Right so, what are Tiers?
Tiers are basically a symbolic estimation of how good you are relative to all the other players in the game. If that sounds familiar to the ladder system, then congrats give yourself a gold star because it is.The Tier system is directly tied to the ladder system and it will be displayed just to the right of your Main Faction in the esl dashboard. This is the current ESL Dashboard for example: https://dawnofwar.info/esl/player/10186929 you can see your own Tier by looking at your own ESL profile.
The difference between just using a the flat rating to determine player levels (such as 1500+) to using a tier system ( like Tier 1-) is that:
1) The Tier system automatically groups you into a group of players, rather than us trying to gauge you based off a somewhat shifting player rating. Inactivity effects player rating yes, but it effects Tiers less. It's far less likely for you to be bumped out of a Tier from minor point changes because each Tier represents at least a couple hundreds points of variance between the top of that tier and the bottom of the tier. We want to encourage people to still play games and not manage their Tier rating
2) The Tier system will be able to filter results a level deeper than just the regular ladder games. I envisioned this as being able to record games purely from tournaments or similar ventures. For now, we'll just work with all games, but should we need to, we can specify tier designations to tournaments or other similar events. I'll consider that option should there be enough people coming right into the game after a long absence or other similar scenarios.
So players are divided into Tiers: 1,2 and 3. 1 is the highest level of the playerbase, 2 is the middle and 3 is the up and coming. MRTs will be available to players from Tier 1 and going down, or Tier 1-, and thus they are open to everyone. Beginner Tournaments on the other hand are only available to Tier 3 players, and thus anyone outside of Tier 3 are denied. So on and so on for other styles of tournaments that can use this.
There will still be some discretion in allowing certain players in and out of tournaments (mostly due to inactivity messing with results), but for the most part what you see is what you get.
So yeah, ultimately the main purpose of Tiers is for organizers (not just me
)to be able to set up tournaments with more even player skills easier. Mid level tournaments are more feasible now and, ideally, this would encourage players to try out event play without too much worry about about getting stomped by highly skilled players. I hope that explanation helps. If there's any other questions, let me know!
