pmm711:The only thing wrong about advancing the Top 100-200 Money Earners, as Lonnie suggests, is that there are cheaters amongst that group. And my feelings about them...well...F 'em
Similar to the Legend tier, it seems or sounds like over time, the champion tier has also grown into a diverse group of players. Given some of the concerns expressed by champion members, would the following be a fairly true assessment?
You have about 5 levels of champion style players at least:
red tee champs,
champs promoted due to saturation very good players but not consistently shooting those crazy low numbers all the time,
legitimate champs but not elite players,
champs that have developed into elite players,
then you have champs that cheat that can fall in any of these ranges but on a good day still even challenge and beat the elite players that dominate the leaderboards regularly.
Given the WGT and Ready Go's cap off at the champion tier, all of these players are competing for the same credits to offset the expense of playing this game, which with the growing cost of some balls over time can build up quite a bit. Given that the prize pools largely reward only the top players, others simply try to break even or just make enough to keep themselves supplied in balls without doing surveys or watching 2 credit videos. for some, the game can almost become unsustainable unless you want to grind out credits in these other ways.
Individual clubs can seek to balance that out by incorporating a handicap system, but it is hard to determine whether WGT could implement something along these lines that would not also be susceptible to being exploited.
This is probably why in part, some feel opening up the next tier to the elite champion players so they could compete in their own events, while the average champions if you can call them "average" can once again have a reasonable shot at wining credits in some of the WGT events and or Ready Go's for their tier.
That said, I also feel there has to be a way to possibly stop the slow churn of "champion level players" dwelling in the lower tiers even if they are playing a clean game they are clearly far better than 98%-99% of the Legends and allowed to clean up hundreds of thousands of credits for what appears to be years in some cases...
Opening up the Tour Champion (even if it is by invitation or WGT discretion only ) may help spread out these players and that tier will likely grow eventually over time if the game doesn't end...at which point you create an EXPERT tier I guess. I don't know, but I can fathom and understand some of the concerns of various players.