Quo Vadis MA? And who needs a gift if you have peers?

[DocKangey]

I couldn't help but have a good laugh when I read Pinky's last part of the "Life of a Newbie" series and came across Marco's comment on the bad mentor experience. (Life of a Newbie) Sure, everything is on MA's priority list. Always has been, always will be

But it made me think about all the great ideas that have been posted here about making the mentoring system more encouraging and rewarding for mentors. And to think about reasons why none of those ideas have ever been implemented.

I have refered to it before, but I think Alice just summed the whole thing up in one nice sentence: Mentoring helps MA to get new players to deposit more money. If I look at it from a business perspective it absolutely does make sense to allow disciple farmers, new players will either quit quickly (they most likely would have quit anyway) or deposit early to get out of the mentor's grasp. Either way it works for MA, and there are always unofficial mentors to do the real work for free.

Of course the overall value of mentor gifts dropped has to be minimized not to hurt the in game economy. Especially with disciple farmers around you can't be dropping a lot of value all the time. And of course ME items come with TT=0 because MA just guarantees for the TT value of an item. It does make sense.

This will be the reason why we will never see an implementation of mentors getting anything of the skillgains of their disciples. If mentors would get a percentage of skills after graduation it would be as easy to abuse as the current system, if a mentor gets skillgain earlier it would be even easier to abuse. And it would be an additional value factor for an avatar, a value MA hs to compensate. I doubt that (or any similar idea for that matter) will ever get implemented.

It seems to me the only way to get more fairness into distribution of gifts and/or benefits would be to manually review mentors and have real persons decide who should get what. Any automatic system can be fooled as soon as users find out how it works, but to implement a "fair" reward system it's mechanics have to be transparent, eg. people would have to know why Alice gets a better mentor gift than me Once you know how it works, you can abuse it. Reviews and distribution of gifts by real persons will never be implemented by MA either, it's too expensive.

Which, IMHO, leaves just one alternative to try to get the whole mentoring concept into a working system. Only if a (large) group of mentors is willing to take matters into their own hands and use publicity (in game and for example EF) as well as self policing concepts, peer reviews, ratings and os on to maintain a high standard mentor group. That way it would be possible for new players to rely on a group/community instead of just one single person telling them what/who a good mentor would be.

My question: how many mentors would be interested in putting in the extra effort to start and maintain such a group community? There is no extra gift to gain, you wouldn't get paid for it. You'd need to invest extra time. And you probably would get some additional headache out of it as well. Who would sign up for such madness?

[Bernz]

Probably 80% off topic but...

I think a minimum of 2000 hours ingame should be required to be Mentor.

I too much when I see peoples who don't know EU themself trying to recruit Disciple(s). Sometimes 3-4 Disciples at the same time.

[jim_T]

Originally Posted by Bernz

Probably 80% off topic but...

I think a minimum of 2000 hours ingame should be required to be Mentor.

I too much when I see peoples who don't know EU themself trying to recruit Disciple(s). Sometimes 3-4 Disciples at the same time.

Well why not implement some kind of "knowledge test" to test your EU-knowledge and if approved...You become a certified "Mentor"? ...just a thought...

[NastyCenturion]

Originally Posted by jim_T

Well why not implement some kind of "knowledge test" to test your EU-knowledge and if approved...You become a certified "Mentor"? ...just a thought...

or even better u can be a mentor after reaching 60 agility

[DocKangey]

"x" hours in game, "y" agility, some other stats, a combination of attributes ... all those ideas about criteria have some merit, but I think they don't really give a hint if somebody is a good mentor. That has been discussed so many times. I can get a bot skilled up to 60 agi and 5000 hours in game, MA won't stop me from doing that. If this is what it takes to become a disciple farmer, thats easy!

It takes a mentor to know mentor - see what I mean? Hence my question - how many of you mentors would be willing (stupid enough, crazy, mad or simply just optimistic enough) to invest into a mentor network - without getting any benefit other than somebody maybe saying: "man, thanks for the time you put into that crazy project, it helped me become the player I am today"

[Bernz]

Originally Posted by jim_T

Well why not implement some kind of "knowledge test" to test your EU-knowledge and if approved...You become a certified "Mentor"? ...just a thought...

