Firstly, good work on trying to continue the discussion. I agree with some suggestions and others I do not but it's always nice to have healthy discussion and bounce suggestions back off other people.


I do like this idea in principle but in practice it seems a bit difficult and restrictive. Let's say for example that you really feel like someone's posts require a lot of merit (for example you're a merit source and you review a members old posts and decide to give them many merit because their overall post quality has been good) you would not be able to then do this without first finding someone else to give merit to, in a sense you'd have to be going from A to B to A to B and so on, it would mostly act as a deterrent for some quality posts getting the merit they deserve.

If something like this would ever be implemented I would definitely say that a good change would be to make sure it doesn't apply to merit sources.

However, given the fact that suspicious merit giving is already quite well reported I feel like it's not really a feature that needs to be implemented.



I have thought this for some time, as you rightly mentioned, merit serves no extra purpose for them and is effectively wasted, other than acting as some sort of badge of honour.

I think that within your suggestions you hinted at the essence of the real problem and that's that there are not enough merit sources, if there was more merit then legendaries receiving merit wouldn't be an issue because there would be enough to go around for the lower ranks as well.

The idea of having merit sources that are voted for by the community seems like a good decision, however it's very difficult to allow people to vote on it because people will often feel like they're being hard done by and not receiving enough merit. I also feel that legendary accounts should also be included but exempt from voting for themselves. It should be conducted on a purely positive vote system and whoever gets the most votes wins, of course senior leadership should have the final decision. If such merit sources are added I think they should be some of the largest merit sources, I think there will definitely be a large group of people who are willing to work hard to distribute merit to those who deserve it.

I like the idea of being able to merit legendaries posts in some way without it costing actual sMerit, but then this could skew the rankings of posts based on merit as these legendaries posts could be merited as much as people would like.

If you were going to do this you might as well just stop people from having accounts with the same IP and cut alt accounts by a huge amount. I've read many times that this is not something that Theymos will consider doing.