Originally Posted by
jordyn
In fact, the only comparison that really matters is whether two people at the border between "upgraded" and "not upgraded" have the same number of EQDs, because it doesn't really matter if
#1 and
#2 on the list have the same EQDs if there's five upgrades available--the key would be breaking a tie between
#5 and
#6 . If we go back to the (almost certainly incorrect) assumption that PLTs are distributed evenly across 5000 EQD values, then the odds that the two people right at the boundary line have the same EQDs are only 1 in 5000. That's obviously quite uncommon, but still means that it would happen on average every day somewhere across the system.
This is definitely one of those really tricky probability problems where one needs to be really careful not to let intuition pull one too much towards any conclusion.
One fascinating wrinkle arises from the fact the status derives from a calendar year EQD value (which must be greater than a minimum value, but has no maximum value) whereas the EQD tie-breaker derives from a rolling 12-month value (which has no fixed minimum value or maximum value). Furthermore on Jan 1 these two EQD values are pretty much equivalent, but on Dec 31 they could be wildly divergent. Two things follow:-
- one cannot know how many EQD values PLTs are distributed across
- the distribution of PLT EQD values grows larger steadily as the calendar year rolls on
It really would be fascinating to try and model this mathematically, but I think that is beyond me.