Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Most important is that you can find mentors purely from in-game options. Reason being, people who will know how to find mentors through elsewhere will probably be the people who need mentors less.
That's not entirely accurate though.
The people who are going to mentor/help new players are going to mentor/help new players regardless of if there's rewards or not.
Adding rewards just adds people who normally wouldn't bother to the list of people helping.
Devil's advocate says it might make some of those good will mentors fall to greed, but even the few that do fall to it are still helping.
Lol. Really tho, just having a “new player help” chat channel is probably as far as most games need to go these days, along with maybe an easy in game way to get linked to a game’s Discord server where affiliated content creators who post help content videos can be easily found.
1. I need to qualify my mentee. Voicechat.
2. Rewards? Seeing the mentees progress is usually enough.
3. Much love ❤️
° a Titel under the name
° exp buff for lower player in our party
° if you are a mentor you can give others a ping and maybe draw on there minimap so you can show them what to do and where to go even if you dont speak there language very well
° if you fulfill Dungeons or quests- the mentor get spezial reward currency to buy in a spezial shop (NPC or so)
° even an chat for new players whitch is activatet for every new player (call it help or so)
° an new idea would be that a stanger who looking for a guild have to play ingame with someone from there guild for a while first befor they can invite them -so they can see them in action befor joining. this whould shut down all soulless mass guilds and ppl who invite unasked everyone without a guild tag, only to have some ppl in there guild. And all guildrecruter will help others so they can maybe recrut new members
Tying the system to Religion seems like and OK idea, but we wouldn't want to limit that amount of players a mentor could help.
Ok, this is pretty funny
Open to abuse but really a simple metric tracking how often a player always gives low ratings will point out abusers who can answer for it or have thier ratings removed.
I wonder also if the mentoring could be opened in structure to create RP events where the players are flagged as being 'event actors' to facilitate the event for other players.
First off, I'd like to start by saying that powerleveling is a thing. Pretty much every single game has some sort way that is either designed or figured out by the players to make leveling faster for lower characters with help from higher characters. Since its going to happen, the only question is, will it be done in a way that makes the game broken, tedious, or more enjoyable?
The best "mentoring" mechanic in a game is one that reduces the experienced character's level/power/skills down to the level of the player they are mentoring, but rewards with mentor with loot/exp that is valuable to the mentor at the level/power they really are.
The reason this is the best mentor system is because it enables mentors to help level lower players and to participate in lower level content without making that content trivial, and without making that content a waste of the higher level player's time.
Most other MMO games have done this poorly, for example:
WoW : (poorly done, here's why) through at least Legion, mentoring wasn't huge because (for the most part) questing was faster than grinding, eventually Wow just sold "level up" packages - which made leveling trivial. Additionally players grinding through lower level dungeons were often geared to a point where mechanics didn't matter, and there was no motivation to actually learn or enjoy this lower content since the rewards were meaningless other than battleground twinking.
Black Desert: (poorly done, here's why) Grinding to hit the upper levels in zones where the characters being leveled do nothing at all. After which powerleveling involved "leeching" off of higher level/higher power groups. This reduced the gains for the group powerleveling (leeching) or required the higher level character to grind an "easy" area which trivialized the leveling process.
FFXIV: (a halfway good attempt - but missing the mark) FFXIV reduced player power for the higher level characters but did it in generic a way that made playing the lower end content almost worse at higher level than at the lower level. Also, the rewards for the lower level content make doing the lower level content not worth the while of higher characters, so most of the lower level content goes unused. Half credit is still an "F"
Elder Scrolls Online: (some good ideas badly implemented) - first, we have the "wedding ring" this was a cool idea where two characters buy a cash shop item that allows them to "bind" to each other for an exp boost while leveling together. Neat idea!... except that you had to actually equip it (breaking more important set bonuses and giving up gear stats) and it often just didn't work right - so overall a useless item that cost actual money.
Powerleveling was tedious and rampant, with certain areas of the game being abused to do long, boring grinds to power level lower level characters over hours of gameplay that wasn't fun for either player. Eventually dungeons were separated into "normal" and "hard" modes, and doing the normal modes was incentivized so that even advanced players would want to do them, but the high power of would be "mentors" partying up to go into these instances (dungeons) made it so that the content was totally trivialized to the point where all challenge and mechanics were skipped and running these instances felt like a chore to get rewards, as opposed to an enjoyable play experience.
Doing this right is easier said than done. Would it be a coding nightmare to create some sort of in game system where players could help each other but equalized to a power level where the content could remain engaging? I think it could be done, but the real question is "is it worth the company resources to make mentoring/powerleveling a fun experience?" I definitely think that there is real game value in keeping lower level content fun and relevant for high level players.
