I have been searching around the forums and on the FAQ but I couldn’t find anything about mentoring being planned for Pantheon and I was curious what everyone else thought of it.
For those that do not know, games like Rift had a system called Mentoring. It would allow a higher level player to group up with a lower leveled player and choose to scale down to that player so they could adventure together at a similar power level. There were rewards for doing so such as an experience bonus for your lower level friend as well as experience rewards or increased gold drops if you were max level for the mentoring character.
Games like Guild Wars 2 had a similar system in a way except it forced you to be leveled down depending on the zone you were in. This I was not fond of and would like to see a mentoring system like the one in Rift. What about everyone else?
I think don't think a player should be able to magically decrease his or her level to group with lower level players. I think you should be the level you are. May seem silly, but I miss MMOs before they put aside immersion in favor of convenience.
In EQ there were various ways for higher levels to assist lower level players. If all else fails, theres always the option of playing an alt to group with other players.
I'm not really a fan of mentoring. I've both mentored and gone to help low level players when I was high level (both people I knew, and people I didn't) - it has always been more enjoyable for me personally (your mileage may vary) to sit behind a group, buff them if I have buffs, play protector for them if things go bad, stop nastys from killing them if they wander by (like zone sweepers), etc... than I have had mentoring and playing with them.
If I had to say why, I would say that I actually feel like I'm helping them more (and normally I am) as a high level avatar than as a mentored avatar.
Yeah, another nay for the mentoring column. We've had some fairly good discussions over on MMORPG on twinking, and I'd much rather have scaled twinking where alts were started and grouped with new players, rather than mentoring.
Scaled twinking being similar to EQ where there were damage caps based off of skills levels at 10/20/30 etc. and I'd want those carried over to AC and other stat increasing elements like Regen (so an item like the Fungi wouldn't have been extremely overpowering). Also, instead of having raw HPs/Mana on gear have it stat based where you gained more benefit from the stats as your level increased. Basically making the scaling skill level/player level based, which makes sense, rather than having a magical way to decrease levels like Dullahan stated.
I'm not a firm proponent of mentoring/level-syncing when the ability to go back and forth is immediate and trivial. I am a firm believer that ever choice should have a palpable consequence, good or bad. Choosing to drop levels to mentor should take some effort and not be something which can be quickly undone. Basically you are committing to your decision. Scaling would have to encompass everything about the character, all stat/skill caps reduced to the appropriate level. If items having level restrictions end up in Pantheon, a charact that mentors down would have to remove those items.
I am absolutely in favor of a system like level sync. I don't know about having special bonuses for it (the system functioning is already a boon in and of itself) but especially if leveling is done through exp parties at all it makes sense. I was someone who was somewhat unhappy with the system when it was first added to xi, and it does have some negatives but the positives far outweigh them in my eyes.
This is a social game, making it so that you have to refuse groups or cant group with friends because of a level gap I think hurts that goal and the sacrifices necessary to support a level sync/mentoring system are relatively less important.
Simples said: That sounds like a lot of instance grouping. I could be wrong though never played those games.
Can't say for mentoring (in rift as the OP is pointing to) but level sync (ffxi) was used outside of instancing. It was primarily used there to make leveling in groups a bit more consistant (it was added a bit later on as more and more of the player base was reaching level cap so that it would keep parties at all level ranges viable).
I would say I am pro mentoring because of the same reasons Aggelos just mentioned. On one hand I like creating a character and leveling up with a friend but on the other it expands the grouping pool and allows you to play with RL or guild buddies with out the PLing. I think this is important in the mid levels where you are normally to high for someone just to create a character to play but a high level toon is just so far out of range.
I think the biggest problem is trying to keep it from being over powered. Scaling down stats and what not might not be enough. At that point you probably need to scale down the spell/skills as well which creates a rather tenious balance IMO. To me it seems like something that would take a lot to get right and might be more of an expansion sort of thing than a launch one just due to the resources it requires.
Not a fan, but there needs to be a way to keep the game viable for new players once it has been out many years. Hopefully the progeny system can be balanced in such a way to encourage more play through by existing players without being required/overpowered.
I do hope the devs are working on other ways to keep new players coming years down the road.
My personal thoughts on mentoring and powerleveling...
I don't like mentoring because my personal opinion is that causes multiple problems. First being that there are people out there that could be grouping with you, but you leveling with a 50 means that is one less person for them to group with.
Second is the way that it eliminates the need to make new friends, or at least be civil to your fellow inhabitants.
