if everyone maxed out at positive rep, that really wouldn't be an issue would it?
now, if you wish to speculate that people spammed each other with "likes" that's understandable because i know of a few individuals who did do that before the restriction was put in place like 2 days after the feature was added.....however take my personal rep for example, it was still only a few green circles for the whole first week the feautre was added. it wasn't until 2 weeks or so after the restriction was put in that my rep started getting really high, i think due in part to some of the people rating me already having higher rep and giving more points per ratings. at one point i got a couple circles into the yellow......idk maybe some people did spam me with "likes" but perhaps they really did like my post? all you can do to prevent spamming "likes" is to limit how many ratings you can give each day, and rightly so they did that almost immediately after the feature was added.
then out of nowhere for almost a week i kept getting tons of dislikes for no reason whatsoever, obviously meaning that somebody didn't like see that my rep points had gotten high so they were trying to take them away from me. that's not balancing the system, that's people just being douchebags for the sake of being douchebags and that is being malicious. they have no "right" to take it upon themselves to balance something that they might think is undeserved. sorry, but you can't defend those actions. there shouldn't be a need for "balance". the feature is supposed to be a fun little addition for allowing people to easily agree with posts without requiring them to reply with a post of their own which would just repeat what's already been said.....
are some people "slapping each other's backs" with a lot of borderline "likes"? possibly......but that's not really a bad thing and it's something you can't monitor or control aside from setting a restriction, which has already been put into place. however, you can control the other side of the issue and prevent people from being complete douches and stop them from being able to troll with undeserved negative ratings.
i'm not the only person this has happened to.....YoYobatty and some other regulars in the KF forums took huge beatings.
better yet, the most hilarious thing about all this is that i first made an issue of this in another thread (BL trolled that one and got it locked), and after that i love how the "last 5 ratings recieved" section was removed from your usercp so that you can't check your current points and ratings history. so now i'm still watching my "rep" drop and have no way of finding out which posts are getting dislikes so i can't report more abuse to the system. for all i know whoever's been trolling me recently is going through my posts from last year and giving them "dislikes" just to ruffle my feathers even more
Schneidy if you're reading this, do you have any explaination as to why this was removed? very odd timing that it was removed right after i began reporting this issue
ultimately, this feature should just be for fun.......for me it's not fun when i know i'm being trolled by asses and i'd imagine that feeling would be the same for the other people that this has happened to.