Originally Posted by sierk1
I agree that it would be better if rep could not be bought, and only earned. The problem is that we started giving out free rep when people bought VIP. Since then a lot of people just bought extra VIP so that they would get the rep. So it has always been the case that VIPs had higher rep than normal members, it's part of the VIP features.
To stop ppl buying a lot of VIP just to get rep, we thought it would be better to just sell rep by itself. This feature is still only available for VIPs, so nothing much has changed really. Normal members have to earn reputation, and VIPs get reputation just by buyng VIP itself, and can also buy extra.
I agree that reputation has lost its meaning for VIP members, but this was already the case when we first started the VIP membership.