Two-way merited behaviours. I guess and believe that it's not strange in the forum after the launch of merit system. At least, till now, admin has not released new rules to punish those ones. Hope that he will, if not, the forum will see more almost illegal behaviours of merit exchanging like that. I call almost illegal because base on current rules, they did not doing any thing wrong.
Theymos quotes:
While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.
and
- Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up.
So if merit is here to improve quality of overall posts, then by doing this (what those two guys did) is defeating the very purpose of merit.
I, to be honest, don't find any of these 3 posts in my original post to be high-quality. Also, giving someone 50 merit because you're their friend is close to someone giving himself merit from his alts.
More merit exchanges? No problem they'll be caught.