Mentors and Academy Outfits

[basti]

The basic ideas for this comes from dorgo and hippieschuh. I am just combining them and adding a proper design. Add your ideas and opinions, so we can help make the life of new players better, or last longer on the battlefield.


Mentoring

Planetside, and for that matter a lot of other games, have one big issue: They are not easy to pickup. At the very beginning of each MMO, you just have no goddamn clue what to do. Common MMOs challenges new players with questions like "How to play? What mobs to kill? What quests to do? When do i need a new weapon and armor? where can i get that stuff? Where do i get new skills?", and the list goes on. Planetside challenges new players with similar questions, and without help, starting the game could be very frustrating.
An always easy solution was knowing someone, or asking someone, who knew what to do. And because of that, we could really use a mentoring system.

Becoming a mentor:

Everyone can become a mentor. It is your choise if you want to sacrifice time and efford for the new guys. All you have to do is go to a menu and click a little checkbox. Bang, you are now listed as a mentor, and new players can find you, see if you are online, and just ask you if you want to teach them the basics.

Being a newbie:

As a new player, the very first thing you will, and propably even hear, is a question window if you want to find a mentor. If you klick no, you are not going to be listed as a new player that requires assistance, and you are not shown the mentor list. The window simply closes, and is never forced on you again. But you always have the option to go throu the menu and open the mentor list again, and set yourself as new player that requires help. That is only possible up to a certain battlerank. Once you reached that rank, you are unable to list yourself as a newbie, simply to avoid the list being filled with random people. On top of that, only newbies that are currently online are show on the list, to avoid filling the list with inactive characters.


Mentor and Newbie, a story of true love:

Once a newbie found a mentor and have chatted with him, or once a mentor found a newbie, both can invite each other to become a mentor - newbie couple. They can always break the connection, and gain certain abilitys to help each other out. They could always see on what continent the other guy is and in what territory, could see what class the other guy currently is, and the mentor could also see the newbies skill tree, to advide him what he should train next. They could also use ingame voice to alwasy communicate with each other, no matter where they are. They wont gain any direct benefits from being a couple, its purley about helping the newbie, not gaining XP faster or training skills faster.
The mentor could also issue small missions to the newbie, to show him the ropes of the mission system. It would be very basic stuff, nothing special, not as detailed and complex as the mission system might be.

The newbie is not a newbie anymore:

Once the newbie reached a certain Battlerank, the two automaticly part ways. Its not mentor and Newbie anymore, it would be just two soilders that know each other and helped each other.
Now, as the newbie parted ways from the mentor, he gets the opportunity to rate his mentor. Was he good? was he just wasting his time? Was he never online? He could write that in a text box, and also rate the mentor from 1 to 5 or something like that (this will become important below). Other newbies can see the rating and comments when they search for a mentor. This way they know who to avoid and who to pick.



Integrated to all that, academy outfits:

Once a certain number of officers from an outfit helped a certain amout of newbies and have a good enough rating, the Outfit leader could change his outfit to become an academy outfit. The differences are:

Skill tree: instead of choosing a specialisation for the outfit, an academy outfits skill tree has basic skills in all areas. This way new players can try out everything, before they head off into the big open world of war. They can figure out what they enjoy doing, and join an outfit that is doing that mostly.

Once a faction got an academy outfit, new players will get a notification about it in the mentor list menu. They could still choose a mentor, but can now also decide to join the outfit and get help that way. Once the newbie is no newbie anymore, means certain BR, he will automaticly switch division within the outfit, and get a notification that he should consider looking for an outfit that fits his playstyle.



Ideas, comments, opinions? keep them coming. Once we are done and happy with it, it goes into the Idea vault, with full credit to those who added stuff.

[Tool]

Very novel idea with the outfits actually. I think there is that role many players would love to fill training newer players of their empire about the game and it's various aspects.

If sandbox elements are PS2s future than surely roleplay is going to have it's place. While that may seem odd to some, it seems like a very natural progression to keep things not only interesting in an MMOFPS, but attract a much larger playerbase the genre may not have tapped into otherwise.

Giving outfits the tools, abilities, and areas to train players in a more roleplay fashion is something worth pusuing. If however your a player who just wants the action during your play time but there's nothing wrong working side by side with players who sometimes take things a bit more seriously during their playtime.

Forgive me if that seems a bit off topic but I honestly think these new systems in PS2 go hand-in-hand with many MMO concepts, just in an FPS fashion.

[ShowNoMercy]

PS2 will be much easier to pick up than PS1 from the way things look. I have a feeling that if someone not familiar to PS1 were to log into PS2 they would feel like they are playing a standard fps. The basics of equipment and weapons can be explained by the pop ups in PS1, but the system for getting into battle and for advancement will need some elaboration (especially regarding resources). We all played PS1, which had a pretty crappy tutorial, but then again we all picked it up. I remember instant actioning for a week before i discovered warp gates and the HART, or and running around in my pjs for a similar amount of time.

