I don’t agree. 500 million and 2 million on Game of Thrones are both below-average scores.
My opinion is that any below-average game should be worth zero. I don’t feel that the difference between a below-average game and a super below-average game should determine whether a player qualifies in the PAPA format.
If you want a comparison for a place where this is already happening, look at Classics. The cutoff for 87th is pretty close to the total number of entries on most machines, which gives below-average games some credit. As a result, in Classics you are hit very, very hard for a poor game.
I greatly prefer rewarding players for their good games, with the relative strength of those good games mattering more than the relative strength of below-average games.
An alternative would be to change the scoring system to be “exponential decay” (100-95-95% of that-etc), which I’ve seen in some Euro events. This gives a longer “tail” where you’ll still receive points, but not many – I find this fairer in noting that there is a difference between 60th and 80th but that difference is not as important as the difference between 5th and 25th.
We used to use exponential decay in the scoring at CA Extreme but I think we set the decay too steep. Lots of people ended up with low qualifying totals, and it was replaced with the current PAPA system.