Over 2,500 newbies banned... Wow.
They were banned in 3 weeks, but that amount of Newbies respawns in just over a day. So maybe 5% gets banned, while I don't think more than 5% are real valuable users. That leaves 90% of potential spammers walking free.
Pretty sure that the vast majority of signature spamming newbies have cheated their way to at least 1 merit now.
I don't think so, only a few thousand got Merit, and as far as I know many tens of thousands were demoted.
Looks like high rank accounts are going to be destroyed faster than they are created now, 4 Legendary accounts wiped out, definitely takes a lot longer than 2 weeks to see 4 people rank up from Hero to Legendary these days.
That's the truely good news! New spammers can't rank up, existing spammers are slowly being wiped out.
Either way, merit destruction can be countered by producing more merit sources, or by more careful distribution of merit from current members.
It could, but merit destruction is not a bad thing if it means destroying spammers.