The idea behind the WIAW thread is to offer a simplistic guideline which members can then use to decide what they want. As with all honest mechanisms, though, it can be abused.
Rarity of accounts is often used to increase their worth, regardless of whether they are worth anything. The ability to sign up to a tracker is considered worthless to having to trade accounts to gain an invite, which boosts the trackers' worth.
So, what is a tracker actually worth?
In the most simple terms, a tracker is worth what the account owner thinks it is worth. Two people will not rate the tracker at the same level, because their perceptions of that tracker may differ.
We hear phrases such as 'pre-time', 'community' and 'content', yet what do they actually mean. On any given community, you will have the lurkers and the activists. The activists are those who are active in the forums and/or IRC, or who upload. These people treat the community as an extension of themselves, and their peers are their online buddies. The lurkers, on the other hand, just check the browse page, read a few threads without responding, and could probably delacct.php without blinking.
Two different groups of people, and two different views of the same tracker community.
So, what is a tracker worth? It is worth exactly what someone is prepared to put into that community. Hard work will always pay off. Ask the staffers at numerous communities, who were at one stage ordinary members who went that extra step and became an activist.
So, when you see FTN at lvl 10, this means that someone who is active has the opinion that the tracker is of that level. Someone who has acquired an account for trade will advertise that tracker as lvl 10, but to them it's worth is not lvl 10, otherwise they would not be trading it. It's worth, then, is only what that tracker will gain them.
Bookmarks