Quote from: jambola2 on January 26, 2018, 04:52:38 PM

The reason I don't understand how this stops account farmers, is consider this:

Assume an account farmer with an extremely large number of accounts has roughly the same number of mean Merits per post as a normal user.
If he gets 100 Merits, he also gets 50 sMerits. He then redistributes these 50 sMerits amongst his accounts. Assuming he has planned this well, he should be discreet about it, and in the end he'll get 25 more sMerits to distribute.

Once you calculate the entire thing, you realize that for every Merit the account farmer receives, he gets close to a total of two Merits across his entire group of accounts, once you account for sMerits.

I never said it's goana stop account farming entirely, but I hope you do agree that it makes it way more harder and time consuming now. If before all you had to do is post once a day per user to get your activity up, now you have to post some good posts too. You say that a person with a large number of accounts has roughly the same number of average merits per post as the normal user. I have to disagree with you. Even if he is a great poster, he will run out of ideas for good posts if he has too many accounts. Even if he doesn't it will be much more time consuming than to just spam a 10 word post. Lets say someone is brilliant and manages to do this consistently. That means that his already good posts will get twice as many merits than the average. This is not such a big advantage considering the amount of time he will have to spend on this collusion.

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Also it will be pretty easy to detect such collusion as everyone can see who you give your merit points to.

I think this might just be the Toupee Fallacy.
You only ever notice that bad colluders are performing collusion, so you assume that everyone who colludes will be readily noticeable.
When collusion goes well, and with the merit system, I think it might be easy to hide, you will not notice it... and hence assume that the only people who collude, are the ones who obviously collude.

So in the end, account farmers get twice the merit across their accounts for the same quality of posts.... which is an issue, but I guess it's not the worst.

While this is true I don't see why this is a valid argument against the merit system. Before it was very obvious that many people cheated the system and created armies of accounts. Now it's goana be much harder to do that effectively. Will people still be able to manipulate the system? Yes, but besides banning bounties entirely, I don't think there is a solution that won't be manipulated to some extent.

Quote from: vegita1233 on January 26, 2018, 04:56:25 PM

For the most part I happen to agree with your long term conclusions. If I had any Smerit I would give it to you. The implementation was a bit faulty cause many members got screwed during the switch. Some were 2 activities away from a new rank that has been here 6 months and is now the equivalent of someone who just got the same rank yesterday. My personal feeling is that for something this drastic just give everyone the next rank and I think most people would have been fine with the change. Doing it this way feels like a kick to the teeth to the people who played by the previous rules.

I agree that this could have been implemented more smoothly. I myself was a few days away from becoming member. Anyway, this issue is more relevant to senior and hero members as the gap is huge between the next rank. This has been brought up already and we might see some tweaks in the future.