Suggestions for a “mentor incentive program” for high-end PVE content

[CallMeSam.6507]

Guild Wars 2 has always been the MMO with a super friendly community; people would step up to lead and help newer players for no personal gain. I would like to suggest a reward system that would:
-give newer players mentorship into high-end PVE content
-give monetary incentives to helpful veteran players
-further enhance the helpful community we already have
-fit into the existing LFG system with minimal development

 

Players can form and join a special type of party/squad called, say, a “mentorship” (labelled with a special icon in LFG). Two groups of players can join and, for simplicity, we’ll call them “newbies” and “mentors.” Criteria can be something like less than 5 games played on a raid wing for newbies, and more than 30 for a mentor. Each mentorship is limited to 1-2 mentors.

 

The mentors are tasked with leading and explaining the dungeon/fractal/strike/raid to the newbies in the group. After the instance is cleared, each newbie is prompted to anonymously rate the mentors 1 to 5 stars, and the mentors would receive 1 gold per star for their efforts. This should give mentors incentive to help out, while avoiding toxic behaviors.

 

Thoughts?

[shrew.3059]

In principle, I like the idea. The problem with systems like this, is that a lot of thought has to be put into how the system could be “gamed” or manipulated:

 

1. If the action does not require incentives, no system is really needed, as the players who want to participate will do so on their own. You can remove barriers, or make the action easier, but that’s about it.

 

2. If incentives are required and the incentives are poor, few will participate.

 

3. If incentives are required and the incentives are good, players will find a way to maximise their rewards while minimising their effort, which can often go against the design of the system unless steps have been taken to account for this.

[yoni.7015]

I actually don’t like this idea. I think rating other people is always a difficult thing and can lead to troublesome behavior. 
I would argue that guilds are the right environment for new players to learn something in the game. And there already are a lit of raid training guilds. So I don’t think your proposal is necessary. 

[AgentMoore.9453]

Any formal system would be abused; the current system of tipping commanders, mentors, and helpful party members is already in place and rewards genuine shows of assistance and kindness. Additionally, people who persistently tag up and help others already attain reputation within their server - for better or worse.

[Omega.6801]

No.

[Parasite.5389]

TL;DR

I want a free gold machine

[Lyssia.4637]

Perhaps if it were applied to guilds, instead, to encourage more training guilds?

 

Edit: It wouldn't take care of all the problems, but if a guild was actually focused on helping people, they would presumably kick people trying to take advantage of the system.

Edited August 14, 2021 by Lyssia.4637

[Dawdler.8521]

Yeah this is literally a free gold dispenser for hardcore veteran organized guilds leading their "noob" members through content.

 

5 stars, always.

 

"No personal gain".

Edited August 14, 2021 by Dawdler.8521

[Katary.7096]

5 hours ago, CallMeSam.6507 said:

After the instance is cleared,

What happens if the instance isn't cleared because the group disbanded after 45min of wiping? How would the system handle that scenario?

[Naqam a.6521]

Rather than gold , let's give them faster accessibility in the Raid or any other content Legendary gear  .

They will behave as bridges  among the community , where they will play once per week with the Pros and once per week with the casuals (give quadruplet LI's) , for faster unlocks .

 

Pros don't have enough time , that why they love the 1-week Raids .

While casuals are shy and don't know tactics .

 

Edit : Mentor or anyone else push a button that creates a default message in LFG Ieveryone is welcomed . The message will be shown to others firstly that don't have LI or don't have the "i haven't done for 2weeks  an Raid "( internal debuff) and the procced to people who haven;t done it for the last 9 days (tier list) .

Edit2:

Suppress the "manual" LFG groups (LF Berseker -150 LI , or selling Run) for 45 min after you logged into the game , or checked LFG for the first time .

And a button to opt out of this mechanic immediately .

 

Or the "community" can suppress any LFG they think is  harmful , which will put them automatically in the "casual  system" (they can see only the "everyone is welcomed" LFG) for 1 month , while the other part of the community can opt out of this false accusation with a button .

 

Edited August 14, 2021 by Naqam a.6521

[Sobx.1758]

Easly abusable and -probably more importantly- people are already helping newer players without having a gold coin hanging on a stick in front of their faces.