That being said, I can think of plenty of games where class balance, pvp content, boss content, the economy, or exploits made me feel like it was time to find another game, but I can't think of any games where I quit because "the powerleveling sucks".
Ooh, this reminds me:
In PoE, Maplestory and a few other games, when your level is much greater than the mobs you are killing, the drop chances from loot tables are penalized heavily.
But if the mentor can take a powerdown to the mentee to be near the same level as the mobs, shaking off this drop chance penalty could be a mild motivator.
I think it would work especially well if there is a globally dropped resource that only drops when you are killing mobs near your own level. However, this might lead to people intentionally farming low-level areas with high spawn rates.
One example we thought of was Mentoring as an Artisan, you could lend access to a mentee to use your Tools/Blueprints/Recipes for a limited use with their own materials that they could then earn Artisan experience through or unlock unique recipes for both the mentor and mentee.
On one hand you should want some sort of rewards in order to attract people to mentoring.
On the other, mentoring should come from willingness to help other players and not from a want for cool prize/reward.
To answer the question of the thread:
- Title
- Access to mentoring chat channels
- Access to some convenient mentor perks
- Maybe a cool cosmetic.
Imho being recognized as a proper mentor should be a hard to acquire badge of honour. Not something that everyone can access with relative ease.
There are a lot of ways to incentivize this the most simple would be base XP or gold bonus however this could have the issue of if the gold or XP bonus from mentoring isn't as good as more interesting parts of the game it wont be worth it to do and if it is to much more lucrative it could lead to an over abundance of mentors or people trying to mentor. Its also just a fairly lazy way of approaching the problem.
A better way would to have a very specific progression just for mentoring. This would have some base XP or gold bonuses particularly early on and then have more unique options such as titles or cosmetic items that can only be achieved through this progression. Not only giving a reason for people who want to mentor already to do it but also a whole progression for people who want to unlock as many titles or cosmetics as they can basically appealing to the completionist types who will make general good mentors as they have knowledge in most areas of the game. This would still keep the members of mentors to a small size however as the actual rewards wouldn't be insane things or the best way to make gold or XP.
Another incentive or potential option could be that guilds can be mentor guilds this could give them a similar but guild wide progression as they mentor new players. Guilds could opt into or out of this and have some content (Likely PVP) locked while mentoring but then can switch out of that mode stopping them from gaining in their progression but perhaps they now have many new members who are not only leveled but have the knowledge you gave them to help you with high level guild content. Some guilds may also choose to hyper specialize as mentoring guilds to get large rewards in the progression tree and then once players reach certain levels they leave to a different guild. This helps to create a guild hierarchy for players to move through as they level themselves up while players who want to can stay at the mentoring guilds and get large bonuses.
Mentee - Mentees should get less rewards than mentors as they are inherently gaining knowledge and game skills by being a mentee. However if there is no actual rewards for being a mentee then many new players will not want to be and you will end up with a large imbalance of mentors to mentees. One way to fix this is to also give base XP or gold bonuses to mentees this works better here as realistically you want more mentees than mentors while not completely over populating the game with mentees.
One potential thing you could add to this is that if you were a mentee before you have an easier time or gain some kind of bonus if you then become a mentor later this encourages players to help others and creates a very nice generational effect for mentee to mentor progression.
Mentoring guilds provide another inherent bonus for mentees essentially being a stepping stone or a safe place as they go higher into the game they can either become a member of the guild and a mentor themselves or move to other guilds with different goals. But in either case they at least get a guild that is easy to join and will be willing to have them immediately without being judged on skill or gear.
An adventurer's title would be really cool and something that can provide a reward for both Mentor and Mentee. In example, upon reaching lvl 20 as a mentee your mentor gets the chance to give a title which stays till maybe lvl 30 or even indefinitely if the mentee chooses so.
Skins are always nice. Imagine a skin set for the mentor which upgrades based on how many mentees gave him positive feedback/a like. Starting at 1 and upgrading at 5/10/25/50 as well as a skin or tabard for the mentee to show they completed or took part in the mentor/mentee program.
Additionally it would be cool if you were able to temporarily decrease your lvl and stats to help your low lvl guildies if they need another player. In example, I am max lvl 60 and they are lvl 32 and need a healer for the dungeon. Now I can make the decision to decrease my lvl and stats for the next 6h-8h to match my lvl with my guildie's
There should be a list of the opt-in players who list themselves as mentors, and it could be like sort of an auction house for mentees to search a mentor. This list could also have a filter of timezones, region and language (region could be country, so for example Europe being the same region, could have different countries).
