Pros
Removes subjectivity - So as people have understandably suggested in the past, your grading might depend on the mod who reads it. One mod might grade threads more harshly resulting in a lower score whereas another might be more generous and grade more highly. There’s not really any room for that in the current system. It is simply a math equation and then the only real thing the mods need to decide is whether or not one of the bonuses is applicable.
Ideally will decrease grading congestion - As we all know, the grading section can get really bogged down sometimes. This isn’t something unique to that section but it’s one of the many things the mods have to keep up with on a consistent basis. The new system theoretically will decrease the amount of time it takes a mod to grade a thread by having them simply double check the word count and apply any bonuses. This might make it less daunting to sweep because they won’t have to spend 15 minutes per thread reading through
Differentiates from peer review - In the old system the only real thing that set peer review apart was the optional grading scale and the expectation of (somewhat) productive feedback. The new system is just math so it makes peer review the place to go if you want opinions on the quality of your writing and/or the content of the thread itself.
Cons
Quantity over quality- The new system has no place for judging the quality of the writing itself. Now I’ve talked in discord about how we shouldn’t take anyone’s criticism too seriously as we’re all just writing fanfiction for fun here, but I personally enjoyed that aspect. You can go to peer review now but history has shown that peer review gets (understandably) very little attention. The bonuses provided are more about engagement, which I can get behind, but they don’t really have much to do with "quality". I don’t think there is a good solution to this as it’s all subjective and one person’s opinion of “high quality writing” can vary drastically from another's.
It evokes the old training rules - I understand that the overall goal of the site is to just write your stories and have fun with them, but some of us are greedy bastards that want to squeeze as many points as we can get out of those things we are having fun with. It sort of encourages you to hit arbitrary word counts or to do a certain number of posts to get the most out of your thread. Even the grading brackets sort of imply that the goal is to pour as many words as possible into your thread so you can be a “mangaka” tier writer and reach the max points. That shouldn’t be what we take away from it but monkey brain like when number go bigger.
Concerns
A whole lotta yappin - As someone who tends to have some relatively wordy posts that drone on, I shouldn’t really be talking but I feel like this might lead to overall wordier socials/lonelies. There’s nothing wrong with doing a 100 word post and nothing in the system says that you shouldn’t, but why not throw a 1250 word post in there to hit that verbose bonus? If you have enough to explore within that post, then by all means keep going! But sometimes we only have so much to work with and it might lead to the same repetition and the stretching out of sentences that we would see in old training threads. If I recall correctly, one of the reasons the rules for social training was changed in the first place is because people were randomly throwing training posts into their threads to try and force some extra value out of the thread.
Scrutiny and bad actors - This is always going to be a problem and it is still going to require the sort of self-moderation from the members that I hope has always been a thing. Without the need to really read the thread some people might try to pull some shenanigans to try and inflate their word count. This goes beyond what I talked about in the previous point, I am talking about writing actual nonsense sentences, conspicuously consistent word repetition, or simply reporting their word count as higher than what it is in hopes of catching a mod off guard. I’m not trying to imply the mods are going to be lazy, but with less of a need for scrutiny it will be easier to miss things and we are all (allegedly) human.
Lonely farming - Some people are built different and I hate them for their talent and ability to just write without banging their head against a wall for hours. These people have always had a leg up on the site because the goal is to write more and they got posts in spades. That’s totally fine for them and for the most part the need for socials sort of keeps these people from getting too out of hand. There was always the possibility that someone could just spam lonelies and make a bunch of ryo that way, but I think the new system makes it a lot more profitable. If you can hit a 1250 word lonely then that is a guaranteed 12 ryo. That would be the equivalent of scoring a 6 in the old system which I have rarely ever seen a lonely hit. That’s a lot of ryo! Add scaled accountant to that and you’re making 16 ryo per lonely regardless of whether it’s fluffy filler or not. As someone who doesn’t get involved with pvp or any of that kind of stuff it doesn’t affect me, but it seems like it could cause some problems down the line. I could be overreacting in this department though. Maybe everyone else thinks it’s fair as, at the end of the day, the person is putting in the work.