To be honest, if one resorts to this type of practice, it’s not as if they’re going to get very far up the ranking ladder anyway, and since the objective behind is nearly always to participate in a campaign, it’s barely going to push far in that direction (plus you miss out on all the necessary training ground to really get very far).
Everything looks right and that's what usually happen to them, but they never seemed to care about that because their main purpose was to join the campaign.
I don't understand why those members need to buy merits, if they find it difficult to earn merit then they should motivate themselves to be better, we are all the same here but different with the knowledge we have right now, just imagine that pro or those people who already have good enough knowledge about cryptocurrency also became noob as well as we are, we can make it as motivation in a way that we should think that if they can be better then we can do it as well. Merit is important but knowledge is much worthy.
Buying merit for rankup is not ethically.
I'm sure all forum users have the ability to do something useful for themselve, but they do take effort and process. Nothing will prevent a single user from rankup after this merit system exists unless they never know how this system works. Merit are synonymous with reward for useful and quality post, one must reach this standard if one is to be rewarded. Even though in practice a person can still have difficulty getting merit even though the delivery looks quality, this is because the merit system is not moderated and as a result the post can still be overlooked. Reporting an unmerited post on the provided thread is fair way from merit source.