Get rid of the 5% tax on mineral transfers. SEN does not run on minerals and therefore the tax is not necessary for keeping the server online. In any case taxing people is stupid; it's a novelty really only used on boards because it's a default setting on vBulletin.

Mineral rewards for "contributions" is too vague and frankly, unfair. The SEN store page apparently doesn't exist right now as of the time of posting so I can't scrutinize the mineral rewards, but here are some things I remember off the top of my head:

-People can be rewarded minerals for being third place in a contest where only three people participated.
-People can and probably will incessantly whine about not having minerals that they earned through a contest if admins don’t give the minerals quickly enough. (“WHERE ARE MAH FIVE MINERALS BITCH I WILL SPAM THE SHOUTBOX UNTIL YOU GIVE IT TO ME”)
-People will complain about not receiving minerals for making contributions that they perceive to be of greater importance than another one that did. (“A spent liek 3 mins on X and got 500 mineralz but i spent eleventeen hours on Y and I get notin’?! WAT IS DIS?!”)
-The difficulty in earning mineralsadmin favoritism almost directly leads to bragging about them, serving as yet another manifestation of an e-peen that we do not need. (“/me has 5 minerals, bwahaha, losers!“)
-Since it’s so hard to earn and only approximately 0.1% of SEN has minerals, the majority of the userbase stops thinking about them because it’s nearly impossible to obtain. Aptly put:
-One single person received 50 minerals "For showing interest into SEN and community". Now if that doesn’t imply the admins believe everyone else is an apathetic prick then I’m lost as to why no one else actually got minerals in this category.
-Admins can give over 9000 minerals just for being awesome

As said before, “contributions” is poorly defined. Fixing the DLDB code is certainly a great contribution, and so is advertising SEN on popular SC2map loading screens. But people who help people in UMS assistance, submit BW maps with SEN in the credits, upload to the DLDB, etc. do not receive minerals at all, and even worse this process CANNOT be automated or it will be abused. (For instance, uploading 5-minute maps to DLDB, or spamming UMS assistance with floods of questions and unhelpful posts.)

Admins do not have time to go through every member’s recent activity and judge the actions that are mineral-worthy. I vote for going back to the simple minerals-for-posts system: giving one mineral per post or thread outside of Null, regardless of how long it is, and members who do very helpful actions can just be awarded additional minerals as a bonus gift. What’s the worst that can happen anyways?

(“Whoo, I spammed everywhere to get a name color! I should enjoy my increased respect and e-peen and—why does everyone hate me now?”)

P.S. Sorry payne, you’re the first example to come to mind when I thought of minerals. Lulz.

Interesting post, Aristocrat, but ultimately inconsequential since we are aware and working on solutions.

Yeah, we've already come up with a solution for minerals and we're just waiting for Dev to finish coding it all.

It gets worse if we start including wiki edits. But the problem is being discussed, so don't worry too much. Minerals are moot until we can use them, which is not possible right now. It's likely they'll just be reset again too.

I think there should be some retroactive mineral giving too though. That's debatable and up to the staff of course too, though.