While I agree with the merit system and praise the admin/s for their decision to help prevent the stream of low quality posts on the system, it could be seen as a flaw with the activity system. Im not sure if the post/time requirements Ive read before are in place (as in you can only get x amount of activity a week and you need to post x amount of times). Ive seen people ranking up pretty quickly, you can especially see this in ICO organisers accounts who post regularly on their threads. If a person actively participates in the forum for a long period of time then do they not deserve to rank up? If people are only giving out merit for 'outstanding' posts instead of 'beneficial' posts then some people may miss out entirely. There is a lot of politics that enter the frey with a merit system and I hope that the admin/s keep an eye on how it progressing to ensure it is working as they hoped it would.
Okay, first of all, we are facing merit system now, so it cant be applied to the people who get the rank before the system applied. They got that because they are in this forum for long and play by the rules back then and they got the ranks. Maybe they are not a good quality poster, but nothing can be done right now.
Secondly, lets think about this merit points as a score for you when you are in a college or work.
I am not going to discuss about politics, but it is just a real life law that is applied to this forum, and people thinks that they are free from the real world when they are on the internet.