live timing: Ive managed to pickup a few KOMs and a Green jersey recently on the roads but you have little chance of getting those on gravel roads without changing bikes.

unterhausen

I just find it to be demotivating that gravel adds so much drag on a regular bike. OTOH, I'm not sure if a tron bike is any slower than the crappy gravel bike I have.

spelger

i honestly never paid much attention to how much better/worse a non gravel bike performs in zwift. i started with the default ride they give you then graduated to the tron when i qualified for it. i don't recall if my speed changes or not on gravel. when i restart my subscription i'll have to take note (getting older so pretty sure i will have forgotten about it by then). i'll just have to believe those of you that make that claim, i mostly just look at power. now, when i was going up the alpe i certainly was speed/power focused there.

looking forward to the new routes when i get back in november. too bad mostly flat though.

unterhausen

It's about my speed, I think the steepest it got was 5%

I had my first zwift crash while I was riding last night though, circle of death and it didn't recover after 5 minutes. Prior to that, it took many attempts to get zwift to start up after the update, I wish they would work on that a little. It's quite common that it will never try to do whatever it takes to get windows to ask if you want to let zwift change the computer until the second try at updating. But that scrolling promotional splash screen gets really tiresome after a while if the program never finishes opening.

Doomrider74

It gets steeper than that. I think I saw an 8% section there.

Ed Wiser

Working my way thru each route. An there are a couple of steady climbs that hit 8 and 9 percent in the longer routes.
hope to have all the route badges this week.

spelger

i was going to try this because i still get 25 km/month but zwift was taking over 10 minutes to load so i got impatient and just road my last 1/3 around lake tahoe instead. next time i will start zwift before i get dressed for the ride. maybe 10 km into tahoe zwift was ready. its slowness to load is one if my biggest remaining gripes about that program.

atwl77

I got all the route badges already. The total distance if you do all eight is 100km, so pretty doable in one session if you have the time - though if you do the routes alphabetically, there's a risk of getting sick of climbing up to that same ancient tree over and over again

The first time the update with the new map dropped, loading times were a lot slower than usual but second and subsequent loading times went back to normal. But over 10 minutes is unusually long - are you on a computer with mechanical HDD?

spelger

mechanical HDD? yes. there is a squirrel in there on a wheel cage that i have to feed from time to time too.

atwl77

That's your problem. Should have fed that squirrel with some PEDs.

zjrog

I refurbed a machine with SSD and the first try to update took 3 hours... In which I shutdown and started over. And took less than 5 minutes. Hmmm.

Through Saturday morning, every time I tried to load the new world, the app shutdown. Stayed up and running if I loaded Watopia. But not the new world.

And then I had the grandkids for the weekend, so I haven't tried again since Saturday morning. Perhaps, tonight...

unterhausen

I know I'm asking for trouble, but if a zwift update takes more than a few minutes after the progress bar completes, I just kill it and start over. In my experience, it will just sit there in the scrolling splash screen for as long as you let it when this happens. I'm pretty sure it's quicker to kill it over and over again.

Whatever mechanism they are using for their updates is very unreliable

Doomrider74

There's a simple solution: get a Mac or MacBook
I dont even notice it updating on my MacBook.

Darth Lefty 

So it's rural Japan?

From "Ancient lands" I was thinking it might be the Lost World

Doomrider74

Yup. Possibly a precursor to an extension to include the 2021 Olympics course/s.

atwl77

Yeah, can't disagree with that. This is a very basic feature that online games have already gotten right since at least 2 decades ago. How hard can it be to give you a proper status indicator on the launcher "downloading update... verifying files... installing update..."