Lastly, gaining levels too quickly leads to level 60's that have never used some of their spells.... and thereby don't often know how to play their class entirely to its peak efficiency. It leads to looking up a rotation of four or five buttons and... not caring to actually knowing the intricacies of your class.
However... if you really must do something of that nature...
I think that PLing should be considered fine. I just wish they made it so you could PL someone and be in their group. It is annoying to be reduced to tells or a channel rather than group... to not see their health even though you are sitting there. In this case, wouldn't that make sense as far as submersion. You are taking someone out and giving them guidance and tutelage (buffs, etc) so that they can increase their skill. Not killing the mob... but making sure they don't die.
Just.... don't allow damage shields do the work for them, though... make them be the ones that kill the mob. The reality of having a damage shield up and telling someone to go get punched would not teach anything about fighting...
This is a real world, not a playground. The artificial level matching mechanic, imo, is an awful idea in a game like this. Your character floating around in power levels to match groups/content flies in the face of what made a game like EQ great. That is some immersion ruining eazy cheez. Hate it.
Krixus said:This is a real world, not a playground. The artificial level matching mechanic, imo, is an awful idea in a game like this. Your character floating around in power levels to match groups/content flies in the face of what made a game like EQ great. That is some immersion ruining eazy cheez. Hate it.
It is A world, not THE real world. As far as I am concerned it is just as easy to explain via magical systems as turning a person into a sheep for example. Now you personally can still feel about it however you wan't but it really isn't outside the realm of reasonable so long as it is given lore context.
Rubezahl said:My personal thoughts on mentoring and powerleveling...
I don't like mentoring because my personal opinion is that causes multiple problems. First being that there are people out there that could be grouping with you, but you leveling with a 50 means that is one less person for them to group with.
Second is the way that it eliminates the need to make new friends, or at least be civil to your fellow inhabitants.
Lastly, gaining levels too quickly leads to level 60's that have never used some of their spells.... and thereby don't often know how to play their class entirely to its peak efficiency. It leads to looking up a rotation of four or five buttons and... not caring to actually knowing the intricacies of your class.
I don't understand most of this perspective. Starting with the first thing (that it removes people from the grouping pool), how is that possibly the case? I mean I think you are talking specifically about from the pool of people within a certain level of you but it actually should be neutral or better. To explain, lets say at a given time you are level 20 and the pool of people online from level 18-22 is about 40 people. If you expand the range by offering mentoring your pool now becomes level 1-maximum which might easily be a pool 20x the size of the just 18-22 level range. Regardless of what level the person is in that range they are valid group members and thust it is not that there are less people to group with, there almost certainly would always be more people to group with. The only difference would be that finding a group that is exactly at your general level would be harder.
Next, that it eliminates the need to make new friends. Again there is a small part of this that I can agree with as people may in some cases only play with their real life friens or only a single group ever if they can always group. On the other hand, you could still play with complete randoms every time just as easily under the same system and in my experience with it it is almost always a mix (play with friends when they are available and convenient and play with randoms at all other times, not to mention groups even with friends usually contain some randoms as well). There is also a point that the game will inevitably level out at this point anyway (that is to say, at max level there is the same point of being able to always do everything with the same group of people). As for need for civility I don't see there being any difference in need between having a mentor system and not.
Finally the point of leveling too fast resulting in unskilled players. For one I don't see how this makes people level faster, if it takes 600 hours of party play to level to max then it takes 600 hours of party play to max. The only speed up I would expect from a system such is this is in the form of less time seeking members which generally speaking is not time spent learning about combat anyway. Second, I used to see this argument (about unskilled players at cap) in final fantasy xi when they added level sync (similar to mentoring it seems) and while I agreed that people who were less skilled were making it further I still found that argument as odd then as I do now. What concern is it of yours that stupid people make it to level cap? If they put in the time and got there then good for them. If they are terrible at the game and cant function at endgame properly then thats really on them and is their burden to bear. There isn't anything that says you need to group with people who don't know how to play, and the truth is that you probably did remove people who didn't measure up to par from your groups so why is that a concern to you if they won't have anything to do with you?
Just seeing a lot of confusing points against in here.
It is interesting to see many people not in favor mentoring in this thread, because in an older thread on mentoring, it was more in favor of mentoring: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1543/mentoring-yea-or-nay ; Both threads have a small sample size so it is understandable.
