It would be reasonable if the merits were calculated in accordance with the activity, and not with the rank. Many frontier guards suffered, especially juniors - 2-5 activity were missing from the member and now please ... (I read in other topics that in this shift of ranks (January 30), merits will not be taken into account! And this at least somehow compensated for the effect of surprise )
I fully understand you, my Junior brother, the merit system is a big surprise for all of us. But what can we do ? Just adopt and mine merits one by one writing good posts. On the other hand it is better than paying money to rank up. And amount of activities needed to rank up also can be increased. Better merits than that.