Don't forget everyone's reputation is now ticking upwards steadily (albeit) slowly. The formula should be chosen to match the kind of rep we're GOING to see rather than what people already have now. I'd say go ahead and target that MUCH higher rep: the few users who have it have really earned it, and it's now inevitable that others will also eventually reach those scores.

Because even users who aren't knowledgable in a subject will eventually have 2k+ and 3k+ ratings in the Scholar category, do you think there will be a problem of everyone having to keep adjusting our mental thresholds for "knowledgeable users", because they steadily tick upwards regardless of whether they are knowledgeable or not?

It should take time and effort to earn increased influence.[/quote]
Agreed. But don't forget the time-honored rule of game-development: No matter how long the developer will think it'll take, players will reach it much faster.

<br /> Because even users who aren't knowledgable in a subject will eventually have 2k+ and 3k+ ratings in the Scholar category, do you think there will be a problem of everyone having to keep adjusting our mental thresholds for "knowledgeable users", because they steadily tick upwards regardless of whether they are knowledgeable or not?<br />

Well, to be fair, the only wait to increase your scholar points directly will be to "follow" a particular topic. This is more to encourage the designation of worthwhile topics than anything.. and there will always be the potential for abuse. BUT, look at it from a different angle in that we should all be trying to produce a lot more open knowledge for each other. We all have a ton of skills that could help others and we have a huge potential as a community talent pool to create some really useful stuff (articles, blogs, topics, answers, etc)

As a side comment, I think one of the things that bothers me still is when people really take a lot of time to help another user and they don't get a thanks/upvote/etc. How do you change that mentality and make courtesy more important? I know this is the Internet and all but the best I could come up with is by giving people a point just for giving out reputation points. Aside from that we need to really experience a culture shift here.. a new renessaince where people do more to contribute game development information.

One of the next stages of this reputation system is going to be how articles are handled.. we're really going to be looking for people to take pieces of code that they have written and share explanations of how it works with other people. When I originally developed gameprog.com back in 1997 one of the things I strived for is platform-agnostic, language-agnostic techniques for game programmers (ie. algorithms, patterns, etc)

It's also pretty simple to build an article around a piece of code.. and most of us all have some gem pieces of code that we have tucked away on our hard drives. As long as people aren't too afraid to share we have some great potential in this area.

At a quick glance almost everyone in this thread has a higher reputation than Tom Sloper. Which is a bit wrong if you ask me. I don't want to have to look up graphs and charts for every member to figure out if they have sage advice or not.

And for what reason do you consider their points not earned? Tom will certainly accumulate points faster than most people anyway. I'd doubt his sage advice doesn't cause his reputation to skyrocket quickly. Remember, this system is brand new..

Most of the arguments I would make have already been brought up in this thread so I won't bog you down with rehashing them. I understand the system is brand new, but if we're going to keep it there needs to be a quick way to see where all these superfluous points come from without having to go through a person's profile.

I get that. I would just take a different stance that the other points are superfluous.. which is perfectly fine that you disagree. I do want to be able to come up with a simple rep tag that shows each of the four categories in a compact format though so hopefully that will address your concerns.

Why not give a small user setting with 5 checkboxes. 1-4 are for the categories you want to care about? The 5th is whether you want a total, or individual breakdown. Then instead of seeing "Reputation: 999" you see "Reputation: [color=#ff0000]111 [color=#00ff00]222 [color=#0000ff]333 [color=#ffd700]444" or "Reputation: [color=#a9a9a9]555".