The merit system is not working, look the merit points of people on the forum, it does not move (even for the more relevant posts), the forum established a system which was suppose to penalize newcomers flooding the forum with useless post, but the forum penalize itself, good luck everybody, If you think people will give you merit points for free you are mistaken.
Looks like merits could be found more on this thread, that is why if you have notice, every signature campaigns allows their participants to post on meta, which is not allowed way back then when we don't have this merit system yet, but I am not against this merit system, this merit system minimize those users who are creating more accounts so that they could abuse every signature campaign.
With this system, those kinds of people will have second thoughts, they are going to be lazy on making multiple accounts since ranking up is too hard if you are not posting good quality post, so if you are not gaining any merits at all, meaning you should improve more of your post quality.