Not a bad idea at all. But the Test should not be easy and contain a lot of questions to cover everything.

Originally Posted by NastyCenturion

or even better u can be a mentor after reaching 60 agility

It's just me but I don't think Skills is a good mesure for this.
If I have a lot of $$$ it's "easy" to gain Skills. I can enter the Ring and shot at peoples non-stop until I reach 60 Agility. It will not make me a expert.

Maybe a high average of Attributes could be a better idea. But again, it do not proove I have good will and know a lot about everything.

Even my idea of a minimum of hours "ingame" (not base on the registration date) do not proove anything in fact.

[NastyCenturion]

Originally Posted by Bernz

It's just me but I don't think Skills is a good mesure for this.
If I have a lot of $$$ it's "easy" to gain Skills. I can enter the Ring and shot at peoples non-stop until I reach 60 Agility.

if u pk to 60 agility then u are a PK master and u should be a mentor. Now on a more realistic note 60 agility cant be reached without knowing the game IMO. (the bad thing is for miners/crafters ...)
I really dont know what should be required for a mentor to be a good 1, i really dont know how disciple farmers can be stopped, the actual system is really crap and without a major change most good mentors will give up.

[itree]

Originally Posted by DocKangey

"x" hours in game, "y" agility, some other stats, a combination of attributes ... all those ideas about criteria have some merit, but I think they don't really give a hint if somebody is a good mentor. That has been discussed so many times. I can get a bot skilled up to 60 agi and 5000 hours in game, MA won't stop me from doing that. If this is what it takes to become a disciple farmer, thats easy!

It takes a mentor to know mentor - see what I mean? Hence my question - how many of you mentors would be willing (stupid enough, crazy, mad or simply just optimistic enough) to invest into a mentor network - without getting any benefit other than somebody maybe saying: "man, thanks for the time you put into that crazy project, it helped me become the player I am today"

Actually most of the serious mentors active today fall into that category. Ask Alice how many nice ME items she recieved so far We help new people because we enjoy it not for any prize (half of the people I "mentor" are not official anyway).

Seriously I do believe that an Agility filter would clean up the system quite a bit. At the moment, 3 day old players can accept disciples, and many do so due to sheer ignorance. The few highly skilled exploiters that "farm" disciples are not really that much of an issue.

Also the current limit of 20 points to be accepted as a disciple prevents most serious people from being mentored, as well as effectively preventing mentors and disciples from filtering candidates. I'd say raise the bar of accepting/kicking a mentor to at least a couple hundred points. That will raise the cost of the give-a-gun-and-ammo scheme quite significantly. It will also allow players that deposit right-off-the-ship more than a 5 minute chance to be mentored, since it takes about that long to gain 20 points if you buy a weapon and kill a few MOBs (cf Pinky's experiment).

Sure that will make it easier for professional mentor-hoppers, but life is not perfect even in a virtual world.

[Bernz]

Originally Posted by NastyCenturion

i really dont know how disciple farmers can be stopped, the actual system is really crap and without a major change most good mentors will give up.

Farmers do it for the gift uH?
Real Mentor should not do it for the gift but only to help Newbs to know the Universe and how to survive for after move forward.

The easiest solution would be to remove the gifts. This way, we will only have Mentors who spread their knowledge for the love of Newbs and Entropia for free.
Those who do it only for the gift will disapear from the arrival zone the minute after the VU.

But we don't want MA to remove the gifts, because in fact, we are all Farmers.

[jim_T]

Originally Posted by Bernz

Not a bad idea at all. But the Test should not be easy and contain a lot of questions to cover everything.

I agree...and there should be random questions preferably w/ a pretty large amount of questions in the database covering, as you put it "everything"...

I´m sure some ppl will try to cheat this...let´s face it´s the world we live in, but perhaps even the "cheaters" actually learn a few things whilst so eagerly trying to cheat this test ^^ ...but I think that the bad/incompetent mentors that perhaps got themselfs a certificate by cheating...will loose credibility...sooner or later, prolly sooner...coz rep & knowledge is everything in this universe!

...just my