SO they want the public to build a network which once able to turn a profit they will immediately back while charging you to post in order to build it. Hmm, want to build a forum/thread for a new game? Go ahead and pay us to make it through our new "trinket" system, spend the time/energy/resources to build it and once it's big enough we will back it with little to no risk because we didn't invest anything into it's creation....The new stratics sounds amazing
Well there's a couple things wrong with that image you're painting.
First off Trinkets don't have to be purchased, they can be earned either passively, by visiting the site and interacting on the forums (slowest), or more actively through contributing articles and guides (Faster) which we are stream lining to make easy for people to do, since that has been a much often asked for feature. Lastly through purchase (Fastest), you'll be able to leap frog the time investment in earning them. The whole idea is to find ways to reward people who contribute to our community. Being active on our forums is a way of contributing, writing articles and guides is a greater contribution in the long term, and direct financial contributions towards running and maintaining the site are even greater contributions and are being rewarded accordingly.
Secondly, it's not all about someone building up an entire title's worth of support, one of the things
Community Liaisons and myself will be doing is keeping a pulse on the community an looking for interest in different titles, if a person starts a group for a game that's fine, but they'll still not be able to give it the level of support we can at the organizational level. User Groups get 1 forum, and no ability to create sub-forums, and the community member who creates it bears the burden of all moderation, support etc. for their group beyond simple support for technical issues in setting it up or answers on "how-to". Something we see more likely is community members who play more than one title, Say UO and another game we don't have a Group or Forum for, if they start a Guild Group for the other title, and we see enough users in it, or a number of guild groups for the same title pop up, we'll approach them and see if they are interested in helping build a new official group.
Additionally if you were to create a group for a new title, and draw in players from that title to Stratics using your Referral Link, and you max out your accounts life time rewards for referrals, you'll gain enough trinkets to start 4 more groups if you wanted.
It's not about exploitation of the community which is what you are implying. It's about finding ways to build in a manner that the community shows a need or interest for, and also rewarding individuals who make contributions to our community. If we see a title gain enough interest, regardless of if any articles, or guides have or have not been created for it, we're going to approach the owner of that group and see if they are interested in joining staff and start working towards a larger scale community for it.