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"Mentor chest" - rewarding experts taking newcomers to runs


TamX.1870

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When you finally finish some harder content, you get all sorts of rewards: you open up collections, get mastery points, finish all sorts of achievements and such. While this game does not directly punish experts taking newbies to runs, there's also no rewards from all the extra time & effort used to teach the mechanics to newcomers and taking some retries after wipes. It is only you who just completed the achievement /cheering around, and others nodding that "great, great, gz, ...", but wouldn't it be more fun if all could get something for such achievements? So, what do you think, should the entire group be rewarded when a member in a team completes some harder content first time?

I was thinking some sort of Mentor chest - some extra loot to members when someone completes content first time - and possibly a related achievement with few tiers. The reward should be enough to justify the possibly extra hassle, but small enough to prevent people to start calculating and abusing the reward. It's main objective would be to reward players who are willing to take players new to some instance in to their group.

I haven't thought the details much, and I hope others will point out the weaknesses in such system, as well as give refinements or totally different ideas for lowering the treshold for groups to take players new to specific instance / boss with them (other than mercenary groups taking gold as payment for completions).

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I wouldn't mind it, nor do I need it. To me, helping people is the reward. The only time I ever really notice it, is if I'm helping people with stories that I don't need and I get zero reward. I'm thinking everything in the game should reward something.

I've gone through Hearts and Minds will people in my guild any number of times, often for no reward. It's a bit of work, I feel like something for my time would be nice. But in dugeons and fractals, since I'm already getting rewarded, I don't feel it the same way.

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@"Vayne.8563" said:I wouldn't mind it, nor do I need it. To me, helping people is the reward. ... I've gone through Hearts and Minds will people in my guild any number of times, often for no reward. It's a bit of work, I feel like something for my time would be nice.

Yes, true. I could ask this another way - wouldn't it be nice if you could share rewards you gained with those who were involved? So, maybe it could be done other way: those achievements would also list "mentor chest" reward (as a sort of shared reward), which would be given to anyone in your group once the achievement is done?

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@"Laila Lightness.8742" said:This would be good for raids and cms

Yes, I was indeed initially thinking CMs and raid bosses / wings. Both Nightmare & Shattered Observatory fractal have already two suitable personal achievements (one to complete at T4, one to complete CM), that could grant rewards for the ones that have done it many times earlier. Raids have personal achievements for killing each boss, which I could also consider giving rewards to the entire group, even if others have completed it earlier 100 times. There could be others, too, but I initially thought it only for instanced PvE content with fixed group size, that is, you would not get mentor boxes from open world events, like world bosses or such (even that they have personal achievement from first kill).

"Mentor" achievement could have its own achievement, for example, when collecting 50 or 100 boxes you would become "The elder, whose wisdom the young ones gather around to listen in silence" :)

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Did you play Revelation Online by any chance, that game had very advanced mentoring system.Alas was pay2win af.Imma person that likes to help, guide but getting tiny appreciation for what you did for new players was nice.On top of anything else that made game very sociable, something GW2 lacks.

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While interesting, this would also allow raid seller to double dip. Once by getting payed, second by getting achievements associated with helping raid newcomers.

This would ultimately lead to any titles gained or unique rewards potentially falling under scrutiny. Any type of mentoring system would have to be way more complex as to prevent such results.

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@"phs.6089" said:Did you play Revelation Online by any chance, that game had very advanced mentoring system.

Sorry, no, can you describe it more?

On top of anything else that made game very sociable, something GW2 lacks.

Yes, while playing this game now bit over a year, I have tried hard to figure out, why this game is not nearly as "social" as the previous one I played. Basically everything here is OK, and the previous game was horrible in some other fronts, but for reason or another you make contacts to other players (especially outside of your guild(s)) very slowly...


I was thinking mentor achievement system a bit more. In fractals and raids, it could be good to show a "completion counter" on each member, telling how many times that player has received the end reward. It was very good addition to show AR in fractals: there is no more need to try to guess how much AR player has, and if s/he claims something, if that is true or false. You know, you don't really need to hide if you are firstcomer or expert - if game client does not show it directly, people will ask for killproofs and such. If the game itself would show a counter how many times you have been completed specific instance, it would greatly ease all the hassle.

So, this way, you would see that someone in your group has never completed that specific instance / boss / tier. You would then know that you as a team are getting mentor chest if you complete that: and game client could even show this explicitly as an event. You'd then just need to be confident enough about the newcomer that s/he can do the minimum required to beat the encounter, and that's all.

My first post suggests that team would get mentor chest only from first run, but in reality, if you have been in an instance like 3 times, it is not yet much. Maybe completions 2 to 5 or 10 would give "small mentor token" which could be later traded to real one (e.g. 10 smalls for one regular). And with enough mentor tokens you would get titles, cosmetics and such things. Maybe you could convert them to some other currency, if you already have what you wanted.

Anyways, for players who are new in instances, it would be a relief if there would be clear non-fakeable indication that you are new in the instance, and it would be a huge relief that if you are accepted by the group as a potential player, they would be rewarded for their trust. Mercenaries already get their "shared" rewards when selling completions for gold, but how about those who don't want to go that way?

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@Cyninja.2954 said:While interesting, this would also allow raid seller to double dip. Once by getting payed, second by getting achievements associated with helping raid newcomers.This would ultimately lead to any titles gained or unique rewards potentially falling under scrutiny. Any type of mentoring system would have to be way more complex as to prevent such results.

