Dont simply be proud of these titles: Make them signify an achievement to be proud of!
What the fuck is with these fucking people... Dude its a fucking web forum. The rank achieved here is nothing to be proud of...
Holy shit people get a fucking life that isn't tied to this fucking forum... Go outside take a walk enjoy nature, get a fucking blowy (from a real person not some 15 yr old boy pretending to be a 19 yr old women on the webz), smoke a dube, have a glass of wine.
When you start saying things like"blah blah blah insult to the word hero" and "can you really call someone legendary". Hey dude it's a forum, guess what those ranks actually mean, NOTHING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LOLOLOLOLOLOL
A persons trust, merit, and rank are completely inconsequential because interwebz and also have zero bearing on the content of their posts.
hahahahaha
I agree with a lot about what you said, Flying Hellfish... but you did seem to take this subject matter to almost the opposite extreme in order to make your point... .. ..
Certainly, rank is important in terms of the forum, incentivizing member contributions, and there are certain potential financial and status benefits with rank. You know the expression, "rank has its privileges"?
But, yeah, the overall point that you are making and several other posters in this thread are questioning whether rules should be made around exceptional posters, such as nullius. There is no problem to strive for greatness, but there is also variety in contributions, and some definitely worthy folks are going to get left behind through this new merit system without tweaking.
Additionally, theymos's decision to start the initial merit distribution of all members with merits at the minimum merit level of their current rank will disparately impact members who had been nearly to rank up under the old system, but based on the new system are now faced with earning merits to catch up to where they would have been.
We cannot become oblivious to some of these disparate impacts and the variation of activities and contributions of members who are worthy to rank up but might get locked out of (or left behind from) ranking up because of these new merit terms.
By the way, I have also witnessed some members who seem to engage in a kind of subconscious merit beginning earning a lot of merits, and many of those members are going to rank up much easier than some members who might be more worthy, but less capable (or willing) to engage in self-marketing.
Anyhow, I have also read quite a bit of merit posts suggestions in the recent months, and sure there is also a common constructive theme within suggestions that recognizes that this merit system is in its early days and could take a decent 6 to 12 months to verify how matters are playing out and perhaps an equal amount of time, if not longer to reasonably attempt to fix bugs (if there are possible fixes).