Mentors should get some unique rewards for it. An item, a mount, etc. sounds really cool, but personally I would like a mentorship token. We know that games time and time again, over time, they implement "new zones" currencies and then there are too many or they are not worth anything anymore and they are put all together as one. For example, in swtor, say you had Nar Shadaa token, then Tython token, etc. After some time, they were all unified as "galactic tokens" and the likes. That sucks. It happens with WoW now too, with Azurite, Anima and stuff. If the mentors system is meant to be something good for the game in the long run, it could be great to have some kind of "mentor reputation" system - for each mentee trained up to X level/amount of goals accomplished (you guys should decide that) you get a token and a bit of rep. With a "mentors token vendor", say you want to get a sword appearance or a toy/pet companion, they would require X amount of rep (that equals X amount of mentees trained - in this case 5) and an amount of tokens (in this case, also 5) for you to obtain it. It wouldn't be anything game changing that everyone would want ("need") to be a mentor, it would be just another iteration of completionism and something extra added in the game for those who are either super hardcore at acquiring items, or that legitimately want to help new players. With this, and the filters on the list, you kind of ensure that each mentee gets a proper mentor (potentially able to play together for longer times, speaking the same language, maybe the same city!) to help them. I was going to say it'd be cool if "knights trained knights" as well, but that would be making it too specific and dividing players too much and also as a new player you don't really get both main archetypes to be your "full class", so it defeats the purpose. (Also it's kinda cool of hte idea of having a pair of knight and mage or something like that). What could happen, however, is that at certain amount of goals completed or when the training is done, the mentee gets a +1 strength, 1+ willpower (or whatever states there are going to be) depending on the class of the mentor. Something that you think "Oh, this is cool to have, thanks!" but not "Omg i need me a wizard mentor asap or my character will be useless!". Advantages in bulletpoints (list feature wasn't working):
- Ensuring a long lasting solid mentorship system.
- Both mentors and mentees get rewarded for the program, if they choose to use it, respectively, but without massive impact on the game, not making it into a "must".
- Requirements and filtered list ensures that mentees can get more appropriate mentors for themselves.
Disadvantages: none, because it's my idea which means it's perfect (XD).
There's a certain amount of 'prestige' that is expected of Mentors - to know things beyond the simple mechanics of the game, which is very often what a "mentor chat" or channel is reduced to - effectively becoming something like You're not playing you're job right, unless... and makes such a channel, and subsequently a game, something that many peole do not want to be a part of.
FFXIV's Mentor pros & cons:
Pros- Takes considerable effort to successfully unlock the Mentor Role
- There is more than one type of mentor role, including PvE, PvP, Trade/Crafting, and "general" (who meet criteria from all the above)
- Requires EVERY duty in the game to be completed (except optional savage challenge content)
- Mentor "roulette" queues for ANY of those duties at random, as parties form and mentors participate.
- Offers perhaps the most exclusive mount reward, a decorated two-seater pegasus, after successfully completing 2,000 of these mentor roulettes
- Includes one daily reward for completion, but can be completed as many times as desired.
- The mentor's chat channel (novice network) actively aims to prevent revealing spoilers to new players - which many new players praise upon discovering new parts of the game and thank the Novice Network for having not spoiled it for them.
Cons- Some of the duties within this XIV system are abandoned by mentors either immediately, upon the first failure, or upon discovering that DPS is not optimal, because of the time investment as many mentors solely participate in an attempt to get as many "fast" roulette clears as possible to make a dent in their progress towards the mount.
- There are zero worthwhile rewards between acquiring mentor status and the mount itself. A couple titles and glamour items which are honestly just worthless/awful.
- Mentor chat is limited to 100 mentors per server at any given time, most of which do not actively participate in the chat channel. The same ~10/20 mentors per server are often the only ones who contribute while needlessly occupying the limited space in this chat channel.
- The Novice Network / mentor chat often develops into a type of niche, where novices and mentors alike have been known to message one another in side-discussion about conversations which arise out of this chat. The negative aspect of this is that I've seen players express their insecurity, fears, or insults as the result of a comment in NN which was divisive to whatever degree. Without specific examples, it happens commonly enough that it's problematic to the point of mentorship.
- To elaborate on that last point a tad further, at times it has been a surprise that new mentors and (sometimes) even novices appear in the chat.
The way that "duties" and duty roulettes work in XIV likely would not be fit to implement its likeness for AoC, however detailing some of my gripes as a long-time mentor in XIV is with the hope that the AoC team can take the good and make good of the bad, or at the very least discover a direction you would like to avoid altogether.
