6. I'm not sure how you can say they lessened XP. I didn't know there was a set quantity of i available and they reduced it. Actualy you could probably argue the reverse. As a saint i'd basicaly stopped voting unless outraged by something. Now i will begin to vote more agian. That voting produces XP for myself and for the person I vote on. It is quite possible then that the flow of XP will increase greatly as many dormant saints begin to vote like maniacs ;).

Update:

Oh, yeah, about this saint issue. If you are level 13 or higher then you are a saint (or perhaps 'saintly'). If you are level 26 then you are both a Saint and saintly. IOW, we still consider all users over 3k to be 'saints'. Have a look at Saints In Our Book to see.

I'd like to address a few of your points, and not necessarily in order.

First is this issue of votes bonus. You seem to think that people will lose out because of the vote bonus. This wrong. Under the new system users will continue to recieve their vote bonus until they have 250XP. Under the old system the user would lose their vote bonus at 200XP. So that has actually moved up.

Regarding the new vote allocation scheme. You say that people lose votes. And you are right. That was a deliberate design decision. Under the old scheme all users over 3k XP recieved daily 40 votes, which represented a voting pool of 16.6k votes. Those same 400 odd users now receive about 7k votes. Generally speaking this is perceived as a Good Thing as it makes newer and lower level users votes mean proportionally more, and compensates for the increase in total number of users. Overall the vote count is still almost certainly signifigantly higher than it was when the original level scheme was created.

Also, it seems to me that you (and many others) have become used to the old system without realizing that it in fact was a very different system when users like myself first joined. Not because the system changed of course, but because of the size of the user base. When I started there were less than 20 Saints and only about 100-200 regular users. We currently have a regular user base of about 4000 and we have over 400 saints. This is a drammatic inflation. And the way we have compensated for it is to reduce the number of votes available. This will mean that the $NORM will drop over time, which in turn will mean that lower rep'ed nodes will generate more XP for the users that write them.

Id really appreciate it if you could leave off the doom-and-gloom predictions until the new system has had a chance to "settle down". I think that in two or three weeks you will have forgotten what all the fuss is.

And just to reassure you, the gods involved in this releveling did a fair amount of analysis and debate to come up with the new scheme. We considered a lot of factors, including current user XP distributions. We think that the new scheme will in the long term provide a lot of room for growth, and will return the voting/experience system to something a little closer to what it was when it was first introduced. And frankly if it looks like it needs to be tweaked again to respond to something we have overlooked, then it will be.

So rest easy.

Oh, yeah, about this saint issue. If you are level 13 or higher then you are a saint (or perhaps 'saintly'). If you are level 26 then you are both a Saint and saintly. IOW, we still consider all users over 3k to be 'saints'. Have a look at Saints In Our Book to see.

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$world=~s/war/peace/g

When I started there were less than 20 Saints and only about 100-200 regular users. We currently have a regular user base of about 4000 and we have over 400 saints. This is a drammatic inflation.

No doubt there's inflation (I only recently arrived here - I only know the current situation), but the numbers you quote don't show "drammatic inflation". In fact, they show *de*flation. "Less than 20 Saints and about 100-200 regular users", suggest the ratio of users/saints is between "1:10" to "almost 1:5". Currently having 400 saints and about 4000 users gives a ratio of about "1:10". Which means that if the number of regular users in old times is in the high end of your estimate, we have an about same ratio of saints, perhaps slightly more. But if the number of users was at the low end of your estimate, the relative number of saints has almost halved.

Note that I'm not commenting on the real situation several years ago - I wasn't there. I'm just commenting the numbers you state, and the conclusion you draw from those numbers.

Perl --((8:>*

you no longer get exp for voting after you have passed Beadle -- level 5.

You may not get a bonus for running out of votes, but you still have a 25% chance of gaining one point per each vote you use.

1. I beleive that the point was to give those high ranking individuals the ability to have a feeling of growth. In order to get that you have to have levels that havn't yet been attained.

Oh, c'mon, don't be silly! I strongly doubt that those high ranking individuals needed any additional level to have a feeling of growth. OR that they really matter!

Not to say that I disagree with your rant to EvanCarroll's one. Actually that many and that high levels rather serve the purpose of showing the new brothers and sisters joining the Monastery that even very active members with exteremely high rankings still have a long way up to the ultimate level, so that they will start their pilgrimage towards enlightenment with due hubri^Whumility.

3. saint was just a title of the highest rank. Perhaps now we will see similar name-sake attributed to curate, who knows. I don't know anyone who went around bragging about being a saint so this probably isn't a problem.

Hey, and so I'm such a miserable nullity not to count as "one", heh?!?

Whatever, that kind of name-sake if really that important, of which I'm not really sure, was so at best as an inner "Monastery thing", and it was far too easy to become a saint, so that just by this fact saintity itself was somewhat desaintized, wasn't it?

Jokes apart, curate can't have just the same name-sake as saint, since they convey quite different psychological feelings - let's face it! Also, not being a native English speaker, many of the names for the new levels sound somewhat exhotic and unknown, and I have an overall impression, like many other people here, that the choice has been suboptimal. But OTOH I wouldn't know even where to start to do better, so I just shut up. After all, who am I -but a simple Vicar- to say how the Monastery "should" be managed?

4. Maybe, maybe not. As a previous saint i feel only a minor sense of loss, on the whole i probably didn't deserver any notions you apparently attach to saint hood.

Let's face this too! The majority of us former saints did feel a sense of loss for being unsaintized. OTOH I suddenly found my level pushed up from 10 to 15, and (letting aside the fact that the former was out of 10 and the letter out of 28 ;-) this compensates for the loss!

6. I'm not sure how you can say they lessened XP.

Indeed rumors are that P is a little-known roman numeral for "Plentium", so that XP is "ten less than a plentium". Thus it is a constant, and cannot be lessened, nor increased, for what that matters...

P.S. I will admit that upon reading this initialy I was dumb founded and felt stripped of my previous regal, but now i realize I didn't loose saint hood, i was never realy a saint before. After all a Saint can't stop being a Saint if he was realy Saint now can he? ;)

I thought Saint Christopher was declared a legend and not really a Saint. After a little research on it, he seems to have lost some status but retained his title, but others did not. So there is precedent for losing saint-hood if someone cannot be proved more than a legend. This is probably not an issue with perlmonks, as contributors are real people and not legends (though some have legendary reputations).

However, if there are bots acting at perlmonks and gaining XP, this issue might have to be reconsidered ...