TrainingPeaks Virtual uses an Elo-like rating system for races. It’s very simple but highly effective.
- If you beat riders rated higher than you, you move up in rating.
- If you lose to riders rated lower than you, you move down in rating.
These ratings are then used in event matchmaking to ensure that you are placed in a pen with riders of a similar ability to ensure you get a high-quality race every time.
Note that quitting is penalized. If you leave an event after 30% of the finish distance has been completed, the game will consider you as having finished in last place in the final results, and your ranking will be impacted as such (and others will benefit from beating you). The exact size of any additional penalty is deliberately varied based on several other parameters (including how well you had been doing, and how far through the event you went) to make it harder to game the system.
Your First Race
For your first race, matchmaking is done on the basis of your configured weight and FTP (because potentially there might be no other data – e.g. if the very first thing you do in the game is enter a race). It is therefore important to have these set correctly before you enter any events.
After your first race, matchmaking is done purely on your results in previous events. Nothing else matters. If you do better than expected, you’ll face harder opposition next time. If you do worse than expected, you’ll face easier opposition next time. Explicitly, ratings are not experience (XP) based, so to reach a higher level, you need to beat riders of a higher level, not simply race more!
Ratings
TrainingPeaks Virtual maintains separate ratings to track your abilities in different types of races – Sprints, Endurance, Time Trial, and Climbing. A blend of these is used to determine the matchmaking in events to best reflect your expected ability in that specific event – for example, a short elimination race will be mostly based on your Sprint rating, but the matchmaking for a long hilly scratch race will be mostly based on a mixture of your Endurance and Climbing ratings.
- Sprint rating is determined by your results in short-distance events. Note that Sprint Rating is not influenced by sprinting at the end of long-distance races.
- Endurance rating is determined by your results in longer-distance events.
- Time trial rating is determined by your results in flat terrain events.
- Climbing rating is determined by your results in hilly terrain events. Note that climbs are weighted in the rating system, so a race with a single 10% climb is weighted more for climbing rating than an event with five 2% climbs (i.e. the gradient of the climbs is weighted more than the total elevation gain).
Note that a race isn’t just a sprint event or an endurance event. The TrainingPeaks Virtual rating engine calculates a weighting of the different factors and then applies that weighting to the Elo rating adjustments. For example, a short(ish) event might be determined as being 92% Sprint and 8% Endurance. The UI will display that as being a Sprint event, but your Endurance rating may still change by a small amount.
Rankings
Your ranking is a reflection of your experience and your rating. There are 6 rankings (Carbon, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond), and within each rank, there are 3 levels. When you begin racing on TrainingPeaks Virtual, everyone starts at Carbon I in all four rankings.
As you compete in more events your ranking will quickly increase from Carbon I to Carbon II to Carbon III as TrainingPeaks Virtual grows more confident about the accuracy of your underlying rating. Thereafter, your ranking will be equal to your rating and will move up and down according to your results in events – how well you do compared against the abilities of those you are riding against.
In addition to your individual rankings for each of the 4 types of races, TrainingPeaks Virtual also will display an “All-Rounder Ranking”. This is a simple average (mean) of the 4 component rankings but is only valid when all 4 rankings are no longer Carbon (i.e. when confidence in your ability is good). This average value is particularly useful for seeding multi-event leagues/series where the same riders will want to compete against each other over multiple different courses, and therefore need a ranking value that takes into account all-round ability.
Note that your ranking is a reflection of how you compare against others, and not a measure of your absolute ability. In particular, this means that it is possible for your ranking to go down even if you get better if those you are regularly racing against are getting even better than you.