How does difficulty level work?

[Shon_T]

I could give you the formula, but basically each difficulty notch is 10% faster or slower away from the default of 5.  So difficulty 1 is 40% faster, and difficulty 8 is 30% slower.

Note we automatically slow you up virtual hills and quicken you down hills, as if you were always shifting to maintain constant resistance, but it's not particularly realistic (especially downhill because we don't coast).  It does however to subtly encourage riders to quicken their pedaling up hills and to take a break down hills to maintain constant velocity, and we always try to tie a sound component to our avatars to velocity so you can hear it too.

Btw in our next release we'll be storing your difficulty setting like other settings between runs, and are also making the 1-4 levels non linear so difficulty 1 is 100% faster, so that people with ellipticals can play easier.

Thanks again for the clarification.