First, I'd like to say that everyone claim Xserver Sage would be bad based on masuri experience to be of below average intelligence.
This is a fact, because they fail to understand WHY masuri matchmaking is horrible--the fact that there are very few player being matched at any given time (because the period is so * long and the servers are bracketed and not all togehter)

Now, to be clear, I voted no for the Xserver sage. Why? because the reduction in reward per person. Take my likely server cluster for example, LA2-12, that's I believe 6 servers. Currently, there are I believe 7 sages or so (with S2 having 2). But with Xserver, I would expect the number to drop to around 4. My server, in the very least, would only contribute to about 1/2-1/3 of a max sage (which I believe is 75 people or so?) so there is certainly going to be reductions. And reduction of # of sage means reduction of the # of 1st ranked player, as that is 3 times the number of sage happening. Same applies to 2nd and 3rd place. Ergo, we are getting less stuff per person.

Second, my condolences to whoever are in sage 1 (except those who are 80k+), because you are f***ed. This is the "section" that would have the biggest disparity, from the 100k+ to probably somewhere around 60-70k. Sadly, I might fall into that, as I'm in the top 90s in my server bracket and depend on % participation on sage... well... I'm not entirely sure how large the sages will be but I can't compete at all if that was the case. That said, for the rest of the player in other bracket, chances are the disparity would be smaller and give a fair chance

Except.... for the fact with the level>power approach. The lv 80s ptws are gonna have a field day, how nice. To be clear, I don't think a pure level approach would be good, because some stuff are level locked, so a player of similar power would have an advantage if he have extra talents to choose from. However, by and large, power is what matters the most. Personally, I think a formula of something like power+lv*100 would be the best indicator.

I'm not at all surprised that the vote thing didn't count. In fact, I suspected as much in the poll BEFORE the sage poll. Specifically, I believe they intended to follow a model of: 1. plan to release something, 2. release a poll about it, 3. Release after getting "yes" result, 4. Profit from the appearance of listening to player. That obviously didn't work out and here we are. However, as they aren't REALLY in control of content, it's gonna happen anyway.

Now, I'm going to be nice, I'm not going to only point out problems, I'm going to suggest solutions.

Solution to the first problem, that is the reduction in overall reward, is easy: give out more reward. I don't even care who gets them, but more rewards per person somehow, maybe make it top 5 instead of top 3, whatever.

Solution to the second problem is to make the "sections" more dynamic instead of hard sized. The first section should be the smallest and the ONLY section that does not strictly follow the power bracketing rules. Specifically, let's say place the top 15* power player AND say RANDOMLY select 30 of the next 60 highest player. What this accomplishes is that the 60 will effectively alternate between being the sacrificial lamb in section 1 against players who are probably 30-50k over them and have no chance to win with being more or less top of their own section and very good chance to win. I'd consider it fair. If this isn't done and say the top 60 is always taken to be section one, then other than player who are maybe ranked 61-80 will alternate in such a fashion(due to participation), players ranked 20-60 will effectively suffer an endless hell, especially the bottom section of that. That is certainly not fair.

*Instead of top 15, it could be: look at the 9th powered player, take all player within 80% of that player's power, up to 30. And this where the dynamic size can come in, the size of the bracket should be based on how many players are sufficiently close to 9th ranked player of that section to have a decent chance of getting top 3 spot instead.

Solution to the third... well... I already said, instead of Lv>bracket, come up with a formula to "merge" the two factors for sorting.

The people that I called out for of below average intelligence for thinking masuri match making is of any indication on how Xserver sage will be.

Thou in retrospect, I must apologize for my mistake. I failed to account for the fact that some of them might be of average intelligence but are merely hasty preteens who have yet to learn the art of critical thinking. Coupled with their youthful impulses, it is no wonder they would sky dive to conclusions without considering the cause and effect of events.

Because I will say the cold hard truth--when someone does or says something that lacks wisdom or intelligence, I will say that they lack wisdom or intelligence.
I'm not going to hold people's hand and certainly do not believe in the philosophy of "everyone is a winner". Respect is earned or loss by one's own action.

What would YOU call someone who, upon seeing a boat can float in water, concludes that "vehicles can float" and proceed to drive a car into the lake expecting it to float?

That said, I tend to be lenient when a certain issue is brought up for the first time, or the second or third really. But the fact of the matter is, the parallel was drawn many times before and I, along with others, have dispelled the notion before ever since the voting thread first came to be, in fact even in that very same thread.

So by once again drawing on the incorrect comparison, it not only show their inabilities of reaching the conclusion independently, which is understandable, it also shows their laziness in not researching the subject matter they are complaining about--they didn't even bother reading through the very poll thread being mentioned and that's not as tolerable. I'm afraid the frustration of having to repeat myself grinds away at my patience and causes my tone to get progressively more aggressive. Hey, at least I still avoid actually using any bad words.

That said, maybe I am overestimating what "average intelligence" is. I never considered myself to be particular smart so I more or less set the bar around myself... maybe I went wrong somewhere around that.

