For any who are out of the loop on this update: This is a very controversial change as the StackExchange userbase was not officially informed of the recalculation before it was made. The meta post linked above is sitting at -200 votes at the time of this posting.
Apart from a leaked memo from a StackExchange moderator there was no warning of this change. A leaked memo does not constitute official communique, nor does it allow feedback. After a series of missteps from the StackExchange organization stemming from failure to communicate this is seen as "throwing fuel on the fire".
That being said, the real root of the problem users have with this change is that it rewards users who post frequent, low-quality questions. Before this change, a user could have a +1/-3 upvote-downvote ratio to receive net negative reputation for the question. After this change, it would require a +1/-6 to receive net negative reputation for a poor question. This is because the rep loss for downvotes was not changed like the rep gain for upvotes.
Ultimately, few users receive +1/-6 ratio for a poor question so most will see an improvement on their reputation when asking questions from now on, weakening other people's ability to use reputation as a metric of user engagement. Likewise, it gives question posters incentive to post more frequently as it is now far more difficult to lose rep after posting a bad question, requiring further moderator action to police poor-quality questions. This will not hit Arqade as hard as StackOverflow (where this is a serious, serious problem), but I bet we'll see an uptick in poor-quality questions.
Other issues with this change is that it retroactively changes reputation for upvotes on old questions, reinforcing a "rich get richer" process for users who have old, highly upvoted questions. I personally don't see this as an issue, but some find this unfair that it rewards old users rather than finding different means to invigorate new users.
Lastly, this removes the reputation boost for users who answer questions rather than asks them. This update is great for users like Tim who only post questions, but does nothing to reward users who answer questions - which both myself and others feel is the more difficult task and shows dedication to the site.
To be sure, there are benefits for users like Arqade's own Roddy of the Frozen Peas who contributes high quality questions and is a boon to the Arqade site, congrats on breaking 1000 rep!
However, I personally feel like the drawbacks to this change far surpass the benefits to the change. I really think that the rep bonus question askers will get for posting high-quality questions will be overshadowed by the increase of low quality posts which have now been made reputation-sustainable.