That is absolutely true. Of course, one could hope that easing the people to take part of normal groups, raid selling would be not that profitable. But the truth is of course, that people trying to get in normal groups are different from people buying completions.

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@Draco.9480 said:you need some special system for that which requires some awkward coding and good funds. i personally prefer not.

For what? For adding shared rewards to instance achievements, or to prevent raid sellers to get them? For the first one, I really don't know, but thinking that e.g. T4 fractal completion rewards all the players, would it be difficult to add additional quest/event/task to reward players when there are newbies in the group? Not necessarily trivial, but not necessarily that hard either. For the second one, I think that I could accept that mercenaries would get these extra rewards, too. It would be really difficult to exclude fractal/raid selling from mentor rewards.

game is already rewarding. i've boxes on boxes of ascended and kitten. all i need is gold to convert to gems for mounts skins blabla.

Yes. I was thinking that if your group has two choices, looking for some experienced instance crawler or try with player new to instance, the group could be rewarded somehow if they are willing to support new players to start experiencing the content. It does not need to be anything worth of huge amounts of gold, but something so that people would not need to feel embarrassed if taken to runs as newbie. Personally I would like to reward people who trusted me, but sending plain old gold for rest of the group feels bit - mundane?

In larger picture, for some odd reason, players in this game are pretty much concentrating on their closed groups (their static raid group, their guild, etc). I have wondered what causes this difference to the previous game I played, but have not yet figured it out. I could vote anything that would make it more acceptable to voluntarily (unlike ranked) start working with people you don't know. For example: in the game I played previously, taking new people to highest tier instances was more a norm than an exception. Of course, we preferred people we knew already, and we preferred experienced players, but many times we tried those instances with some strangers in the group - if it was disasterous, we disbanded and regrouped. But still, we made lots of contacts to other people in the process. Maybe LFG is just working too good, and people are not that willing to give at least one try new people?

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You want to open Pandora's Box? I feel like teaching new people the ropes is reward enough, because once they learn you have another teammate who isn't a newbie anymore. It keeps the well of people full. If people keep excluding new players because they don't already know the content, eventually there will no longer be people doing the content who are "experienced fractal game masters". Everyone is new at some point, and its up to everyone to pay it forward.

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@"TokenG.7863" said:You want to open Pandora's Box? I feel like teaching new people the ropes is reward enough, because once they learn you have another teammate who isn't a newbie anymore. It keeps the well of people full. If people keep excluding new players because they don't already know the content, eventually there will no longer be people doing the content who are "experienced fractal game masters". Everyone is new at some point, and its up to everyone to pay it forward.

I fully agree with this, and I have seen great groups in other games to collapse because they have been too closed. Like someone said in this forum long time ago as an answer to totally different subject about PvP: "You are not bad, you are just new."

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I remember back in WoW when they added special loot rewards for players to queue up as Tanks and Healers. The result? Tons of players switched over to play crappy tanks and crappy healers, didn't care about anything other than getting the run over as quickly as possible in order to get their special loot box.

Yeah, no. The best part of GW2 is the fact there are people spending time helping other people for absolutely no other reason than they want to help people. Watching 3 Mesmers rotating portals to bring people (like me) up to a JP? Watching those same Mesmers jump down and use another portal to help players (like me) who fell off before reaching the chest? All that for only a "ty".

Yeah, you won't find that in WoW or any other MMO of which I am aware. Let GW2 remain what it is. If you start to incentivize altruism, it stops being altruistic.

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@TamX.1870 said:The reward should be enough to justify the possibly extra hassle, but small enough to prevent people to start calculating and abusing the reward.

I think achieving this balance may be impossible. The issue is, if you have a 10 person static, you only have to buy a new account once every 10 weeks in order to get the reward every week. If an entire group agreed to all purchase accounts when a sale was happening, I think you might see a lot of groups where every member takes a turn doing their full clear on a newb account each week, probably rotating members through the core power warrior role. Additionally the first time you clear a raid is extremely lucrative for the clearing account, doing a full clear on a completely uncleared account would be insane. There are many challenge motes that are so easy, a group could easily incorporate them into their weekly full clear.

This order of magnitude effect, along with the already large financial advantage to owning multiple accounts (daily log in is the most profitable farm in game) could definitely lead to the abuse your trying to avoid. Honestly, right now the personal reward of owning a 2nd account is already so great that it is quite common for raiders to own more than one account already. I think it would be difficult to add even more reward to buying more accounts and not seeing abuse.

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@"Turkeyspit.3965" said:I remember back in WoW when they added special loot rewards for players to queue up as Tanks and Healers. The result? Tons of players switched over to play crappy tanks and crappy healers, didn't care about anything other than getting the run over as quickly as possible in order to get their special loot box.

Yeah, no. The best part of GW2 is the fact there are people spending time helping other people for absolutely no other reason than they want to help people. Watching 3 Mesmers rotating portals to bring people (like me) up to a JP? Watching those same Mesmers jump down and use another portal to help players (like me) who fell off before reaching the chest? All that for only a "ty".

Yeah, you won't find that in WoW or any other MMO of which I am aware. Let GW2 remain what it is. If you start to incentivize altruism, it stops being altruistic.

They don't do it for 'ty' tho, for 'ty' a person can help for 10-29 minuts. They do it and expect a tiny tip. I for instance take 1 ecto/t6 on every daily JP for that mesmer( could be sending 10 silver but I dunno if they ar caped or no, so mailing bit loot works well) that stands there for 3-4 hours porting people like me.

I still wonder why this game is the most asocial mmo I have played

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