I don't see the existence of a mentor chat being able to dodge the negative aspects of payer-niches without there being an active, employed, impartial moderator of sorts which is able to enforce the standards of Mentors set by the AoC team. This might simply be an additional responsibility of a passive GM while they address live chats or tickets submitted through the support channels - having them monitor a constant text-view of the in-game mentor chat channel and act promptly upon discovering discussion that becomes an issue - while the policing itself is left to those mentors who understand and exemplify the appropriate behaviors. Just the knowledge that it is actively monitored, and seeing rules be enforced in the chatlogs is more than enough. Depsite the knowledge that all chatlogs can be pulled at any time, systems lacking active monitoring can fall and fail to assist the players who need assistance very fast.
Finally, many existing mentors in XIV blasted through the requirements of becoming a mentor, and while this does eventually reuslt in knowing plenty about how to perform each role of the DPS/Tank/Healer trinity - they can know absolutely nothing of the game's lore to answer frequent novice questions. I would propose an entry test of sorts on various aspects of gameplay which truly challenges the aspiring mentors to KNOW about the systems they intend to provide mentorship for. This entry test should be something that the aspiring mentor can only attempt once per week (or longer), and have variable questions which change so they're never taking the same tesst twice and not recording correct answers that are constant and becomes just another quest to look up on Reddit or whatever Wiki.
For example if you want to be a PvE mentor, be prepared to answer questions that are centered around PvE content, instances where they prove the knowledge of their role, whereas a lore mentor might be challenged on certain key figure NPCs and history events which are important and relevant to the building world - obviously different requirements respective to the type of mentorship being tested and unique/exclusive rewards for EACH type.
There will always be players who do the grind just for the shiny, but I feel like making Mentorship something to actually aspire to rather than just achieve and claim will improve the whole concept of mentorship as a whole.
Edit: Additionally - I've seen many "duties" that were mostly comprised OF mentors. When multiple mentors are trying to offer the explanation of certain encounter mechanics, the different ways in which mentors communicate almost always leads to confusion. I personally feel that any effective mentor system should aim to put no more than ONE mentor to a party so that explanations and tactics are consistent to help new players progress rather than just making things that much more confusing.
I don't see anything wrong with providing a unique cosmetic reward as an incentive either. Sure, some folks will game the system to get access to the reward, but the system as a whole will be a huge resource for new/returning players.
For me to want to be mentored, I want the person's knowledge of the general game, or maybe specifics (combat mechanics, leveling options, group dynamics, questions about guild perks) to be really high otherwise I will go do what I normally do - find a number of people streaming and figure out which ones actually know what they're talking about and then just follow them.
For me to mentor someone, I'd want it to feel like it meant something - both that I could provide a valuable and helpful service, but that it had some distinction as well. So whether it was a really cool looking mount, I got to participate in some development discussions to provide input, etc, those things would have appeal to me and keep me interested.
Years ago I started playing World of Warcraft. I was horrible at the game, but I was too immersed to care. Then I ran into a couple that was dungeon grinding, something I enjoyed myself. They invited me to keep running with them and I did. After a couple of hours, and lengthy discussions of life and the game, they invited me into their guild. Turns out they were a raiding guild and it was something I always wanted to do. However, my situation was far worse than I could have imagined at the time and was nowhere near ready to raid. My new friends inspected my gear and found out that I was all over the place! I played a Paladin with a tank shield, an agility axe, and a helm specific to a holy paladin (healing). Needless to say, if you looked up the definition of NOOB, you would have found my avatar's picture next to it. Instead of laughing at me and kicking me out of the guild, they decided to help me figure out what role I enjoyed playing. That became the best weekend of my WoW life. For 18 hours split between two days, the three of us ran dungeon after dungeon to grind the gear I needed for my newly selected role, a healer and is something I still enjoy doing to this day. Nearly 15 years later we are still in vc together (Started off in vent now discord) playing whatever triggers our fancy that night.
Needless to say, I support and encourage a mentoring system. Now, at the time Blizzard didn't have much of a system in place and my mentoring was organic, as in saying my friends had no profitable reason to help me. However, I feel like veteran players who reach out to new players is a beautiful thing and those veterans should be rewarded for strengthening their community one noob at a time (I use that term in jest as I classified myself as one).
This system should also deter those min/max crazy people who don't have their heart in the right place. So here is my idea:
Once a player reaches max level on one character it unlocks the Mentor Tree. This tree works similar to a class tree where certain items are unlocked as that player progresses. The Mentor Tree is account-wide, so a player isn't restricted to only their main to progress in this, especially if they are an altaholic.
