"High ratings" means you don't reject offers from Door Dash. Meaning if you get a $2 untipped order to deliver 10 miles away, you accept it. Each rejection hits your "Acceptance rating".

It was a marketing ploy to trick people into losing money delivering. Because Door Dash can't force people to tip, someone has to take the financially bad orders.

I did wonder if being a top-tier dasher meant you got great ratings from customers, or if it meant you did DD's bidding...

> Because Door Dash can't force people to tip, someone has to take the financially bad orders.

Well, they're trying, by not-so-subtlely telling customers that if they don't want their orders to get cold, they need to pre-emptively tip.

Trust me when I say, being in those high echelons isn't worth it for a driver. Everyone will be happier with this. Getting a higher rating priority usually means that you lost money, and are just planning to be dashing a ton at a lower quality the next month to offset it. You have to purposefully accept untipped orders at bad ROI restaurants to achieve those numbers.

On the flip side it might encourage the bulk of drivers to stay with the platform if they were previously denied access to the best jobs.

Outside rush hour there's already not enough work in the sense that there will be long periods of waiting for orders in even very large cities. It seems like if anything they could afford to raise standards for the consumer by offering less to lower performing drivers to make contracting unappealing.

>Will this encourage some of these top workers to leave the platform, since they can no longer get access to good orders based on their track record?

this isn't uber. Do people actually pick who delivers their often fast food?