base2 

I think the trainer difficulty setting ought to be called "trainer reality" instead. Trainer Reality is a more appropriate term for what it actually does.

There should be a pop out menu so that you can scale the in-game world to your trainer bikes actual gearing. So if, for example, your trainer bike has a 52/36 crank set and an 11-25 cassette, but you'd like to ride the virtual world as if you had a 50/34 and an 11/34 you could select these in a menu and the "reality" slider would automatically slide to ~72% for the lowest gears and scale to 96% when you are in the flats and down.

You could also go the other way. Say your trainer bike is a 1x with a 42 tooth chainring and you'd like to simulate a 2x Standard crank set so you could ride Tick-Tock without spinning out, you could do that, too.

I don't quite understand the mechanism behind how they execute the trainer difficulty setting effect but my feeling is they do so by scaling the gradient algorithm virtually on some non-linear (exponential ?) scale. It doesn't seem like it would be hard to code in a "what are your actual gears, what gears do you want?" feature to make that setting obvious.

Sy Reene

All of this discussion will get pretty muddled and moot, as virtual gearing comes into the fore. 24 virtual gears now on the One version trainer, plus if you stick a full cassette on such a trainer, you can further shift manually to really extend the range to the extent you could emulate a 34/100+ gear ratio or somesuch. Riding the AdZ at 100% trainer difficulty won't mean what it used to mean.

unterhausen

They must have had trouble deciding what to name it. Or it was called "trainer difficulty" in the original code and they never changed it.

Sy Reene

Could use TD to mean Terrain Diminishment

Dancing Skeleton

How it feels to ride AdZ at 100% depends on what gearing is on your bike.
You could have an 11S 53/39 11/26 & it would be a real challenge because you'd probably be grinding out at 50-60 RPM.
But with a 12S 46/33 10/36 it would feel much easier, you could spin at a comfortable cadence.
Either way, it's W/Kg that gets you there.
Trainer difficulty is nothing but a virtual cassette.
Virtual shifting essentially uses trainer difficulty on a 1X setup to change gears.

PeteHski

I think Zwift simply scales the slope gradient. So at 50% difficulty, it broadcasts half the virtual slope gradient for your trainer to apply resistance. So your trainer is fooled into thinking the slope is shallower than the virtual slope.

Your virtual gear idea wouldn’t work too well because the trainer sets resistance based only on the slope gradient broadcast from Zwift. So in your example 96% of zero slope is still zero. So your trainer resistance on the flat would be the same. The slope scaling only affects climbs and descents and has the opposite effect on descents ie makes them feel harder.

PeteHski

It kind of has that effect on climbs by reducing the slope resistance, but on a flat road it has no effect at all. If you set Trainer Difficulty to 0% then your trainer just applies zero slope resistance everywhere. The trainer resistance on the flat is exactly the same as it is at 100% Trainer Difficulty.

genejockey 

Trigger pulled. I ordered an Elite Direto XR-T from BikeCloset. $419 + tax and shipping. I realized I bought my Kick'r Snap back at the end of 2020, so it's a bit long in the tooth. Still works well. though! But it's hard to pass up these Post Bike Boom prices.

unterhausen

Now I want a trainer with virtual shifting. If a 2020 trainer is long in the tooth, how about my kickr from 2014?

choddo

Yep. Scrap

they haven’t improved much since then, good product from day one. Had to do any maintenance?

unterhausen

I had to replace the bearings in the cassette body. That's partially my fault for having the quick release too tight

choddo

Impressive. The bearing in my flywheel lasted 3 years but was sorted by them for free (refurb sent at their cost)