The concept isn't terribly difficult to grasp, but it's a little abstract. I don't know how many times we've had to address the phenomenon of "Missing Tiers". If you don't have a wide variety of rankings, certain "tiers" might not appear. Also, there have been a lot of users who would like to "assign" certain scores to certain tiers, which is just not possible, because... it's math. It's not "configurable".
Of course, when you have to answer the same question hundreds of times, maybe it's your system that's the problem. At some point, we realized that we were always addressing these concerns in the same way: "Tiers are more understandable if you consider that they represent percentile groups". And then we thought... why aren't we just using percentiles?
So now, we are. In one of the biggest changes to Criticker since the website launched, we are shifting from Tiers to Percentiles.
From a conceptual standpoint, this isn't a huge leap. Tiers were representations of percentiles, anyway. But you'll notice a lot of changes at Criticker. The biggest will be in your TCIs. Because we're now averaging "Percentiles" instead of "Tiers", the TCIs will be much bigger numbers. The difference between Tiers maxed out at 9, but the difference between Percentiles can range up to 99. So, a good TCI will now be something like 18.435 as opposed to 1.843. We think this is cool, as it introduces more variation (rather: the variation is more visible).
What happens to your recommendations? PSIs will improve slightly. We tested the new system against a wide variety of users, and in nearly every case, accuracy improved -- not a whole lot, but a little. (This testing is actually what gave birth to our recently-introduced Accuracy feature for sponsors.) It makes sense; percentiles are basically the same as tiers, but they're more refined. Which means that the resulting PSIs are, as well.
If you love tiers, and you can't imagine Criticker's system without those "Tier 9" headers, don't worry. No one is going to force you to switch. Because they're so similar on the back-end, we're allowing tiers and percentiles to co-exist, at least for the foreseeable future. New users will see the percentile version, but nothing will change for existing users. However, you can switch the new system at any time, using a link your profile page. When you do, your TCIs and PSIs will have to be rebuilt. And as a one-time way to say "thanks" for being a member, we'll rebuild them fully for you, once you've initiated the switch.
That's all! We think this change is going to make Criticker much more accessible to the general public. People understand the idea of "percentiles" on a more intuitive level than "tiers"... which shouldn't be too surprising, since "percentiles" are a basic mathematical concept, and "tiers" are basically something we made up.
Let us know if you have questions, or if you discover any bugs (I'm sure there will be some). As always, we'll do our best to answer everything as quickly as we can.
