On-screen handling of difficulty level

When a <100% difficulty level is selected, the colors and grades that are displayed in the detail widget or the ride profile are adjusted downward, and the original profile is displayed as a dashed line.

I think this is misleading, because the grades do not actually change. What has changed is the virtual gear that we are using. When we change "real world gears", we don't think about that as a change in steepness of the road, do we?

I would recommend that future versions of the TDA don't implement those color or number changes. A small additional widget could be created to indicate difficulty setting, or this information could be displayed in an existing widget.

To make this absolutely perfect, the terminology should be changed from "difficulty setting" to something like "virtual gearing setting" where 100% means "your cassette" and progressively <100% setting would mean progressively "larger sprockets than your cassette".

  • A bit of a late reply but I second this suggestion to rename it to Virtual Gearing.
    I'd only suggest to make it exceed >100% for "larger sprockets"

    As a Mountainbiker with real-world eagle-gear setup I'd also love to see another option for less than 100% virtual gearing for those steep descents :)

  • Just now the difficulty slider also effectively gives larger gearing if you move the slider to the left. your cadence will increase on the steep positive grades & decrease on the steep descents as the artificial profile that the break is using flattens. You must remember to move the slider at the top of the hills to the left  ;-)