genorb: Nice way to use my words in a wrong way... :)
I hope I didn't - I only wanted to know the reason for your thesis. Thank you for responding in detail.
First of all, I'm discussing options, not proofed situations.
Second, we have to be careful to use terms and conditions "as usual" because the situation and calculation has changed. Unfortunately we know that the company's ameliorations are not always bettering the situation - I've used "betterworsening" a few times already. Therefore, the term "it makes no sense" would not exclude a scenario from becoming real IMHO.
This happened to me, too.
I've been calculating my average from day 1, and I have had detailled looks into some users' score histories to answer their questions with some success. For this, I have a spreadsheet with some functions working on the scores which I copy&paste into it. I have two major items included:
- an average calculation from the "equivalent" 18 hole scores, an internal function of the program which only needs a selected range of cells as an input.
- a counter for ranked rounds, added after I became a Legend, sparing me the look 300 lines down to
see how many they are. It will tell me, "no. of ranked rounds =
minimum rounds", and then I'll have to select the rounds for a saturated average.
My spreadsheet has been challenged by changes in WGT's averaging conditions, that is
the anti-sandbagging changes (match play & credit wins included) and the new Par3/5 courses. I cannot cope with the former because it's outside my data, and I only barely manage the latter if they hide the course names behind CC tournament names.
If I detect such score, I delete it in the appropriate column, making it invisible for the averaging function.
Now I have a good tool, telling me both the average of valid rounds and the arrival at the 500 ranked rounds mark. It's brilliant, isn't it?
Still it breaks your logic rules - did you recognize it?
Answering your points:
ad 1) The "1+499" situation was my conclusion from my first thoughts in this direction. Would we consider it faulty? Yes. Is it impossible? No. It corresponds to the counter in my spreadsheet.
ad 2) I agree that these rounds do not count towards saturation, because they are excluded from the average. Alas, there's no guarantee that saturation would be a necessary logical condition for tiering up. That is, in the 1+499 condition, the average is not saturated from 1 score, it would of course move up or down from any further legit score.
The combination would possibly result in cases where
a) the minimum no. is reached by 1+499 (or n +(500-n)) rounds,
b) the "average" of one (or any no. below 500) score(s) would not be saturated but below the threshold.
Conditions met => tier-up, confirmed by my spreadsheet.
As I said, someone has posted here that 494+6 rounds allowed for tiering up to TL, another said that he's still Legend (ave. 59.x) after 505 rounds minus an unknown no. of Par3/5s.
Difficult to decide, isn't it?
And I want to set up my spreadsheet for the real thing :)