Distribution of players & score in and around the 0.1% title cutoff (EU)
I've seen a lot of posts along the lines of "what score will the cutoff land at" etc, and I wanted to share some more information about how the cutoff actually works. At a glance the cutoff is just a number that keeps moving up (or well, almost always up) but the rate at which this number changes fluctuates quite a bit and at some points in the season it seems to slow down only to then pick up again.
Now, this score number only tells half the story. While yes, it is true the number that is shown is the number to beat at that point in time, this is just a proxy to the actual underlying information that is used to determine who get the title and who does not. As everyone (hopefully) knows, the title is awarded to those who end the season in the top 0.1% of characters. The number of slots that represent 0.1% of the total mythic plus population grows monotonically over the season and as of the time this data was collected there was 1471 slots in the EU - meaning that there are around 1.47 million characters who played a mythic plus keystone so far this season in this region.
Now, these 1.47M characters are far from evenly distributed from 0 to 4364 (max score at the time of writing). A lot of characters cluster around important break points where there are rewards, such as the 0.1% title, but also around points which are hard to break through, like resilience levels. Ever since resilient keys were introduced, the title has seen large breakpoints around different resilience levels since the access to keys (and especially resilient keys) become much lower for each level increase.
What this means for players that are looking to figure out where the cutoff may end up, or trying to figure out if they are safe at their current score, the best metric to look at is not the current score and its trajectory but rather how many characters are in the brackets above and below them (and the cutoff). As of this writing with the cutoff at around 4127 score (~22 resilient), it only requires 30 score (~2 keys) to pass almost half the population inside the cutoff. That is to say, there are almost as many characters between 4127 and 4157 as there are characters between 4157 and 4364. Assuming a player climbs to 4157, it would now require 690 individual characters to all bypass 4157 to push this player out of the cutoff range. This will take a lot longer than it sounds for the title to just rise another 30 score. The title went up almost 30 score last week, but that included passing by a much easier barrier than what is ahead of the cutoff from this point forward.
So, as we get into the final weeks of the season, I would encourage anyone who is anxious about falling out of the cutoff or trying to predict where it will end up, I would strongly recommend to have a look at how many people are in and around the score you care about.
Now as an aside, one might wonder why there is such a clustering here, and the answer is mostly that there are a around 1400 characters with resilient 22 in the EU right now whereas there are only around 230 characters with resilient 23. This means that the available 23 keys is vastly lower than the number of 22 keys (and a lot of these 23 keys are held by teams). This also means that there are way fewer people who will be pulled up (be it by paying or by being invited by people with one resilience level above them) to 23s than it is for 22s.
I hope this made sense even through some rambling, enjoy the data and would be interested to hear any thoughts or comments :)
GL in the push streets!