[Tool]

PS2 will be much easier to pick up than PS1 from the way things look. I have a feeling that if someone not familiar to PS1 were to log into PS2 they would feel like they are playing a standard fps. The basics of equipment and weapons can be explained by the pop ups in PS1, but the system for getting into battle and for advancement will need some elaboration (especially regarding resources).

That is a good point I didn't consider much until now. The learning curve will probably not be as great and much can be explained through a small tutorial or text/voiced popups.

With the intention the PS2 developers have laid out, saying they're releasing a core game then building from there implies things will probably become more and more complex as time goes on. So perhaps implementing those community tools now rather than later will help with the integration of later features, information and player assistance easily accessed by new players after release.

[Raymac]

Great idea. You started to lose me a little with the whole mentor/newbie marriage thing, but the more I read it the more it makes sense if it is over a play session. At first I thought you meant that they would be man and wife errr I mean mentor and newbie for days or weeks. I think it would work better if it was more free-love and the newbie could get help from a number of mentors all at once, Sasha Grey style. Sometimes you don't need someone to hold your hand for long, just answer a random question or 2. Like I said though, the more I read what you wrote, the more it sounded like you accounted for that.

EDIT: There will be a learning curve. I remember when I first started in 2003, the very nature of an mmofps made it so that it took me a while how to figure out not to die so fast. Even if PS2 is more newbie friendly, there will still be a learning curve because of the massive scale.

[Vancha]

I've made a thread about it before, but I figure I'll mention it again.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/ISD_STAR

I'd love to see an equivalent of that in Planetside. Basically, every new character gets put in a newbie channel for 30 days that they can leave at any time, and in that channel are volunteers who are employed by CCP (the company that runs EVE) who have powers over the channel and who's job it is to answer any questions that those in the newbie channel may have.

Having such a thing in PS2 would mean newbies have a chat channel to ask questions in while retaining their choice of outfit.

Meanwhile, I think you could just have an EVE University equivalent instead of having people apply to be academy outfits (EVE University is a corporation (EVE's equivalent of an outfit) who's sole purpose is to teach newbies, who become pros and teach newbies, who become pros and teach newbies who become...You get the idea.)

[Tool]

Originally Posted by Vancha

I've made a thread about it before, but I figure I'll mention it again.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/ISD_STAR

I'd love to see an equivalent of that in Planetside. Basically, every new character gets put in a newbie channel for 30 days that they can leave at any time, and in that channel are volunteers who are employed by CCP (the company that runs EVE) who have powers over the channel and who's job it is to answer any questions that those in the newbie channel may have.

Having such a thing in PS2 would mean newbies have a chat channel to ask questions in while retaining their choice of outfit.

Meanwhile, I think you could just have an EVE University equivalent instead of having people apply to be academy outfits (EVE University is a corporation (EVE's equivalent of an outfit) who's sole purpose is to teach newbies, who become pros and teach newbies, who become pros and teach newbies who become...You get the idea.)

I have not played EVE before, not sure why honestly; but that EVE University, is that controlled by a player/players or something automaticaly setup by the developers?

A non-leadable outfit for new players with perhaps general outfit certs and tutorial like missions would be along the same lines?

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by Tool

I have not played EVE before, not sure why honestly; but that EVE University, is that controlled by a player/players or something automaticaly setup by the developers?

A non-leadable outfit for new players with perhaps general outfit certs and tutorial like missions would be along the same lines?

It's a regular corp set up by players like any other. In the same way Exxon-1 in Planetside was made for support, EVE U is made to help newbies. My point was that apart from being added to a "mentor screen", the academies idea in the OP could essentially be done by a player-run outfit (do we know that outfits won't be able to choose between specialization and jack of all trades? I was under the impression they could pick and choose skills the same as players)

[Tool]

Originally Posted by Vancha

It's a regular corp set up by players like any other. In the same way Exxon-1 in Planetside was made for support, EVE U is made to help newbies. My point was that apart from being added to a "mentor screen", the academies idea in the OP could essentially be done by a player-run outfit (do we know that outfits won't be able to choose between specialization and jack of all trades? I was under the impression they could pick and choose skills the same as players)

I'm not sure about outfit skills, I was thinking about a general non player controlled outfit possibly for new players.

Having that training relegated to the community is great but I think outfits who really want to dedicate themselves to that role would need more tools and avenues than what were present in PS1.

[Vancha]

Supposedly there's some surprises in store in regards to how outfits are going to work in PS2. It certainly sounds like they'll be more elaborate than PS1.

[DviddLeff]

Like it.

Sounds like a great and worthy specialisation for an outfit.

[Tikuto]

I like but it could be more simplified.

Involving an outfit and a temporary status of being a "Mentor" may distract players from the war too much. We don't want players not contributing to the war effort properly.

Instead, it could be contemporary as you log in and exclude any Outfit involvement. Newbies in local area or wherever trigger a prompt message for players who have opted-in to support new militants though the option to 'opt-in' may not be necessary at all

If new players adds someone to their friends list, that action could prompt the mentor with some sort of Mentor support if they choose to accept.

When mentoring with a befriended player has completed, they could automatically ascend into that befriended Mentor's Outfit.



Personally I like how this idea could abolish VR Training completely. I hated that place.
Cool contributions?