You know, not that they had a bunch to begin with, but the tommy points kind of lost their meaning with the lakers bet. Before that I thought in a lot of cases if someone had a really good tp to post ratio they were probably contributing in some way to the board. That could be anything from doing the drafts and games, providing cool graphics, links or video or just regularly making strong points in arguments. After some people including myself lost hundreds or more, i think the novelty and noticing peoples ratio was lost. I am still interested in getting my second star, and i never am unhappy when someone gives me one, but i don't monitor or give them out like before...
Well, even before the Laker thing there was a thread where some people were complaining about TPs, and to sort of devalue them the mods pumped a lot of the more frequent posters' counts up. Every mod and some of the chat guys got boosted to 2500, and some of the more frequent guys got anywhere up to a few hundred extra. I got like 100 myself this way. And mods could always give bulk TPs for stuff they liked, trades in the fantasy games, help with the site, etc. So the "value" was always skewed.
To me though they're worth the same as they always were, which is nothing but goodwill. But that's enough for me. They're a nice feature of the site provided they're never taken too seriously.