Since I signed up in the forum, and started to earn merit, I had been steadily climbing positions in terms of earned merit, but lately I see that I have a hard time advancing, being around the 200th position, despite the fact that today I earn merit faster than ever, almost twice as many merits as activity, which I think is not bad at all.
Definitely you are good member, and if the merits have speeded up then I am surely you are contributing something better than previous times! Being around 200th position is just fabulous. However, this is not a race. You can still keep on contributing to forum voluntarily and growth will follow.
I wonder if you have noticed anything similar, although I suppose that not in all cases people will have noticed that around the 200th position. I am sure that n0nce, for example, did not notice anything at that position and will certainly do so later, when he gets to the first 25 or so. But his is an exceptional case, which we should not consider the norm.
Oh yes, n0nce is whole new chapter to forum. He is very knwoledgable person and can quickly answer technical queries. So thats a learning for us, if you want to be good at forum you have to have proper knwoledge and you should be able to speak out desirable answers. Peeps will automcatially read and follow you.
I would also like to clarify that those in the top 10 of most earned merit (or those in the top 25 if you want) I would not call them just quality posters, I don't know exactly what I would call them, but it would have to be something else, like exceptional posters or something like that.
I don't know if we could consider that there are about 200 (or 150 or 250) high quality posters in the forum. Not only because of my perception, which could be subjective, but also taking into account the following:
There are 54 participants in the CM campaign, 25 in the Best Change campaign and 22 in the [banned mixer] campaign. Maybe someone may have a member of these campaigns in mind who does not consider a quality poster, but the vast majority of them are. That would make about 100 members and we have to take into account that there are people who write with quality who are not part of those campaigns, either because they are part of other campaigns or because they don't wear a paid signature.
I believe that taking this into account, we would get roughly a minimum of 150 high quality posters, which coincides with my perception.
What do you think about it?
I agree that you are correlating quality poster with the campaigns they are in, may be because of the managers who run them have different ways to accept them. Most recently DarkStar had algorithm which chose the best of best, for example, n0nce so yes the best poster with high merits etc.
We respect their judgments but it does not mean you or me or other hundreds out there are not doing anything good just because our speed of meriting is slower.
At some point, amounts and ranks don't matter that much anymore... At least, that's how it was in my case.
Sure, i still like to receive some merits, because it means somebody appreciates what i've written, but wether it's 5 merits or just 1 isn't that important. At some point, merits become less of a tool to rank up, and more of a thumbs-up functionality. I know it wasn't created for this purpose, but still, once you reach the legendary rank, that's a bit how it feels for me personally.
Exactly what I want to explain in single line. :-)