Gold league in particular seems to have a very large difference between the rating earned by a win and the rating reduced by a loss. Perhaps the relative low number of plays that Gold gets figures into it somehow?
That, or the large number of decks submitted. There are probably around ~1500 decks in the gold league right now (I've seen references to rankings of 1300+), maybe more. Remember that the ranking system is designed so that newly submitted decks with no record get pegged at around a ranking of 250--essentially, new decks enter at an artificially inflated ranking around the first quintile (a necessity, since the actual "average" rank is much lower than the T500 cutoff), which means they immediately plummet if they can't keep up. Realize that you need to be in the top 200-250 to actually stay ahead of incoming new decks, which means you need to stay in the top 15% or so of performing decks to avoid getting pushed out by the influx of new decks. It's pretty cutthroat in Gold.
Yeah, at 15-3, I had a 0 rating, rank 258 (83% winrate)
later, at 22-3, I had a 40-something rating, rank 150 (88% winrate)
now, at 23-4, I'm back down to 18 rating, rank 203 (85% winrate)
It looks like, to stay above 0 rating in gold, you need better than a 5:1 wins:losses ratio.
