It's still on my TODO: combining theymos' data dump and the current merit amounts in each profile is enough to determine the Merit airdrop for each user, which is enough to deduce their "starting" rank.
I've been postponing this for too long, I hope to find some time tomorrow. I'm very curious to see stats on who ranked up.
Once I get it all figured out, I'll include it in my weekly updates.
You're right. You can backtrack using the initial airdrop as a measure for the initial Rank. I did it like this at some point in a post from way back, but somehow got confussed now with the initial sMerit <> initial Merit (obviously).
Based on what I can see, if I'm right, we have:
- No one has made it to Legendary
- 8 to Hero (from Sr. Member)
- 33 to Sr. Member (from Full Member)
- 21 to Full Member (from scratch; two more than on a list I found yesterday with older creation dates), and another additional 53 to Full Member (from Member)
- 1.614 to Member (starting from Jr. Member or below).
-> I'm only listing regular ranks here, since I don't know how the initial Merit played out with Copper Members, VIPs, and so on.
The above data is based on all historical records, and not using as a safe baseline a certain date of account creation onwards.
Since you're going to detail the users I'll stop here, but the above could serve to cross-reference our results to double-check.