I collected some of my thoughts of the merit system and would like to ask you about your opinion.
Is the initial merit distribution fair?| Rank | Required activity | Required merit |
| Brand new | 0 | 0 |
| Newbie | 1 | 0 |
| Jr Member | 30 | 0 |
| Member | 60 | 10 |
| Full Member | 120 | 100 |
| Sr. Member | 240 | 250 |
| Hero Member | 480 | 500 |
| Legendary | Random in the range 775-1030 | 1000 |
Every user got the amount of merit which would be required to obtain his current rank.
The only exception is hero members which could already have been legendary.
I decided that the previous allocation was too unfair in this area, so everyone with activity >= 775 got 500 more merit if they didn't already have 1000 merit (and also Lutpin). No extra sMerit, though.
Since the required merit is pretty close to the needed activity for a rank we can assume that an average user with good post quality should obtain 1 merit per day (if the average user gets that many merit for good posts is a different question). By this assumption there would be many users which would get "deranked".
As example there is a Full Member with 200 activity. This user would only get 100 merit which would result in a deficit of 100 days activity for his/her account in merits.
But lets take a look at the lucky users of this distribution. A Hero Member with an activity of 775 would get 1000 merit since his/her account could potentially be a Legendary one. Therefore this user would get 225 more merit then his current rank which would be equal to more then 7 months of activity which would he/she would have been awarded for free.
I already posted an idea which wouldnt benefit anyone and shouldnt be hard to distribute:
Maybe it would have been best not to create a new value for the merit but simply use the activity the same as it is used for time and activity right now.
So instead of this
The activity number is determined in this way:
time = number of two-week periods in which you've posted since your registration
activity = min(time * 14, posts)
We would have used:
activity = min(time * 14, posts,
merit)
and everyone would have gotten the same initial merit as his activity at the time of the change.
This way nobody would have been affected in his current rank by a positiv or negative direction and we would still only use activity instead of an additional counter on all accounts.
But all these considerations are based on the thought that the current rank is as valueable as the same amount of merit.
Is activity worth as much as merit?I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
- Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
- Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.
Until this point anyone could have become legendary simply by having an old enough account and posting one post per day on average.
So there is no guarantee that users with their current rank would have deserved any merit whatsoever.
So maybe the correct aproach would have been to give no one merit but only sMerit.
This way nobody can claim merit without doing any quality posts in his accounts lifetime.
Of course this would deficit the current users ranking. To prevent this I would suggest to reward accounts differently depending on their current activity status.
| Rank | merit reward per +Merit |
| Brand new | 1 |
| Newbie | 1 |
| Jr Member | 1 |
| Member | 2 |
| Full Member | 3 |
| Sr. Member | 4 |
| Hero Member | 5 |
| Legendary | 5 |
So when a user spends 1 sMerit to reward a post from eg. a Full Member, this Full Member would actually get 3 merits.
Important is that he/she would still only get 0.5 sMerit so merits are not inflated and generated out of thin air.
These numbers are obviously debateble and just an example for the different factors by rank.
But the most important question:
Does merit serve its purpose?Account farming should no longer be viable which would be a great succes.
But the merit might as well force unorganic posts which are only made for the purpose of calculating merit. And since good posts are not guarenteed to be rewarded by merit, users might make more posts then usual hoping for more merit to obtain the next rank.
And all this upranking is highly dependent on all the other users. Some might never use their sMerit to reward other posts and some others might not even know about this feature for a long time.
Those are just my thoughts on this system and some suggestions on different approachs.
Obviously no normal user can force this system to change but at least we can show our ideas to improve it.
