Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Right off of reading the meeting minutes from the latest CSM, the biggest thing that stuck out to me was the section on NPE, specifically regarding how to ease new players in. It seemed that the agreement was that social structure and interaction had the best chance of retaining newer players by having someone experienced walk new players through. This way, the new player gets a "best of" explanation and skill path, and is more likely to stay on.

To that end, I think an established mentoring system (as an actual implemented feature) would fit this need perfectly. It allows experienced veterans that are interested in helping new players an easy, somewhat official way to do that. I see this working like so:

An experienced player signs up as a mentor. Their name gets put into a pool or list, along with everyone else that's signed up. This can be split by race, I haven't decided yet, since it really doesn't make a difference. Anyhow, on the other end, a brand new player is offered the option of (A) going through the existing tutorial, (B) requesting assistance from a mentor, or (C) skipping everything entirely and "roughing it." If the player chooses (B), they are then given the option to choose, or be assigned* to, a mentor. The mentor then has the responsibility of walking the player through the basic steps of introducing EVE to a new player.

*Provided the mentor is online and accepting new "students" which I'll get to in a bit

Motivation
Why would experienced players want to deal with the possibly mundane task of explaining everything to new players? Well, for one, there's the undeniably good feeling of helping someone new. If that's not enough, I figured there could be some sort of monetary award upon successful completion.

Aha, you say, but what counts as a "complete" for a mentor? Well, I see it being defined by either the student or the mentor. If a student feels they have had enough guidance, they (through the UI) declare the mentoring session over, and are then asked to rate the mentor (more on this in a second). Alternatively, the mentor should be allowed to end the session as well, for whatever reason. If this occurs, the new player should still be prompted to rate the mentor. Sessions should be able to last as long as necessary, including multiple days.

Rating
Rating the mentor serves as a quality measurement. Remember back when agents had quality, and their quality (and level) dictated your reward for completing the mission? Well this would work the same way: higher rated mentors would earn a bigger payout (which could come from CONCORD, the NPC corp that the new player had signed up with, or a brand new NPC corp). Also, and just as important, the rating would be a key in allowing new players to pick mentors. New players would be far more interested in being mentored by a 5-star mentor than a 1-star. So, this provides multiple reasons for a mentor to try and earn the best rating they can. In addition to ratings, players should also be able to post reviews about mentors, to provide further feedback.

The Mentor
So far, things have been about the new player's interaction with the system and the mentor. Now its time to talk about the mentors themselves. As I said before, the an interested player would sign up to be a mentor, much in the way one signs up for Faction Warfare. Once signed up, they indicate whether they are taking new players or not, or have it determined by a player-set number, which allows the mentor to autonomously dictate how they want to run things. This works if the mentor wants to provide group-based instruction, or prefers 1-on-1 sessions.

What allows a mentor to be eligible? Well, I think we all agree that we don't want brand new players assisting brand new players, since they are not nearly experienced enough for the task. To that end, though, I'm not sure if its proper to put in a time limit (6 months or a year before your ACCOUNT, not character, is eligible). I definitely don't support having to train a skill to allow mentoring. Maybe something along the lines of completing a certain number or level of certificates? I don't, and I'm open to suggestions.

Going back to rewards for a bit, there's a large number of possibilities for what can happen. I was originally leaning towards a Mentor Points (like LP) system, but that further fractures EVE's market and is probably not desirable. The most obvious is just a flat ISK award, based on rating earned and/or overall rating. But I did start thinking of a new method, one that further promotes mentors to really do their best: after a new player stay subscribed for more than a set amount of time (3, 6, 9 months, haven't decided), the mentor is awarded a PLEX for their efforts in adding to the subscriber base. This also ties in with CCP's effort to start rewarding their loyal, long-time players!

I'm sure there's things I've forgotten or haven't thought of yet, so I'll be paying attention to this thread and updating as I think of things. Please leave your feedback.

But less rewarding for the folks putting in the time, and not getting much recognition. Furthermore, the Help channel is far too populous, and its sometimes difficult to get questions answered.

tl;dr

The best form of mentoring is still a corp/alliance.

Join my corp and we will mentor you(This is an alt....do not apply to this corp), believe this is the case for most decent corps.

New players should be strongly encoufarge to join a corp...but how do you do this and what corps should they be encouraged to join?

It is what is already in place and wasn't really working... and also...



... this.

I think it would be a good idea to implement this in order to assist new players get past the steep EVE learning curve. It would also be beneficial for mentors to identify their area of expertise (PvP, Mining, PvE and so on).

Joining corporations and alliances is also a good way for players to receive good mentoring, but this is at times hit and miss. Having a dedicated system to support new players that may not want to join corporations/alliances in order to learn the basics of the game would be beneficial. After the initial introduction, they can be encouraged by the mentors to select a corporation appropriate to their profession choice.

One thing I liked about Freelancer MMO is that you had mods out there flying with you. They were easily identifiable and they would offer there assistance in whatever you needed.

The Eve-Uni channel is essentially the Rookie Help without the scammers and trolls. Just tell people to ask their questions there, until they find a decent sized corp that can help them progress in the game. Its what I did after all, its not hard.

While I would not suggest feeding newbies into Eve-Uni public chat automatically, as that would lower it to Rookie Help levels, I think it should be advertised somewhere so that new players who can read (ie those who might actually play for more than a month, and so are worth helping/mentoring) are pointed towards the channel.

Just my two cents, as a new player.

+1

As a social scientist, this seems totally accurate.

+1 for a good idea. ISD already does a lot of this, but only so much a small group can do, especially in the rookie help channel which is easy to get lost in at times.

Some additional comments...

1) Have CCP create an NPC mentor corp. Same rules apply as all other NPC corps. CCP can support an NPC corp all they want with little trouble IMO. People interested in mentoring new players would apply to be mentors and some mechanic would be used to accept them or not. They could also tick a box depending on what their specialty is (PVP, PVE, Mining, etc.)

2) New players can choose to join the Mentorship corp or not. Once they join, they are either assigned a mentor, I'd also do this based on TZ of play and hours usually online, or they can choose a mentor based on ratings, whatever.

3) I like the idea of mentoring evaluations. Good mentors will stay, bad mentors will leave. Over time you should have a pretty nice group of folks mentoring newer players.

4) Mentors should be allowed to mentor from an alt, but should apply with their main. No reason to have to leave your current corp for mentoring duties. You're mainly going to be answering questions, so it shouldn't matter too much how many SPs you have, you're not going to be doing things for them, just talking them through the process, helping them get their feet under them, etc.

I don't like the idea of giving a PLEX for mentoring. I agree it is a nice reward, but I think it would be too much of a carrot and entice all sorts of abuse. I think mentoring should be done for the sake of mentoring, it is its own reward.

This.

In fact this reminds me of logi pilots requesting to be added to killmails.

Mildly pathetic.