i'd like to see an official mentorship aspect to this game

LuC1ll3atTh3Wh33L · November 3

title says it all.
i think it could help bring new blood into the game. there's so much needed info not available in the game that players would benefit from, imo.
i for one enjoy helping others in game play. i 'member a game that offered a similar idea to its player base. it can be done successfully, imo.
i also believe there are many vet players who would be willing to assist new players; the resources are there.
not everyone would qualify to be a mentor.

karthrag_inak · November 3

Khajiit thinks this is a great idea! This one volunteers for sleekness mentoring. Regardless of what anyone is doing, they should be sleek when doing it.

tomofhyrule · November 4

We used to have Project Vitality.

That was organized by a content creator and it was an entire conglomerate of raid leads across all servers who wanted to help bring players into group content. People were vetted, they helped out, it was a good thing all around.

Then U35 hit. People still talk about the exodus there, but “nerfs” wasn’t the whole story. It was more that it was an unnecessary change that made people have to relearn a lot. High-level players were able to bounce back from those nerfs within a few weeks. Casuals also didn’t feel the effects much because they stick to overland. But that mid-tier of players trying to get into group content? They got utterly kneecapped.
(Not to mention that U35 was also a buggy mess at release, with a lot of combat issues that should never have come up and stayed for far too long)

The players who were trying to “git gud” were dejected since they got sent back to square one. A lot of the raid leads left in disgust from that patch, and a lot of the ones who stayed stopped having patience for training runs with people who were barely able to do normals after the nerfs and didn’t want to change. And over time, it got harder and harder to sustain the Project. And then finally Nefas quit, citing all of the problems with the game and the lack of communication and the utter insanity of combat changes, and the Project died.

What we have now is a major chasm between the players who can do high-level content and others. And there are problems on both sides here - a lot of the vets don’t have the patience to spend longer than 25 minutes in a vet trial, and a lot of the casuals are so sensitive that telling them to stand in a certain place or to not try to DPS with a sword-and-board is “toxic.” As such, the endgame community just gets smaller and smaller because they’re not welcoming new players, and more often the players that they do welcome do not intend to play as a team. We’re at the point that really the only people who still do training runs are in social guilds for those guild members, and even a bunch of those won’t clear unless the raid leads stack about half of the group to carry the others through.

And U46-48 is giving a bunch of déjà vu all over again.

U46’s Subclassing, like the U35 nerfs changes, are something that casuals love since they can slot whatever to kill the 1k HP wolves in overland and the sweats can all put on Herald/Assassination to wreck everything with their 150k+ DPS beam. But the mid-tier, who like their characters the way they are, now just got nerfed for not Subclassing and left even further behind since the high-end is now so much higher than it was. That combat balance has not even been addressed since then, but instead U48 just dropped with some major combat bugs (fixed now, thankfully) that essentially made tanks squishy because they had no passives and half of the DDs’ attacks didn’t work.
We can even draw some parallels between U35’s Templar jabs animation change and the new animation changes - something few people wanted, was put in with little to no explanation, and was pushed through despite PTS feedback threads decrying it.

So it’s a good idea. In theory. It was a good thing, until one poor game decision after another chipped away at it and left it in the state it’s in.

scrappy1342 · November 4

tomofhyrule wrote: »

So it’s a good idea. In theory. It was a good thing, until one poor game decision after another chipped away at it and left it in the state it’s in.

doing it as a player run guild sounds like a good idea to me. guilds have moderators who keep an eye on things. making it a part of the game does not. if i had never experienced it before, i would have thought it was a great idea. but i've seen it implemented in other games and it gets extremely toxic.

Personofsecrets · November 4

I'd mentor players in ToT.

Vulkunne · November 4

Tales of Tribute could use this.

Renato90085 · November 4

no,thank you
90% player not would qualify to be a mentor
and give new player wrong thing,like many stream

StackonClown · November 4

How about troll tank or annoying ganker mentor ?

benzenexz · November 4

I've been spreading solo mechanics and will mentor vet dungeons should there be people unknowing of what to do.
However, sometimes one have to admit that not everyone is willing to learn or even communicate or even ask or read chat.

Jaimeh · November 4

I think what would be more helpful for new players is 1) practical things: consumable, materials, gears, gold, and 2) a good overview of questing (main, versus, zone, versus all the other types). I would add a basic class guide, but the game does actually offer information on skills to slot if people care to look.