I lean more towards in favor of mentoring, as long as the mentor's power is correctly scaled down to the mentee's ability. I am a very social player and level gaps prevent me from playing with my not as active friends - so I usually have to either hold back my leveling or create alts to play with them. In EQ2 I liked how we could shut off our exp gain so that we earned AA experience instead. I could then work on growing my character while waiting on others. I like how mentoring allows me to interact with new players in a way that I am playing with them and not carry them through content. It lets me enjoy content at level thus appreciating all the mechanics at that level and not just powering through it. In FFXIV you see more activity at the lower levels because they keep giving you reasons to go back to the lower level content. So when new people start the game way after launch, it is not deserted there are people to play with. It gives the game more playability and I think it unites the playerbase overall. But it has to be done right. Power needs to be correctly scaled and abilities that you get at higher levels need to be turned off.
I am not in favor of mentoring, mainly because it never scales right. either the characters are still too powerful or they end up too weak. i do however like having buffs and abilities that i can cast on my low level friends to make leveling to catch up to me easier. i never was a fan of needing to be a cirtain level for a buff to be effective on a character. if i want to take my $$ and donate for maxx level buffs on my twink magician i should be able to. if i want to go around lowbie areas handing out these buffs just to be nice it should be ok as well.
I am not a fan of this system. I do want to group with my friends, but I always end up with a fwe friends that can only play 1-2 days a week and they always want me to come group with them doing low level stuff.
If I want to group with them, I should just have a 2nd or 3rd character that can group with them. EQ2 had mentoring, The lev 50 has this awesome gear and even mentored down to lev 5, the higher level would just 1 shot mobs. It was boring as boring could get.
If people don't NEED to group and level, you will end up with a WoW community that is a bunch of D heads that just talk smack. This game is supposed to be about the adventure and being social, grouping.
Keep it that way.
I Do support twinking like EQ1. I had a cloak of flames for my lev 20 iksar monk. it was awesome fun!
Not a fan of mentoring systems..
I have had friends in past games I'd want to group with and be completely at different levels and gear, but never did I think it made sense to artificially boost them to my level or artificially deflate my character's strength down to their level either. At most, I usually just rolled an alt or followed around with a buff character. I'd talk with them in voice comms, offer them guidance and maybe attack some mob it if aggrod on them and I were nearby etc.
Most mentoring I've seen in games tend to still result in a high level/highly geared player even when scaled down being far stronger than the regular person they'd be grouping with otherwise who haven't attained that tier of gear (even scaled). This results in more xp per hour which does result in faster leveling to a degree shortcutting things. Somebody playing an alt along with their friend instead of downleveling through a mentor system would likely be slower xp per hour and a more normalized leveling time due to normalized gear and spell tiers.
I personally don't want to be grouped in a dungeon only to find the person I invited doesn't even know how to play their class fully because they were carried/handheld through the game. Some encounters require people to have a full and thorough understanding of their class and game mechanics. It won't only impact my play session by the person joining who was carried, but theirs when I boot them for being obvious dead weight. I don't have the same babysitting obligation their mentor had with them and choose not to waste my time or my groups time with deaths or having to explain things that should already be known by a player of that level. Do them (and everybody else) a favor and let them properly learn the game, their class, the game world, etc. It'll make for a better experience ultimately for everybody. There can be significant time loss having to work back through a dungeon to get to your spot of camping for maybe a specific spawn or an xp location (disco 1, disco 2, hand room, etc). If this game is like EQ, death in a game could be a significant time loss at minimal (this is assuming your camp location is still available by the time you get back).
Another thing with mentoring tends to spoil some of the surprise of what's around the next corner in a dungeon when your buddy already knows or is explaining everything in advance. Imagine when you were first leveling if somebody did that to you. You'd probably feel like you missed out on some of that excitement and wonder. That's part of the magic of a game. It's like watching a movie with somebody who keeps telling you the plot before you get to that part. If you do mentor, you should at least consider this for them as it may have been a memorable time when you were first playing.
My bigger concern is that once the game starts catering to casual features, where does it stop? Do we get ant trail markers added? Maybe maps/mini-maps with POIs litering them? Maybe flying mounts where you can fly over everything trivially? Perhaps some dailies for tokens that can get you an epic without doing the full quest chain? Maybe class change tokens so people don't have to relevel a new class? Maybe remove guard factions so casuals can go into every town without having to work on faction (like EQ factions)? Maybe remove dungeon flags so everybody can enter without flagging or ways to shortcut the flagging process? Does every NPC start getting question marks over their heads and mobs with large blinking quest indicators so you don't need to interact with the world's inhabitants? To what extent does the game go with casual features? To what extent is the game trying to avoid such features? It's a slippery slope.
