I was reading one of Brad's blogs from April and he was asking of ways we could have high level players interact with lower levels. When I was young I took Tae Kwon Doe and now my son is in it and pretty soon he will be a black belt. Some places require the students to teach the lower level students for x many hours in order to become a black belt while others require you to teach to get your 2nd degree and so on.
In Pantheon I don't think you would have to require a player to mentor a lower level player just to be able to unlock a level or something (tho possible?) but I think it would be cool to have a set of AAs that unlock from mentoring or playing/interacting somehow with lower level players. Maybe when the higher level player mentors down and gains x amount of experience it goes towards a subset of AAs.This doesn't just have to pertain to AAs either, it could affect a certain set of skills/spells, or passive abilities, etc. Maybe you have all of your skills/spells have a separate meter that levels them all up but only increases by mentoring.
OR mentoring lower level players could affect the progeny system in some fashion. Seeming how you are to sacrifice a high level character in order to begin a new character, maybe the more you mentor lower levels the better your progeny becomes.
I don't know, just a few thoughts I was kicking around. I'd love to bat this idea around with yall. Mentoring is always a fun little way to play with your friends if they are lower level than you but that's pretty much where it ends. Why can't it be more? And like Brad said, he wants to help new players aclimate more easily to the game without the game neccessarily holding their hand so why not get higher level players involved somehow?
Cool idea!
I think someone mentioned the other day they wanted to implement somthing like the guides that were in early EQ, maybe they could have their own guide leveling system similar to what your saying wth blackbelts in Tae Kwon Doe but based on the help they give to newbies!
Maybe the system your mentioning for general players could be a way general population could make themselves noticed by GM's to be potential guides in the future?
Probably the whole guide thng is a little off track from what you were thnking but it sprung to mind
That is an interesting idea. It is always annoying when you out level your friends or your friends out level you and you can't group up any more. I'm a fan of any system that allows you to group up with those people that you really want to group with regardless of their level. But I'm not sure about the idea of unlocking certain skills / levels / AAs only if you mentor lower level players. When you are quite high level most of your play time is based around getting better gear either through adventuring or through crafting and that might not leave much free time to go out of your way to help lower level players. I don't think that a player should be gimped just because they haven't mentored enough people.
I think the reward of just playing with friends is enough to make sure that people do it or perhaps the reward of seeing lower level zones that you skipped when you were leveling up yourself.
This would be a neat concept. Maybe at max level you could scale down to the level you were grouped with. The xp gained there could go towards maybe an AA level? I think that would be a great way to play with lower level friends who you may not have an alternative in their level range.
Cromulent said:... I don't think that a player should be gimped just because they haven't mentored enough people...
Mentoring at least once could be required in order to unlock certain teamwork associated AA's, once unlocked they could be completed with any source of exp. I wouldn't mind being nudged to give mentoring a shot but wouldn't want to be restricted by it.
If they can find a way to prevent players from maxing out characters and then sell for profit, or gold farmers (nomatter which country they are from; I am totally happy with a mentor system. Maybe disable follow" will "mentoring". I'm not sure. Risks should be considered when implementing to stop harmful gold farming/leveling services.
In FFXI they had something called the "mentor" system. You essentially could enable this mentor tag, and new players knew they could send questions to anyone with these tags. My time using this a lot of the tells I received were sadly people begging for items/gil, but there was also a lot of new players I was able to help with this.