Exactly, and what’s a player likely to say that differs from wowhead regarding handling seasonal, or raid boss? If they don’t directly send the newbie there.
Mentoring is a disposition based pastime primarily. Experience helps of course, but principally the thing is having patience with people, being positive, open etc.
You can’t measure these in game, but I don’t get what on earth 10ing each dungeon has to do with it either. To me it’s like blizzard just said “people are complaining the mentor system is too lax, better make it have requirements” and just slapped them on.
Irrespective the system only works if you police the mentors and the channel, qualifying as above doesn’t ake you magically affable. So I don’t understand what is gained here, unless blizzard believes having these qualifiers means they can trust these people to be “the right stuff” without having to monitor it, which seems naive to me.
I’ll point to real life here. Mentors/guides in real life are principally expected to have experience mentoring, with some very general experience in the most common areas their mentees need help with. Ie In schools a careers mentor needs to know stuff like how job websites work, CV building etc, but they don’t need to have worked as a firefighter to give a young person considering it as a career advice regarding preparing for it.
Where someone has experience in the area and that’s essential to their insight, I’d call that a coach, and a coach is very different to a mentor. Mentor is about assisting those who know little and helping them find their feet and make them more independent in the area. A coach is about someone using their expertise usually derived from experience to allow someone without it to perform highly in a specific area, and the coach is more involved consistently until that person reaches their goal.
These requirements strike me as closer to a coach than a mentor. Additionally coaches don’t usually have the same need for personable skills as a mentor, because their main boon is their experience and knowledge, and however they deliver that is just the way it is. Note you don’t fire coaches for being rough around the edges and curt with people if they get results, but if a mentor makes people feel unwelcome/attacked they’re probably going to be out of a job.
indeed it seems to be a very short sighted way of solving new players confusion.
it’s easier to introduce a Do Not Disturb ( DND ) system to opt in for players who should not be approached for help and preferablr not paired with new players in the dungeons
Please don’t do any rewards for Mentoring.
In FFXIV the Mentor system is just a hoax I hope WoW will do better.
If there are any rewards players will do it just for the rewards and the New Players who are trying to learn from them won’t be helped at all.
Hopefully Blizz will be strict on Mentoring behaviour too. <- Popular problem with “mentor systems” in games.
If I was to be mentored by somebody, in an ideal world it would be a player who is:
A: experienced with the class I wish to know about
B: Isn’t going to be clueless when it comes to end game or low level content, potentially even be good at the end game would be a big+ so they don’t feed the new players utter BS
C: Would be able to push fresh max level players into some form of content which would be adequate for them.
I help people because it’s how I am… particularly in dungeons. If I see someone struggling with mechanics I’ll whisper them and ask if they need help. I don’t get a reward from that, other than a nice warm feeling in my big furry belly.
I’d prefer that any mentoring system had some kind of specialisation though, just because someone is a mentor doesn’t mean they have experience of everything, based on the current requirements. So flag them for what achievements they have as part of those requirements (“This mentor can help you with… X”). I’d happily help out in dungeons, questing etc, but I’d be pretty useless at current raids.
D: have a positive and friendly personality, with time and patience to spare.
I mean, there have been lots of people on this forum over the years that absolutely check every box as far as knowledge and experience with the game is concerned, and then at the same time are massive jerks when it comes to sharing that knowledge and experience with others.
I mean you could argue its top three for sure but you can’t just go around handing people mentor tags who have 0 traits or any other fulfilled requirement than being friendly x)
I dunno if you can wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart throws a sword at them, I’m sure being friendly can help in becoming a supreme executive mentor.
That’s why you police it, and kick bad mentors from the programme.
Having X requirements can help, but it doesn’t mean someone is suitable to mentor, so it’s pretty irrelevant.
The only way it makes sense is if those achis were a guarantee of good conduct, so blizzard then don’t need to police the channel, but they’re not, so they’ll need to police the channel anyway. If they don’t, it will fail.
