There's good news and bad news about esteem. The bad news: the situation
people were seeing where a positive esteem vote would actually reduce
their rank wasn't a bug per se. What happened was the system was
neglecting to update people's esteem ranks in light of the regular decay
rate toward neutral esteem. So the decay was happening to the
behind-the-scenes data, but ranks weren't being updated to reflect it.
The result was that your esteem votes were decaying but your ranks
weren't getting updated until another esteem vote was received, giving
the illusion that the vote caused the rank drop. Anyway, I've fixed this
but a lot of people's ranks had decayed toward neutral behind the scenes
and I wasn't aware of it due to ranks not getting updated regularly. So
a lot of people's esteem ranks fell to where they 'should be' just now.

The good news is that I've substantially reduced the decay rate, so most
esteem votes will now last a LOT longer. Your esteem rank will also be
updated every time the votes decay, so the rank you see in honors should
be 100% accurate.

In addition, I've added a new config option: CONFIG ESTEEMREASON. In
short, with this option on, the reason you specify for your vote (but
not your name) will be displayed to the person for whom you're voting.
I'd recommend keeping this option on, as it gives people very helpful
feedback about what they're doing right (or wrong). But if there's a
situation where you're afraid of retribution or just don't want your
reason known to the other person for whatever reason, you can turn this
option off and they won't see the reason you specify. FYI, immortals can
see the reason you specify regardless of your esteemreason setting.

-Varian

Penned by my hand on the 8th of Slyphian, in the year 118 MA.