- if I know a member, think his quality is "OK" but not outstanding, can I send him 10 merits to any post as a reward for overall contribution (to help him rank up), or will this be seen as suspicious and potential merit-trading, for which I could get red-tagged?
If you merit a lot of shitty posts then someone might see a pattern. If you occasionally boost a shitty poster or your alt - unfortunately that's probably going to go unnoticed.
...There is no point in hoarding sMerit; keeping it yourself does not benefit you, and we reserve the right to decay unused sMerit in the future.
From any signature-camp participant perspective: not sharing points benefits me, as I make it harder for new ones to rank up and become a competition for me, making it easier to get the spot in campaign and could keep payment rates higher. It also increases the value of my account.
If someone is only concerned with sig campaigns and/or account trading then yes, there are probably ways to abuse the system. Hopefully the overall impact will reduce spam sufficiently to outweigh potential negatives but this may take a few weeks to settled down. Once the initial sMerit bonus is gone we'll start seeing how this actually works.