Whether you have requirements or not, it needs to be policed, so it makes no sense. All the requirements do is lock certain players out for arbitrary reasons. It doesn’t keep “riff raff out” because as said, having those achis is no guarantee you’ll be a good mentor in terms of behaviour.
How does this prevent that? It’s still very much something trolls regularly buy their way into or even accomplish themselves for that matter. Anyway, I want to clarify and say that I think requirements to be a mentor are almost entirely arbitrary.
Some players are obsessed with what others buy. I don’t think people who buy achievements are inherently likely to be trolls.
As I said the system needs something to try and ensure there is a lesser chance of players abusing the system. However I’m not sure that those requirements will do it.
As I also already pointed out I feel a global support/mentoring channel would be far better. Players should be able to ask any question without fear of being told to go google it or worse responses. Traditionally guilds and general chat have been places people could ask questions.
The most sensible requirements to me are stuff you have to do in game pre application, not before.
So I’d pitch it like this:
You must not have been suspended (could add a time caveat) for violation of CoC. This is the closest thing we have to an achi on “your character” so it should be in there.
Complete the “Mentor Application Scenario”.
2 would be a scenario that takes a fair bit of time to complete, over half an hour, a duration that dissuades people from “doing it in 5 mins for the lulz”. It’s only available upon satisfying the previous condition and having a level 50 character.
What it involves would be hard to say, but it could be something like you’re paired with an NPC newbie who follows you around, and you have to escort them to certain locations or zones, and the quest tracker does not work during this quest, so you have to know it. Something like this
Step One: Settling in
Objective: guide your mentee to 8 key locations within the time limit.
The mentee would randomly ask from a list of several different locations to make it different each time, unique to each capitol:
An auction house
A mailbox
A bank
An innkeeper
An (insert tradeskill) trainer
A guard you can ask for directions
A portal to (location)
A boat/zepp to (location)
A distinct/valley
The Transmogrifier
The Void Storage
The Embassy
Location of (key NPC)
When locating a specific individual, you’d have to actually talk to them to complete the step.
Step Two: A test of Wisdom
I’m unsure about the execution of this step I’ll say that first.
Whilst your mentee catches their breath some form of guide NPC appears and uses the moment to catch up with you, they ask you 20 questions from a random bank of questions, with multiple choice answers. The questions would range from “Which of these abilities can a Balance Druid use to damage multiple targets?” To “Northern Barrens is connected to Ashenvale, Southern Barrens and which zone?” Etc. Generally checking for shallow game knowledge. Each question would have a time limit with scrolling text for the answers. And chat/whisper would be disabled during the test.
As said I’m not sure about the step but some kind of “do you know” needs to be involved.
Step Three: Ready for Action
Your mentee is ready for action , complete the steps of this scenario to show them how to adventure
lead them to (questgiver NPC)
The NPC gives the mentee some quests to complete a random dungeon, and to complete a mythic dungeon.
firstly, demonstrate for the mentee to Q for a random dungeon by doing it yourself. Once this is done the step advances as the mentee confirms understanding.
next step, take the mentee to a mythic dungeon. For the purposes of this step you use either RFk or stockades, but you must manually set the difficulty to mythic and walk through, then the step completes.
This is as much as I could come up with, specifics are shady but the key takeaway is:
the scenario involves knowing where key player utilities are in the world without a tracker
the scenario involves some measure of player “general knowhow” on core features/classes, not optimisation.
the scenario involves knowledge and demonstration of using game features for content without a tracker or prompt (can add PvP stuff in to)
the scenario takes enough time that it requires effort put aside to do it, so it lends itself to those who want to do it purposefully and discourages those who don’t want to put aside time for it. Say 30-45 mins. If a player can’t put aside this time to qualify, then questions can be raised about their willingness to participate in the programme.
It’s not a perfect solution but I’d see it as more applicable than a measure of stuff you’ve done previously, if only slightly. And of course the channel would still need to be policed.