It is a completely artificial mechanic, like instancing, that breaks immersion. I'm no role player, but this just screams "lowest common denominator" to me. This is supposed to be a simulated world. Ever invite friends out to a nice dinner and they can't go because they didn't work hard, or are still in school, or whatever, and they can't afford it?
There are ways to play with your friends. If one of you is in school, or a graveyard network admin who has unfettered use of the companies interwebs, and the other is a mother of 2 who works full time, spin up an alt that you only play with her when she has time.
Don't sacrifice the integrity of the world and hence, the game, with this kind of thing. /deadhorse
One big problem of making alts to play with new, low levels players is that inevitably you will get "out of sync". Say you cannot play for a few days. Most likely, your friend won't just stop playing the game (its new and shiny for them after all), and you end up with a "useless" alt, because your friend is already several levels ahead of you. Mentoring is the superior method here I think, as long as it scales stats and abilities down carefully.
spyderoptik said:Not a fan of mentoring systems..
I have had friends in past games I'd want to group with and be completely at different levels and gear, but never did I think it made sense to artificially boost them to my level or artificially deflate my character's strength down to their level either. At most, I usually just rolled an alt or followed around with a buff character. I'd talk with them in voice comms, offer them guidance and maybe attack some mob it if aggrod on them and I were nearby etc.
Most mentoring I've seen in games tend to still result in a high level/highly geared player even when scaled down being far stronger than the regular person they'd be grouping with otherwise who haven't attained that tier of gear (even scaled). This results in more xp per hour which does result in faster leveling to a degree shortcutting things. Somebody playing an alt along with their friend instead of downleveling through a mentor system would likely be slower xp per hour and a more normalized leveling time due to normalized gear and spell tiers.
I personally don't want to be grouped in a dungeon only to find the person I invited doesn't even know how to play their class fully because they were carried/handheld through the game. Some encounters require people to have a full and thorough understanding of their class and game mechanics. It won't only impact my play session by the person joining who was carried, but theirs when I boot them for being obvious dead weight. I don't have the same babysitting obligation their mentor had with them and choose not to waste my time or my groups time with deaths or having to explain things that should already be known by a player of that level. Do them (and everybody else) a favor and let them properly learn the game, their class, the game world, etc. It'll make for a better experience ultimately for everybody. There can be significant time loss having to work back through a dungeon to get to your spot of camping for maybe a specific spawn or an xp location (disco 1, disco 2, hand room, etc). If this game is like EQ, death in a game could be a significant time loss at minimal (this is assuming your camp location is still available by the time you get back).
Another thing with mentoring tends to spoil some of the surprise of what's around the next corner in a dungeon when your buddy already knows or is explaining everything in advance. Imagine when you were first leveling if somebody did that to you. You'd probably feel like you missed out on some of that excitement and wonder. That's part of the magic of a game. It's like watching a movie with somebody who keeps telling you the plot before you get to that part. If you do mentor, you should at least consider this for them as it may have been a memorable time when you were first playing.
My bigger concern is that once the game starts catering to casual features, where does it stop? Do we get ant trail markers added? Maybe maps/mini-maps with POIs litering them? Maybe flying mounts where you can fly over everything trivially? Perhaps some dailies for tokens that can get you an epic without doing the full quest chain? Maybe class change tokens so people don't have to relevel a new class? Maybe remove guard factions so casuals can go into every town without having to work on faction (like EQ factions)? Maybe remove dungeon flags so everybody can enter without flagging or ways to shortcut the flagging process? Does every NPC start getting question marks over their heads and mobs with large blinking quest indicators so you don't need to interact with the world's inhabitants? To what extent does the game go with casual features? To what extent is the game trying to avoid such features? It's a slippery slope.
Nailed it. Pantheon isn't that game. If it is, it's going to fail.
Medjai said:I am not a fan of this system. I do want to group with my friends, but I always end up with a fwe friends that can only play 1-2 days a week and they always want me to come group with them doing low level stuff.
If I want to group with them, I should just have a 2nd or 3rd character that can group with them. EQ2 had mentoring, The lev 50 has this awesome gear and even mentored down to lev 5, the higher level would just 1 shot mobs. It was boring as boring could get.
If people don't NEED to group and level, you will end up with a WoW community that is a bunch of D heads that just talk smack. This game is supposed to be about the adventure and being social, grouping.
