I see nothing wrong with the current system. When I first brought Kurayami here, there was going to be latent potential that he would later explore and learn of his talents over a long while. Much the same as everyone else who starts as an apprentice. I was asked by the one who invited me why i didn't just transfer him, he had a total of 8+ years of development, his original training threads lost to the eons long ago. Unfortunately life has a way of throwing curveballs sometimes, so the person who was to train me got slammed with all sorts of things going on and things got more busy for me as well. I gave it a bit to settle, but it only seemed to get more crazy as time went on. So i had a couple old friends vouch for a rank transfer, people whom I know remember my first posts and how ridiculous they were.
It took me awhile to admit to myself that I wasn't going to get the chance to really delve into the development of his latent abilities as much as I had hoped to, and I come from sites where you could easily start as a Lord/Master level character. Yea sure it was fun to be able to jump right into the fray, but few if any writers had any respect for a new Master equivalent character who just showed up out of nowhere. The main issue I recall with such systems was that in some ways it encouraged meta-gaming. You could have thousands of posts and many years behind a character, and someone would walk in with a new character who magically knew everything you did, and then some and could counter almost anything you could manage, and when asked to edit they'd refuse based on the fact that they were of equivalent rank to you so if you could do something then there was no reason they couldn't. That doesn't even get into characters created solely for the purpose of jumping into someone else's thread and just screwing the whole thing up because they could and had a high enough rank to 'legitimately' last in a duel if they were challenged.
Will abolishing rank systems lead to such issues? Not necessarily, but it very easily could. If I didn't have the amount of experience I do on RP boards, then I would not have even considered a rank transfer, because my confidence that I could do a Master level character came from many years of already having written one under both stricter and more lax rules. I had a lot of experiences to fall back on both good and bad. That is a major thing that someone needs in my opinion to write a Master level character successfully. Experience, time spent reading other's posts, both those that do it right and those who do it wrong, and make those mistakes themselves before being granted a rank like Master.
As for the post count idea, I am not against it, however the ranks I don't think should be purely post count. Rather only IC posts would be considered in the promotion. 500 posts IC would mean that I would still be at Knight level at best as many of mine have been OOC posts. Why I would place that restriction is so that we have a relatively clear idea of how the character has developed in terms of learning and utilizing the Force, whether through a PC/NPC master or just over time on their own. It gives people something to work towards and provides incentive to figure out an IC solution instead of causing OOC drama, due to the fact that only their IC posts would help them 'level up.'
Again, I will say that I don't feel the system is broken as it stands, and of course someone is going to game the system either way, people are like that sometimes. You won't stop those who want to cause drama from doing so no matter how strict the guidelines are to attain the next rank. The system in place works well from what I have seen and I had quite a bit of planning going into possible story arcs. I was excited to write a character from the bottom up, and this was a character who had been a Master for a long time. Don't view starting at the lowest rank as a bad thing or a negative. It isn't. I had to make some edits to my bio when I did the transfer so it made some sort of IC sense. That was incredibly annoying to me honestly, and then having to find what powers fit his character and everything else took a long time to get a decent list together. I had been trying to figure something out almost since I started here, but I knew it would be a bit before I posted that he was even learning those powers. And I was looking forward to the stories that comes from such things.
In my honest opinion, the best characters and those I respect most end up having a good amount of story behind their characters. They have threads showing that they weren't just this amazing prodigy from the get go. They had to learn and make mistakes, and learn over time. Learn to savor the journey and the challenges that come with working towards the next rank. I've honestly thought about going back and doing a write up of his training, breaking it up and doing blog posts to give background on how he came to be where he is now. Because I didn't get the chance to do it as I had planned originally. Problem is time and making sure everything works right. Could be fun though, just to get an idea of the 'what could have been.'
Just my thoughts based on past experiences.
