Originally Posted by
Futumsh
Since we don't want to give preference based on timing, there are essentially 2 options:
* Ties get rewarded based on the highest rank of the tied range. 3 people tie for 9th-11th, they all get rewards for 9th. This is what we have now. This is susceptible to people cooperating to improve their rewards, though only if others don't pass them since they're sandbagging their scores. It's debatable whether the cooperation is a bad thing or not - personally I think people working together with a common goal is a good thing. If enough competitors disagree, they'll pass the tied people and it becomes a non-issue. This is a common method for handling ties when there is no tiebreaker mechanism.
* Ties get rewarded based on the lowest rank of the tied range. 3 people tie for 9th-11th, they all get rewards for 11th. This prevents cooperation to improve rewards, but can also shrink the reward pool. I've never seen this used anywhere.
Additionally, if we care to, we could allow ties with one of the previous options, but make it harder for ties to deliberately happen - anything that gives points gives amounts in a random range, etc.
Or we could introduce a tiebreaker mechanism of some sort, though since we don't want to bias based on time zone, it would probably have to be something like time from first point scored to last point scored, or something of the sort.
I'm happy with how it works right now, and suspect very few people aren't, since otherwise they would be outscoring the tied people and pushing them out of the ranks.