Quote from: JollyGood on August 28, 2025, 06:36:32 PM

Quote from: Satofan44 on August 28, 2025, 12:10:58 PM

I understand the issues that you are trying to solve, I just don't see how your ideas would help for the other issues such as the one that I am writing about. If anything, making everyone a merit source would amplify the power of the abusers and the farmers. I think that such a system would need much more oversight and require frequent and severe punishments to have any chance of deterring cheaters.

I did not advocate making every member merit source. We both agree on the fundamentals of the situation.

Maybe I am being repetitive in some regards, yet it seems to me if there were a desire to get rid of what you assert to be two-tierdness, then the logical conclusion would lead to something that you don't seem to be advocating which would be either to competely eliminate merits or to cause more members to have smerits to spend (like having more merit source members) - and so if we were thinking in terms of increasing merit source memers, then where do you draw the line in order to eliminate tieredness? a few thousand?

Since you seem to agree that compete elimination of the merit system is not a good thing, then at what point of the expansion of the merit system (by adding more merit source members) would the tieredness be sufficiently eliminated?

Oops.. maybe I am not giving enough credit to your rotating merit source members idea? There still would be some tierdness in the eligibility pool, and the more I think about the idea of rotating merit sources, that starts to seem to be logistically disasterous... Would the terms of service be a month? or maybe a year? or every quarter? I am not opposed to the idea, even though it seems like potentially a lot of work.

I seem to recall when the merit system was first activated, theymos said that he would revisit it about once a year, and yeah, he revisited it a few times and probably did quite a bit behind the scenes while maybe striving to allow it to seem like it was pretty much hands off, yet part of my point is that systematic review and revise did not really seem to take place in any kind of a public way, and likely there were just ongoing administrative matters change the source amounts and remove some members and add some other members and even theymos's one time stated goal of increasing the merit sources to a couple hundred or whatever it was did not come to pass, since it seems that the most we ever got up to was around 130.. and perhaps even that was a lot of work to sometimes review reports of abuse or drama related to some locals not having any merit sources or maybe just having 1 or 2 merit sources, which also could have had led to some problems in some local sections.

Quote from: JollyGood on August 28, 2025, 06:36:32 PM

Quote from: Ambatman on August 28, 2025, 03:01:00 PM

The issue is majority of any idea that can be thought of Would be misused
It's not that the system is bad is just that it involves humans. And we humans are good at finding loopholes in every system.

If the majority of any idea can be misused because members will find loopholes to exploit, I see no reason why the current two-tier merit source and non-merit source should not be changed (even if just to test any new proposed format).

Quote from: JayJuanGee on August 28, 2025, 06:06:03 PM

Your "limited examples" don't get me too excited, but who am I.

It seems to me that even though several members are complaining in reasonable ways about aspects of the merit system, theymos is likely not completely unsatisfied with the merit system as it is playing out, so any suggested changes likely would need to be somewhat in line with what is already happening rather than revolutionary changes.

We are all members and within our capacity of being members, all we can do is to contribute ideas and suggestions. I am not looking for my suggestions to be implemented, nor am I asking for support. I took the opportunity to invite debate and suggestions.

The merit system is broken, whether it continues in the same format or not I doubt members will use that as a reason or excuse to leave the forum.

It likely is true that aspects of the merit system as it currently stands has quite a few negative aspects, meaning that it could be improved, yet it could continue going on as is, too.

In that regard, broken just seems like a wrong choice of words, and I am starting to feel that I am repeating myself. Theymos probably reads through several of these merit related discussions, and there could be some kinds of changes that he might be receptive to making or even contemplating making...yet I am just guessing, since in some sense, even if some members believe that some meaningful changes could be made to the merit system, he might just think that if any changes might be tweaked here or there by removing or adding a merit source member or maybe increasing or decreasing a source member's quantity of smerits, those might be good enough kinds of adjustments to make from time to time, so in that sense, he might not be agreeing with your "broke" assessment.