However, in terms of combat knowledge mentorship, for a new player to improve they need to have a desire to learn and become better at their chosen playstyle, and no matter what anyone tells them, or the abundance of information available, if they are not actually willing to practice combat, it won't matter (I would argue they'd also need to have a liking for harder content beyond 'it's just a means of getting gear and collectibles' mentality). And they don't need someone else necessarily to do that: solo arenas are a great training ground to learn to do damage and avoid incoming damage, to self-sustain, to practice optimal positioning... Learning harder combat requires doing harder combat, there's no going around that, and if someone has done that, then learning the mechanics of a given trial fight is easier by comparison. If people don't have faith in their combat abilities, then someone telling them 'you need to do X thing here' likely won't work (you see this frequently in portal scenarios in PUGs, the SE portal for instance doesn't have anything too complicated, mechanics-wise, but people fail a lot because they either don't do good damage, or don't avoid damage). It also might make things even more difficult, like another commenter said above about streamers, because saying 'this is proc set is meta' to a player that is not able to reliably trigger the proc conditions and have good uptimes is less helpful to them than, for instance, a flat stat set. And it's the wrong thing for new or inexperienced players to focus on, but new players don't want to hear 'you have to go and fight things, go to PvP even if it seems scary at first, try an arena, or to solo a harder overland mob' and so on, they much prefer the objective of 'you have to hit this CP level and get this gear'. In truth though you have to learn by doing, only then you can come up with more nuanced things to ask, where there might not be much information online, and where a veteran player might be helpful.

Danikat · November 4

This is one of the things guilds are for. There's many guilds that will train new players (or long-term players wanting to learn something new) to do stuff like run vet dungeons and trials. Also learning all kinds of other things like role-playing, levelling crafting, making general purpose builds etc.

If there was an official programme I think it would need to be optional for new players, ideally with some way to specify what they want to be able to do. If I started a new game and I was forced into learning to play the way some people do, where it's all about grinding XP as fast as possible so you can start grinding instances for gear to...grind slightly different instances I'd quit and assume I made a mistake buying the game at all.

alpha_synuclein · November 4

We need more incentives to join guilds. Then each player can learn from players they have common interests with.
Not every vet player is an expert with every aspect of the game.

DragonRacer · November 4

People will complain about not wanting to join guilds, but something like mentorship or learning certain aspects of the game from a veteran player (PvE endgame content, PvP content, ToT, housing builds, trading, etc) is literally the core of what guilds are.

twisttop138 · November 4

tomofhyrule wrote: »

We used to have Project Vitality.

That was organized by a content creator and it was an entire conglomerate of raid leads across all servers who wanted to help bring players into group content. People were vetted, they helped out, it was a good thing all around.

Then U35 hit. People still talk about the exodus there, but “nerfs” wasn’t the whole story. It was more that it was an unnecessary change that made people have to relearn a lot. High-level players were able to bounce back from those nerfs within a few weeks. Casuals also didn’t feel the effects much because they stick to overland. But that mid-tier of players trying to get into group content? They got utterly kneecapped.
(Not to mention that U35 was also a buggy mess at release, with a lot of combat issues that should never have come up and stayed for far too long)

The players who were trying to “git gud” were dejected since they got sent back to square one. A lot of the raid leads left in disgust from that patch, and a lot of the ones who stayed stopped having patience for training runs with people who were barely able to do normals after the nerfs and didn’t want to change. And over time, it got harder and harder to sustain the Project. And then finally Nefas quit, citing all of the problems with the game and the lack of communication and the utter insanity of combat changes, and the Project died.

What we have now is a major chasm between the players who can do high-level content and others. And there are problems on both sides here - a lot of the vets don’t have the patience to spend longer than 25 minutes in a vet trial, and a lot of the casuals are so sensitive that telling them to stand in a certain place or to not try to DPS with a sword-and-board is “toxic.” As such, the endgame community just gets smaller and smaller because they’re not welcoming new players, and more often the players that they do welcome do not intend to play as a team. We’re at the point that really the only people who still do training runs are in social guilds for those guild members, and even a bunch of those won’t clear unless the raid leads stack about half of the group to carry the others through.

And U46-48 is giving a bunch of déjà vu all over again.

U46’s Subclassing, like the U35 nerfs changes, are something that casuals love since they can slot whatever to kill the 1k HP wolves in overland and the sweats can all put on Herald/Assassination to wreck everything with their 150k+ DPS beam. But the mid-tier, who like their characters the way they are, now just got nerfed for not Subclassing and left even further behind since the high-end is now so much higher than it was. That combat balance has not even been addressed since then, but instead U48 just dropped with some major combat bugs (fixed now, thankfully) that essentially made tanks squishy because they had no passives and half of the DDs’ attacks didn’t work.
We can even draw some parallels between U35’s Templar jabs animation change and the new animation changes - something few people wanted, was put in with little to no explanation, and was pushed through despite PTS feedback threads decrying it.

So it’s a good idea. In theory. It was a good thing, until one poor game decision after another chipped away at it and left it in the state it’s in.

Hey dude, don't tell them we're stacking the roster lol.

What you say as usual is right on point. My social guild has weekly training vet trials. No we don't always clear, though now that it's always the same people usually, we have a good success rate. I also learned like this until I found a team and still always sign up so that I can help folks learn. It's like the best part of this game. Raiding with your friends. 2 hours blocked off in the evening, relaxing after work, kids homework is done. Having tons of laughs. Blowing people up when you're supposed to converge. It's such a blast. That's why I really fear next year. I have this feeling that there will be no trial. That all the fun will be ruined as more people leave, unhappy with 2025 already and getting no relief in 2026.

I thankfully missed 35. I was on a break. Though I remember Morrowind, which was similar kinda. We don't need to go back to that. Hopefully we won't.