Discussion on Team Points Cap and Non-regional Teams

[Hancockbs]

@Steve O 189232 wrote:

PI’m almost positive it’s not the device that does this, but Strava.

Probably a moot point but I know Garmin devices will show both total elapsed and moving time. Wahoo does as well (active and total).

[bentbike33]

@Hancockbs 189255 wrote:

Probably a moot point but I know Garmin devices will show both total elapsed and moving time. Wahoo does as well (active and total).

The Wahoo app reports non-moving time as “Cafe Time”.

[jrenaut]

To be clear – it doesn’t matter what individual devices do, it matters what Strava reports to the BAFS website through their API. This has been an awful lot of discussion over something no one has researched. But the bottom line is that integrating weather into the official scoring is unlikely to be feasible unless we have more volunteer coders.

[Steve O]

@Hancockbs 189255 wrote:

Probably a moot point but I know Garmin devices will show both total elapsed and moving time. Wahoo does as well (active and total).

However, this has no effect on what Strava reports. I do not use auto-pause. I ride with people who do. Our rides are identical on Strava.
Strava uses location and time data to determine whether you are moving or not. It doesn’t care what the settings on your device are.

[LhasaCM]

@Steve O 189260 wrote:

However, this has no effect on what Strava reports. I do not use auto-pause. I ride with people who do. Our rides are identical on Strava.
Strava uses location and time data to determine whether you are moving or not. It doesn’t care what the settings on your device are.

To some extent. You can manually configure the auto-pause on your device for different speed thresholds (or as you’ve done, nothing at all). That governs whether or not the data is recorded. Strava will then take whatever it gets and try to adjust for pauses itself (to calculate moving time vs. total time). However, if you kept your device running all day in your office (for example – you commuted in the morning and forgot to pause it for the day before riding home that evening), depending on how noisy the GPS signal is, Strava could count that as part of the moving time. So – even if the Strava API provides that insight (I think we can say that it does as the “moving time” is used for one of the “Time in the Saddle” chart), its reliability is another thing that would have to be looked at.

[Judd]

@LhasaCM 189261 wrote:

To some extent. You can manually configure the auto-pause on your device for different speed thresholds (or as you’ve done, nothing at all). That governs whether or not the data is recorded. Strava will then take whatever it gets and try to adjust for pauses itself (to calculate moving time vs. total time). However, if you kept your device running all day in your office (for example – you commuted in the morning and forgot to pause it for the day before riding home that evening), depending on how noisy the GPS signal is, Strava could count that as part of the moving time. So – even if the Strava API provides that insight (I think we can say that it does as the “moving time” is used for one of the “Time in the Saddle” chart), its reliability is another thing that would have to be looked at.

Jon had a good activity once that was a scribble around his house while he slept with a GPS on.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[jrenaut]

@Judd 189266 wrote:

Jon had a good activity once that was a scribble around his house while he slept with a GPS on.

Funny you should say that – earlier this week from my vantage point stuck on the couch, I saw a guy ride past the house with a BAFS ankle thingy on and wished I was Strava-ing so I could check the flyby and see who it was

[Steve O]

@LhasaCM 189261 wrote:

To some extent. You can manually configure the auto-pause on your device for different speed thresholds (or as you’ve done, nothing at all). That governs whether or not the data is recorded. Strava will then take whatever it gets and try to adjust for pauses itself (to calculate moving time vs. total time). However, if you kept your device running all day in your office (for example – you commuted in the morning and forgot to pause it for the day before riding home that evening), depending on how noisy the GPS signal is, Strava could count that as part of the moving time. So – even if the Strava API provides that insight (I think we can say that it does as the “moving time” is used for one of the “Time in the Saddle” chart), its reliability is another thing that would have to be looked at.

Right. But Strava doesn’t care if you have auto-pause on or not; in fact, it has no way of knowing what your device settings are. It merely uses time and location data. If the device records inaccurate data, then Strava will use that. Last year I had a ride where my average speed was over 2000mph. Whee!

[cvcalhoun]

@LhasaCM 189143 wrote:

For fun, I created 4 different random team assignments based on this year’s scoring (so with the weekly mileage cap and 10 riders per team).

In one of those 4 simulations, the final team score between first and second place was 5 points. Exciting! But 3rd place was 900 points back, so it was only slightly more interesting than where we ended up. The other 3 simulations were the same or even less competitive at the top than what we ended up with here.

Now – what if we went with larger random teams? Not surprisingly, things get a little bit more interesting, and more often the race for the win is relatively close. The overall standings get a bit tighter as well, but it still usually becomes a 2-team race.

The benefit to the random approach is that expectations are set up front that there’ll be no rhyme or reason to how things end up – not that it would actually be expected to change things

The problem with larger teams is that standings become more equal precisely because no one person’s effort has much effect on the outcome. If you have a 5-person team, the person who used to bike only a couple of miles a day, but decides to bike a century every weekend, can move the whole team up. If you have a team of 100, it gets to be like the National Bike Challenge, in which there is little motivation to push harder, because your extra effort is just a rounding error for your team.

[creadinger]

@AlanA 189236 wrote:

I’m sure the technology is there. Maybe every rider could get one of those personal weather reporting stations mounted on each bike that they ride. And then we could just upload that to a database. It seems like an easy fix to me! :rolleyes:

A friend of mine from college is a scientist in the Netherlands now. And they installed little pollution monitors on bikes to get microscale data on pollution levels in and around cities. It sounds like an awesome experiment that I wish they would bring here to the US.

[chuxtr]

Steve O and I were discussing scoring a little bit last night at HH. What if points were a function of miles, days ridden, and riding time? The idea that actual riding time (presumably in the cold) matters. Strava does differentiate between total elapsed time and actual riding time, so (theoretically) do-able. It would the inverse of stage racing like the Tour de France, where lowest riding time determines the winner. In this case, more riding time would be worth more.

[secstate]

score = (ride_days * 10) + (moving_hours * ???) + miles

[LhasaCM]

@chuxtr 189295 wrote:

Steve O and I were discussing scoring a little bit last night at HH. What if points were a function of miles, days ridden, and riding time? The idea that actual riding time (presumably in the cold) matters. Strava does differentiate between total elapsed time and actual riding time, so (theoretically) do-able. It would the inverse of stage racing like the Tour de France, where lowest riding time determines the winner. In this case, more riding time would be worth more.

I expect things would be slightly different (for example, I would become more “valuable” because I’m slower) but probably not appreciably so. I can drop in a few numbers from this year’s results to put proof to that supposition. Bigger question: what problem are we trying to solve with that? That would inform the function/relationship to set up.

[Subby]

Why make this so unnecessarily complicated?

Team points competition: total ride days (minimum rides have to be X miles)

Individual Competition: total ride miles

[musclys]

@Subby 189305 wrote:

Why make this so unnecessarily complicated?

Ugh — you obviously don’t get it.

[Author]

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