In Amber, the players create a hierarchy for each stat by bidding character points for ranking. Supposedly the amount paid is irrelevant. However, the stats of NPCs with stats higher than Amber level are given in terms of point values rather than ranking. I cannot imagine that anyone would play this game without this coming up and being resolved in short order, so what is the community accepted solution? Is there one?
(My own thoughts:
The most obvious way of handling this is treating the point value of an NPC stat as its bid, and putting it wherever that would place it in the ranking. However, this would have the effect of shortchanging the players if the initial attribute bidding didn't run high, while supposedly there should be no advantage or disadvantage to that. My next thought was to "scale" the point value of the attribute by comparing the points spent on it by the first-ranked person to what you would "expect" to be spent on it -- so if the highest Warfare is 20 but the expected highest Warfare is 30, then all NPC Warfare values should be multiplied by 2/3 before being compared with the PCs. The problem with that is that I lack the play experience to judge what reasonable expected values are.)
The community standard seems to be that points are the coin of competency. This allows you to fairly introduce new cousins, old forgotten elders and completely strange menaces.
Ranks are noted for "generational conflicts" and may be useful for cross-generation arbitration of conflict as Pundit suggests.
There are no reasonable expected values across the community.