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A day later he realizes why he came here in the first place. He needs damn money. So the light bulb goes off. Well if a hero member gets 8 stake and a jr member gets 1 there is only one thing left to do if I'm to make it as a bounty hunter. Multiple accounts!
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1 - When you need to make 50x more posts with multiple junior account to earn the same money as you would with 1 Hero account - that should motivate any reasonable person to focus on quality, earn merits, rank up and make it easier for yourself. Unless you're intellectually incapable of quality posting.
2 - If someone's here only to maximise his profits, he would spam more if there was no Merit system, knowing that all his multiple accounts will rank-up eventually, disregard of post quality.
3 - Assuming there's a limited number of spots in signature campaigns for junior members, market soon will get saturated and most junior accounts would end up idle.
ps. I've noticed increased number of "smart post" - low rank members spamming with copy/paste of smart sounding content (usually from press articles/blogs) in attempt to get some merit points (unsuccessfully). You could say Merit system is responsible for this particular kind of spam, but it also suggests the system works.
ps2 - Move to "Meta"