I'm not "following" the backlash wave because... well... I was there before the backlash was even a thing.

here is an interesting post of mine: dah post

Notice how it's before the sage poll was made? yeah... I suspected #2 was going to be a thing before it happened.

To be clear, I am against Xserver sage, it's just that I have good rational reasons as opposed to certain thoughtless sky-dive to conclusion reasons.
I never said I was smart, all I said was that some people aren't based on what they said. There is a HUGE difference there. I mean, I take no pleasure by having more money than the homeless(well, the REAL homeless...) so...

4. I'm a programmer, so I know exactly how easy it is to change such things. I should be able to implement all 3 changes that I proposed between 20 minutes and a day, depending on how it is coded (assuming it's written in a commonly used language). That said, as far as the "increase reward goes", I can only guarantee increased reward for the top 3 in that time frame to at least preserve the reward per person quota. It may or may not be easy to increase the number of reward recipient and even if I did, changing the interface to make it "look nice" would take far longer. That said, someone did have an awesome idea: ramp up the "winning side" reward. That would work perfectly and probably far easier, just substitute one item for another and everything would be fine, in interface change required (thou it might need to be changed in a couple place to make everything line up.)
Algorithm... there aren't enough player in the game to make "algorithms" a thing. Given the small data size, the simplest, brute force and inefficient algorithm can be used unless the servers are running on commodore 64s. And frankly I don't intend to change the "algorithm" just the variables.
Well, at least that's what I'd expect if they follow any kind of good coding practice where sage is its own "thing" that have its own section of code (and preferably the player placement in its own method/function). It would indeed be difficult if everything is in one code blob....

In any case, they probably aren't going to change the code because Oasis can't and the devs won't. Thou seeing how most lesser ptws are going to be *er punched in section 1 sage, maybe they'll rage quit and that will convince them to rethink their strategy. But maybe the arms race of top ptw will cover that, whoever knows.

yes
http://forum.naruto.oasgames.com/en/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&ptid=19758&pid=138393&fromuid=27049

If they did things right, I would say that's cause the relative low amount of active players who sign up for sage at or below 70s, since it only take a month or two to grow out of that level if you are active.
And it would also depend on which server cluster you are in, as some server cluster would have more of those while others less. For the first server cluster of each region, for example, there probably aren't enough 75 and below to fill one field, even if you count alts (there might be quite a few 75s for self-plunder, but value of alts below that is rather low so...)

Thou of course, the batching could have been done badly. All I'm saying is that there COULD be a reasonable explanation.
P.S. to disprove this theory, you simply need to find a player who is between lv 34 and 70 that is in your server cluster but NOT in your sage.

I don't know how big the sages are, but let's say it's 75 person each.
If the top 75th highest powered lv 90 player of your server cluster that signed up for sage is say 50k, then EVERYONE who is lv 90 and 50k+ would be in one cluster.
So that means 55k vs 75k as well as 50k vs 120k, should a 120k super ptw exist in your server cluster.

That's certainly going to be the case for group 1 of the first 2 server cluster of each region, which is going to be somewhere around 60k to 150k.

Group 1 is gonna * even if it's 30, from 80k to whatever the max is for that server cluster (which is 100 to 160k)

I think the solution would be better with something like this:

Step 1, bracket everyone into whatever group size (I think ~45 is good)
Step 2, for bracket 1 and bracket one only, for each player 13th to 24th, have 50% chance to swap with the 1st to 12th player of group 2(13th with 1st, 14th with 2nd and so on, 50% chance is rolled individually, so on average 6 would swap), for player 25th to 36th, 50% chance to swap with top of group 3 and finally, 37th to 48th(or all remaining if less than 45/group) 50% ti swap with group 4. (if there is more, swap with group 5 etc)
Step 3, last 15 of group 2 will have a similar swap with top of the highest group that is not swapped with group 1.

This system would more or less be overall fair as far as top 3 reward is concerned. People who have a chance to win top 3 reward will, effectively speaking, be randomly pulled into group 1 to be sacrificial lamb so they don't always win. At the same time, people who would otherwise be stuck with group 1 will have a chance to be top of the group they swapped down to so they wont always lose.

And as participation varies from sage to sage, there are some mobility for everyone else to be top/bottom of group (except original group 1 and part of group 2)

Note that all numbers are examples. The fact of the matter is, the smaller the sage and swap group, the better. I picked 12 per swap group as at 50% that means 6 swapped down on average. This makes it so they won't take up all the top 3 rewards and thus giving the lower groups players a chance at reward. Both the size of the swap group and the swap chance can be adjusted, maybe say 9 per group at 30% chance or whatever might be fair. But in any case, the only way to make sage fair for everyone is if there is some way to "randomly" pick the sacrificial lambs for group 1, because as it stands, no matter what sage size is, player ranked 15th onward until group 1 fills will probably have a sad life.

P.S. as a fairly high powered ftp(63k), 30-45 group size would probably place me in group 2, possibly on the upper portion. So this is really for other people. If it's just for myself, then pushing for smaller group size would have been the easiest way to get what I want.