First of all I wanna thank
zentdex for his great analysis about how many merits each rank - on average - gains a month. I used some of the data he provided in his post:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/3-merit-stat-after-a-month-of-merit-3015036Now to my point:
I took my time to do the math and see how many members can the current merit system sustain and here are the results:
SUMMARY
https://imgur.com/a/snYsnFirst of all let me remind you of rank requirements:
Newbie: 1 activity and 0 merits
Jr. Member: 30 activity and 0 merits
Member: 60 activity and 10 merits needs 2 months to get the activity
Full Member: 120 activity and 100 merits needs 4 months to get the activity
Sr. Member: 240 activity and 250 merits needs 8 months to get the activity
Hero Member: 480 activity and 500 merits who knows?
around 12 months
Legendary: 775 - 1030 activity and 1000 merits
There are currently - at the time of this post - 57 merit sources with a total merit generation of up to 11975 sMerit per 30 days. Those are the merits generated by sources only, and given that a member can send half the merits he receives and imagining the best case scenario where every member sends all the merits he receives, the total amount of merits generated by the system would double to 23950 sMerit per 30 days. So, roughly 24k sMerit per month.
Now to the boring math:
Based on Zentdex's analysis the 24k merits are distributed between ranks in the following manner:
Legendary: 8%
Hero: 8%
Sr. Member: 14%
Full Member: 16%
Member: 19%
Jr. Member and Newbie: 23 + 11 = 34%
So...
Legendary members get 8% x 24k = 1920 merits
Hero members get the same amount 1920 which is enough for 1920/500 = 3.84 members to rank up every month. The No. of Hero members the system can sustain: 3.84 x 12 = 46.08
Sr. members get 14% x 24k = 3360 which is enough for 3360/250 = 13.44 members every month. The No. of Sr. members the system can sustain: 13.44 x 8 = 107.52
Full Members get 16% x 24k = 3840 which is enough for 3840/150 = 25.6 members every month. The No. of Full members the system can sustain: 25.6 x 4 = 102.4
Members get 19% x 24k = 4560 which is enough for 4560/90 = 50.67 members every month. The No. of Members the system can sustain: 50.67 x 2 = 101.34
Jr. Members and Newbies get 34% x 24k = 8160 which is enough for 816 members every month.
The time needed to rank up is easily acquired by dividing the amount needed to rank up by the average merits gained per month.
Conclusion (my opinion):
The amount of merits produced by the system is too very low, as we've seen that it would take an average member 3 to 5 times the time it took him to rank up in the previous system, I know that the purpose of this system is to create a better forum with better members but just imagine yourself a full member needing almost 2 years to get to senior. Is that fair? How frustrated you'd be? Well, this is the case for half of the seniors members in the forums!
Not to mention that I described the best case scenario and didn't go into calculating all the sMerits that are horded and not used and the merits that are sold on black markets.