Restrictions
Only Two, there are. A Master and an Apprentice...
The mentoring is restricted to one player at a time to avoid someone from stacking and farming this system. As this system would be account-wide, no player can farm additional rewards on several max-level characters. The mentoring process continued until the player either reaches max level, or the mentoring is canceled with a cool-down period before another mentee can be obtained. Likewise, the former mentee will have a cool-down period before they can find another mentor. A player can only obtain a mentor if they have no characters above half the level cap. So, if the level cap is 50 and the player has a level 27 rogue but re-rolls a level 1 fighter, that player can't obtain a mentor. This is to keep friends from cheating the system by rolling new characters.
Benefits
Once two players enter the Mentoring System together they will be able to do everything together, even if the Mentor has already completed a quest/dungeon/event/etc. All progress will be followed by the mentee's XP, so even if the Mentor has a 9-5 job and can only play during certain times, they will still benefit from having a mentee though it will be slower. When the Mentor and Mentee work together the progression will increase. As the mentor helps their player they will unlock certain items in the Mentor Tree. To start off, it could be a Scroll of Ancient Knowledge to give an XP buff for an hour, or a revival stone if the mentee player dies or vice/versa. Once the Mentor reaches mid-tier in the progression they begin to unlock cosmetics like the Cloak of Mentorship. Once the mentee has completed their training (Obtained Max Level), both Mentee and Mentor will receive a non-combat pet and/or unique mount to showcase their achievements together. Additionally, the Mentor receives a unique title to show all the players that they are not only a Mentor, but have successfully "trained" a new player. This title could be "Mentor", "Master", "Guide", etc. While the mentor is rewarded with a title, the Mentee will be given a Seal of Mentorship that they can turn into their Node NPC quartermaster in exchange for a weapon/armor upgrade to help "boost" them into end-game content.
Every time a Mentor completes the final requirement, there is a cooldown period before they can take on a new mentee. However, once a new mentee is selected the Mentor Tree unlocks and holds either additional items or new items that give the Mentor a reason to do it again. Nothing is more boring than doing a lengthy task only to get the same items again. Likewise, if the former mentee decides to become a Mentor themselves, their own tree will filter out achieved items so they won't have the same rewards.
Obviously, this system isn't perfect and probably too steep requirements for casual players or hardcore players with lives, but there are benefits for both players to not only give help but receive it.
Idk if it would help but maybe you could use the scribes that your planning to implement for it. Just a thought
"Patrons" recieved a portion of XP that their vassals earned (the vassals did not get a penalty or lose any XP it just added as a bonus). This made keeping vassals and keeping your active vassals happy and engaged a priority. If you wanted to have several people under you and passing you XP you needed to teach them, answer questions, help them grow as players.
Example of how this could work:
You must be level 20 and have 50 hours played. You may have up to 3 mentees. You earn a small portion of their experience earned as a bonus. Each level your mentee earns while pledge to you gives 25 mentorship points. You can use these points to purchase special cosmetics. Each mentee you have that reaches max level grants 500 mentorship points. Once a player reaches max level the mentorship pledge is removed.
I know this is a bit of a stretch as a true mentor/mentee system but it truly felt like that's what the guild system created on Asheron's Call at it's inception. Your patron was your mentor, and if he sucked at it you found a new patron who wanted that XP perk
I've never understood why mentorship programs are tied to money and subscriptions vs. experience and in game progression perks. It should be more about people PLAYING than just keeping an active sub.
Crown- MMORPG Survivor since 1996
Because of this I think rewards for a mentor system should be kept to a minimum. Possibly just a mount skin or maybe a cosmetic title to put in front of their names, only given after they've helped a certain amount of people.
I love having reputation or status within a guild. Being know as the guilds "bard" or "weaponsmith" would be an awesome title to have. That way people in the guild know they can go to you specifically because they know you are the resident expert in that field. This also gives you a bigger sense of importance within the guild.
Maybe if you are mentoring a new summoner in the guild, while you are in the same party that new summoner can get a little boost in EXP as long as you are both the same job class or crafting profession.
Tools:
-Mount for two
-Teleport/summon from one to the other
-Practice mode
-Instant chat with a channel of mentors for fast question for when designed mentor is not online
Also, since mentees can access more mentors opinions if desired, he can contrast them with those of his mentor.
-Mentees would rate mentors as to keep quality filters
Rewards:
-Normal mount/Mount for two for being a mentor
-Higher quality normal mount/Mount for two for the top mentors
-Title or cosmetic accesory