Can anyone explain the effect of worker difficulty? I see where it asks the expected hashrate of the worker and then raises the difficulty for that worker if the hashrate is very high. What effect does this actually have? What effect does it have on a worker to have too high or too low of a difficulty set? I googled but could not really find it explained. If someone has a link or an explanation I would appreciate it.
Nothing. Your submitted shares have value x difficulty. You'll see less submitted shares from cgminer but they will be multipled by the worker difficulty to calculate your score. For very very short duration consecutive blocks you may get screwed once in a while because you work did not submit any shares at a higher difficulty. n my opinion stick with the lowest granularity unless you have a large Caterpillar bitcoin mining machine.
It's basically getting paid by the shovel or by the bucket for your work.