WM Quicksilver, on 26 October 2014 - 11:29 AM, said:
Agreed, but who's to say those top tier players aren't taking advantage of the same thing. There is one large assumption that you are making, that not only are top tier players are always getting placed against other top tier players but that these are also the matches that they are getting counted towards the tournament. Without PGI's official stats or the ability to compile our own through screenshots and such (which Im sure many have) you can't say one way or the other. Not to mention, the bigger the divide in ELO the better players will be able to abuse it.
During peak play times, top tier players will get matched with other top tier players nearly every time. It is downright near impossible to get any score high enough to get on the leaderboard. I think I've seen a grand total of 4-5 individual games over the past 3 leaderboard tournies, where I've seen somebody in a high Elo match get a score high enough to count. It isn't impossible, but it's extremely unlikely to happen, and it certainly isn't going to happen to the same player 10 times in a weekend.
Once again, it isn't an issue of farming, but rather an issue of consistency. The high Elo players are playing in an environment where players rarely make mistakes, and consistently perform at a very high level, whereas in the average to low Elo brackets, while players may technically be amongst similarly ranked players, not all of them will consistently perform at a high level.
The middle/average Elo bracket, as somebody mentioned before, has the widest variation and least consistency in performance, so a player in the average Elo bracket actually has a higher chance of getting a high scoring game, and it will happen more often.
Let's use football as an example:
The high Elo matches are essentially 2 professional NFL teams going up against each other, and while sometimes the planets align and one team drastically outperforms the other (see: this year's superbowl), most of the time scores are very close between the two teams, in addition to the overall scores being relatively low due to good defense on both teams.
The average Elo matches are like a pickup football game in the neighborhood. Nobody is professional, but some people may have more experience than others, which leads to very inconsistent games, and without knowing who has more/less experience, the teams have a higher chance of being lopsided, and the possibility is very likely that one team will drastically outperform the other, with the players that have more experience doing the majority of the work.
Imagine now that individual players from both of these groups have their stats compared against each other, competing for the same prize of being labeled, "One of the top 15 football players."
The kid with some high school level football experience in a neighborhood game may score 10 touchdowns in a single game, whereas it's extremely unlikely any professional player will ever do that in a professional game.
The problem is, when it comes down to just stats, the neighborhood kid ends up looking better than the professional players, despite the fact that the professional players are technically better.
Edited by Aresye, 26 October 2014 - 12:18 PM.
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