ah it was me centurian and plastic hussar my apologies, plastic hussar.

Spyman, if you play to win regardless you should still play WTA. Because in WTA you get 100% of the GR points, while in PPSC if you win, you only get 18/34ths of the GR points.

That being said, my worry about PPSC distortions isn't strong seconds, its actually how easy it is to do well in PPSC. Winning those games is much easier, as is cutting your losses if you are doing badly.

I see spyman's points ... using the GR system as a 'social engineering' to change the PPSC mentality of 'strong 2nd'. but spyman, i think you might be overemphasizing the effect that the GR system has on bad 'ghettozied' players who could care less if their GR goes from 1172 to 1035... they just want those extra 2 dots so they can tell themselves they did well.

i personally agree with GR's point about the distortion effect of PPSC games... they are FAR easier to win than WTA games... meaning that anyone who cares deeply about their GR will actually go and play more PPSC games to get the easier wins.

to be honest - i'm playing a ppsc game (anonymously) JUST to test out this theory and it is night and day... its a high-point game, so i dont think you can say the 'level of player is not controlled'.

all that said - I would be curious to see the delta from a WTA-only GR (where only WTA standard games are measured) compared to the 'combined' list... not knowing the early history of this site, i'm presuming that WTA-standard games were good to go from the day they were started, otherwise, a specific date marker or cut-off for qualifying games might need to be included.

also ghost - on a personal note - I went from GR 13ish in Nov to 37 in Dec. is there a way for me to figure out what precipitated that drop for me? i'm kind of bummed out about how badly that month affected my GR.