I just love the merit system and new ranks because it gives equal opportunity to every member of the forum to show their skills  by posting high quality posts. Before this system there wasn't any real measurement to determine the high quality posters and low quality posters because everyone was almost able to achieve higher ranks from posting, and no matter if the posts were of good quality or not.  But now only those will be able to climb the ladder of higher ranks who give their time to research, so they could create high quality posts that might help many new comers as well as inform the reputed users of the forum.

Only activity to raise higher levels was somewhat fair, but unfortunately it was vulnerable as many corrupt users who had no skills other than account creation were able to create accounts so they could sell them to new users who had money. That is indirectly a huge treat for the active and hard working users of the forum because those newbies were able to have Sr, Hero, and other rank account just by feeding those account sellers some cash. The merit system has solved that vulnerability with its entry.

But, I am still somewhat confused about the ones who are having many alts, they might try to misuse the merit system to gain higher ranks, but that confusion is still not that huge because I am very sure that misusing of this system will be very hard for those people because getting higher s-merits will requite hard work for their alt accounts, so they will have to post quality materials to get those s-merits which is probably impossible for them.