https://youtu.be/khWck4XGZNE
I had three weapons of GS 256 and three pieces of GS 256 gear. My remaining three pieces of gear were under level 30 (GS 0). This gave me a total GS of 171. I was then able to fast travel all over the map/ restart my game and was still able to enter the 0-163 dark zone bracket with my 171 gear score.
Rather than trying to fix this individual glitch maybe it's time to get rid of some of the lower world tiers/163 gear. The video above explains that even after trying to transfer multiple times at different times of the day I was unable to find a single player in the 0-163 bracket. The only reason that anyone uses lower level gear now is to try and exploit the system. We all remember using old SMG's for the crit hit chance and saving old M44's to use the provident talent. I'm sure no one at massive was happy people were doing this. Keeping these lower tiers around is creating a lot of extra work for you guys without improving the experience of the game for the community.
Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think anyone is going to put up much of a fuss if lower level tiers were phased out.
As always, thank you for continuing to support the game FOR FREE in year two!
Pees
Actually it is no glitch but a method to exploit gear brackets and use higher lvl items in lower brackets.
Your dark zone GS was 146, not 171. The value in menu is calculated by dividing total GS of all 9 items by 9. In the dark zone, GS is calculated differently.
The exploit is to enter lower brackets with this reduced GS and then buying new items at DZ vendor, which will rise your gear score. As long as you don't leave dark zone, you can use those items and be much stronger than anyone else with normal gear.