Keep it that way.
I Do support twinking like EQ1. I had a cloak of flames for my lev 20 iksar monk. it was awesome fun!
That isn't inherently a problem of having a mentoring or level sync system but is a problem of that SPECIFIC implimentation of it. In ffxi this did not happen, when people were synced down they were set to roughly an average geared player of the level they synced to. They most definitely did not break grouping mechanics and while you may have lost a little bit of power relative to what you would be at the same level if you wore the best gear you would still do ok (and could get around this if you wore level appropriate gear anyway).
This is a major problem with a lot of the arguments against, you are arguing specifics that are not necessarily involved (Like the above, suggesting that because in everquest 2 scaling resulted in over powered low level characters when mentoring that it is an inherent problem with ALL such systems and it factually is not.
spyderoptik said:Most mentoring I've seen in games tend to still result in a high level/highly geared player even when scaled down being far stronger than the regular person they'd be grouping with otherwise who haven't attained that tier of gear (even scaled). This results in more xp per hour which does result in faster leveling to a degree shortcutting things. Somebody playing an alt along with their friend instead of downleveling through a mentor system would likely be slower xp per hour and a more normalized leveling time due to normalized gear and spell tiers.
I personally don't want to be grouped in a dungeon only to find the person I invited doesn't even know how to play their class fully because they were carried/handheld through the game. Some encounters require people to have a full and thorough understanding of their class and game mechanics. It won't only impact my play session by the person joining who was carried, but theirs when I boot them for being obvious dead weight. I don't have the same babysitting obligation their mentor had with them and choose not to waste my time or my groups time with deaths or having to explain things that should already be known by a player of that level. Do them (and everybody else) a favor and let them properly learn the game, their class, the game world, etc. It'll make for a better experience ultimately for everybody. There can be significant time loss having to work back through a dungeon to get to your spot of camping for maybe a specific spawn or an xp location (disco 1, disco 2, hand room, etc). If this game is like EQ, death in a game could be a significant time loss at minimal (this is assuming your camp location is still available by the time you get back).
Another thing with mentoring tends to spoil some of the surprise of what's around the next corner in a dungeon when your buddy already knows or is explaining everything in advance. Imagine when you were first leveling if somebody did that to you. You'd probably feel like you missed out on some of that excitement and wonder. That's part of the magic of a game. It's like watching a movie with somebody who keeps telling you the plot before you get to that part. If you do mentor, you should at least consider this for them as it may have been a memorable time when you were first playing.
My bigger concern is that once the game starts catering to casual features, where does it stop? Do we get ant trail markers added? Maybe maps/mini-maps with POIs litering them? Maybe flying mounts where you can fly over everything trivially? Perhaps some dailies for tokens that can get you an epic without doing the full quest chain? Maybe class change tokens so people don't have to relevel a new class? Maybe remove guard factions so casuals can go into every town without having to work on faction (like EQ factions)? Maybe remove dungeon flags so everybody can enter without flagging or ways to shortcut the flagging process? Does every NPC start getting question marks over their heads and mobs with large blinking quest indicators so you don't need to interact with the world's inhabitants? To what extent does the game go with casual features? To what extent is the game trying to avoid such features? It's a slippery slope.
I addressed the first concern above already. As for the issue of underskilled players, again it doesn't make sense to me. First, having a syncing system does not mean that they will not learn to play or that they will be hand held (As stated above there are a variety of uses for a syncing system and you are focused on a specific subset of that. How do you know that people will not be using this system through all level ranges? I personally did in ffxi and most who I knew did as well with only a few people cheesing the system).
Second, removing the syncing system does not fix that problem. You are still going to end up with people who do not know how to play at endgame. The reason for this is that playing poorly is largely the result of the person playing and not because of this system.
The spoiling of surprises are going to happeing with or without the system as well. How does not having a syncing system stop the same high level friends from giving you details anyway? How about wiki information? Other people in the party who are on alts that already did it before? It isn't a problem with the system.
Finally define casual feature? I don't consider this a casual feature. Do you consider all features that make the management of things casual? If so perhaps all such features should be removed. Lets throw out mounts cause they make it faster and easier to get places. Or how about the ability to see what items are in your invintory, thats something that makes manageing things easier. How about we remove guilds, those make it so that you can network with players easier. No, the line is crossed only when a feature undermines the point of the game (for example, waypoints diminishing exploration). As far as I am concerned this helps the games points rather than diminishes them by making it possible to play with a wider array of players.