At any rate I think the merit system is AWESOME and should bring higher quality post to the forums. Genius idea!
You send sMerits, not Merits. When you receive 1 Merit, you also get 0.5 sMerits. You would have some number of sMerits to start off, and you may have exhausted your supply.
Ohhh sMerit. Okay, so I sent one sMerit yesterday and now I can't send anymore. Thought I could send 4 more but guess I started out with only one. I would have used it much more sparingly picking a much higher quality post if I knew I only got one to send starting out.
At first I misunderstood several aspects of this whole system too, and I think that we have to attempt to learn it and then let it run for a while, and see how it plays out.
Hopefully, members will not be reluctant to spend their sendable merit, and hopefully, sources will be able to identify a variety of meritorious posts from more junior members in order that those more junior members will both be able to receive merit to rank up and to also receive smerit to share the smerit that they acquire.
By the way, I sent you one of my smerit, which turns into your merit, and if someone else gives you another merit, then you will have one smerit to spend (from the combination of the two received merits). Building little by little.
Okay thanks! And you're right this will take some time to learn. A learning cure for me that's for sure.
And thank you for the sMerit. I looked and it says "You have 0 sendable merit (sMerit) which you can send to other people." So if I get one more sMerit then I can send one sMerit to someone else - correct? But what I'm really wondering, if I get one more sMerit will those other 4 sMerits come back? Surely I didn't have 4 sMerits decay (disappear) in less than 48 hours. I started out with 10 Merits so I should have 5 sMerits right?
I think that you are confusing some information in the Op that says that Theymos had set up the smerts in such a way that it drew from your level of activity in the past year and your current rank, and if you were active in the last year you could perhaps earn the maximum, which would not be greater than half of your merit.
Just take myself for example, I believe that I was active in every activity period in the last year, so I earned 14 activity points every two weeks, and I was awarded 1,000 merits based on my being legendary; however, I only received 200 smerits (which would be 1/5 of my merit count). I don't know how the ratios might differ from person to person, but maybe Theymos was overstating the case a little bit when he said that you would receive smerits amounting to no more than half of your merits, when likely a more accurate reflection would be that even the most active members were likely only receiving about 1/5 or perhaps less if you were less active in the past year?
So, I am presuming that you did not lose 4 smerits, and you likely only had 1 smerit in your total smerit bank at the time that this new system was implemented.