I do not think everybody is pretty negative about the forum. Shitposters are, of course, but I think the good members of this community are fairly happy with the merit system, and their criticism only looks to improve it.
merit will improve the forum, its starting already. Once all managers of campaigns and bounties start using merit as an entry requirement then the shitposters will have no way of earning.
Or normal users for that matter.
I'm really afraid that merit is not going to scale well, and that only 0.1% is going to be able to rank up, which means this forum will see a lot less activity. I'm still unsure whether i think that's a good thing, or a bad thing.
17800 merit a month, or 26700 if everything is distributed twice, (or 31200 if you distribute it thrice)
Is roughly what, 30/60 Hero ranks each month? On a forum with over 3 million registered members? We're really scaling down here.
And that's just theorethical. Over the last few months we've seen how many users exactly rank up? 10? 30?
I just want to give another counter-argument to that.
You don't need to level up to make use of the forum's basic features. Not everybody is looking to get into a signature campaign, there are plenty of other opportunities on the forum.
It's not that difficult to get to member status and once you have that, you can already join a low-tier campaign.