WTF! KAO THE FORUM IS BROKEN. THIS WAS MY REPLY TO A PM!
At the moment, some posters, including me, are micromanaging your Karma title to keep you, just for the moment, at "Scholar". See, the Karma system usually works very well, except in the case of low-count posters. In the Game forums you are usually rated up for giving out very helpful/useful/informative advise. So if a high-post-count Sage or Guru says something about a game, you can usually trust that what they say is true or useful. Posters are usually rated down in game forums for insulting/degrading/prejudiced language, or general obnoxiousness or wrong advice about game facts.
The OOT forums have a different relationship with rating. You are rated up for both for useful and correct information about the world at large, and also for Being Entertaning. So a high post count Sage or Guru can generally be relied upon to be good company, to make good jokes, or to give out sympathetic life advice.
The problem is is that every time you make a post, you get an automatic default rate just for posting. as Scholar you usually automatically get a "Decent" rating on your post, unless someone else rates you up or down. Sages automatically get a "Good" and Gurus automatically get "Excellent" on their posts. The lower your post count, the easier it is to move your Karma title between Default, Scholar, Sage and Guru, because each single post represents a larger contribution of your overall Karma score. The higher your post count, the harder it is to have your default Karma changed, because every post contributes a tiny fraction of your overall Karma score. Now imagine that someone with a very low post count comes in and makes 50 really great posts and they are all uprated to "Excellent". From now on in every post you make is automatically "Excellent", and you stay a Guru... even if the next thousand posts are completely mediocre. Once you have 3 or 5 thousand posts, it's extremely hard for your default Karma to change. So you could start trolling the forums, telling lies, misleading people and being an overall PITA, and other posters would be more vulnerable to trusting you, because you have a Trustworthy and Informative "Guru: Excellent" stamped all over your posts.
The Zam Karma system is generally liked by regulars, keeps down the flaming because you can down-rate a post and move on, and generally works as intended. But everyone agrees it doesn't work as intended for the very low-count posters. It's hard to delineate when the Karma system starts working as intended. Everyone has a different perspective about that, and it probably kicks in later for the OOT, because of all the celebratory circle-jerks where everyone in the thread rates every post in the thread up just because it's party-time over a poster's birthday, or new child, or graduation. While you are perceived to be in the zone of low-count poster, some people will arbitrarily rate you down and up, not over an individual post, but to keep you where your posting history as a whole is perceived to rate your contributions to the forum. After you are perceived to have left the low-count zone, each post will be up or down rated on its own merits.
At 40 posts you were default rated to "Good", which means that you were on the verge of tipping over to a Karma title of "Sage". As delightful as most of your forum contributions have been so far, I don't know, within 40 posts alone, if you are the sort of person who deserves the trust and respect that a Karma Title of "Sage" should indicate.
The Asylum used to be more fun than the OOT, because The Asylum rules are MUCH freer than any other Zam forum. Sadly most of the Asylum posters grew up and had children and started caring that other posters were actual real people. However, if you go in with a titanium-plated skin, it can still be a fun playground. In the Asylum it was considered bad form to down rate a post you didn't like. You were supposed to flame the sh*t out of the post and the poster instead.
Edited, Feb 25th 2013 1:10pm by Aripyanfar