[ASP.8093]

The fastest way to make money under this system is for for 2-3 players to carry everyone else in a relatively easy Strike or Fractal with zero teaching involved.

[Chichimec.9364]

6 hours ago, yoni.7015 said:

I actually don’t like this idea. I think rating other people is always a difficult thing and can lead to troublesome behavior. 
I would argue that guilds are the right environment for new players to learn something in the game. And there already are a lit of raid training guilds. So I don’t think your proposal is necessary. 

This. My most active guild does raid, fractal, pvp, wvw, and dungeon training as well as leading hp and bounty trains. It is by no means the only guild to do so. I've seen guilds advertising ingame and on the forum that they are noob friendly and will provide training in the various game modes. So why do we need to set up an easily abused payment system for something the community already freely provides?

[Zephire.8049]

I'm all for adding incentives for vets who mentor, but not when it's a monetary/gold reward. Have it be a title with no AP or something.

 

Others have brought up how your suggestion would add a ton of new gold into the game plus how rating 5 stars would be required (even if it's anonymous, if it's a raid you can easily write down account names and blacklist the whole lot if the gold you get isn't divisible by 5), but there's also the question of whether or not F2P accounts will count.

 

If they do, people will create new ones constantly so their main account can get a bunch of free gold. If they don't count, that means genuine F2P players will be skipped over in favour of someone who will get the mentor gold if the mentor is motivated more by gold than helping others.

 

There's just a lot of things that need to be considered as something like this would have a huge impact on multiple facets of the game. There's also the question one needs to ask of whether or not someone who could have been helping newbies all along but only does so when they get a benefit should be helping newbies at all. All it takes is one person to react horribly to a newbie and the entire system (and possibly game) could be branded as hostile to newbies as a whole.

 

An alternative to this could be overhauling the LFG and also adding an icon that new players can click that will take them directly to the LFG page for newbies to find a person/party/squad/guild to help them out. Facilitates connections better than the current system (and in addition to the current system) and doesn't inject gold or otherwise encourage players to abuse it for personal gain.

[mungozen.2379]

Isn’t the incentive for helping other players is that you help grow the community of players you get to play with? 
 

helping players learn metas, learn events, learn the tools and the ins and outs of the game helps entrench them to GW2 and hopefully they start sharing and growing the community as well.  
 

The more players doing this, the more players in game doing whatever is is players are doing in game. 

[Shadowmoon.7986]

Imagine a raid community week where you get extra box of goods for having someone on your team first time clear a raid encounter. I would enjoy it alot more than the world boss event we keep getting over and over again. 

[Poormany.4507]

Hard no from me - This would be abused way too easily as others have mentioned, most likely by players making squads solely for getting profits and not so much helping anyone if the rewards are worth doing so, or just not using it if the rewards aren't.

 

I would much rather they add more/better new player guides/tutorials into the game (breakbars, skill combos, dynamic AoE dodging, etc.), as those seem to be very lacking atm and would be more meaningful in the long term than the suggested incentive system.

[Embered.5089]

As someone who helps newbs all the time, I would have to say no.

Even for something simple, it wouldn't work. And simple things don't need it. For example, daily jp mesmer ports. People tip us if they feel like it. Some of us operate for the tips and some of us genuinely want to help people. It's easy to mail a commander or mentor; nothing else needs to be implemented for this. However, sometimes people are still salty. Sometimes, all of us mesmers are on cooldown and then some inconsiderate person starts shouting at us to "do our job". Those people would have no problem giving us bad ratings even if we were doing our best. Also, people tend to only give ratings if they're left with a strong impression. This means that, for something that's usually done well and done often, more of the ratings will come from unsatisfied people. It's similar to being a maid or housewife; your work goes unnoticed until something goes wrong.

 

As for more complicated things, it could easily go the wrong way. Let's take a famous example, Zander's HP Trains. Zander is incredibly efficient, and as such he does not repeat HPs or wait for anyone. People who are used to his trains appreciate this, but first-timers may get frustrated when they start to fall behind. Someone who is currently highly respected could suddenly meet his demise, not because he did a bad job mentoring but because the newbs couldn't keep up with his mentoring. There are plenty of others who do HP trains too, and I myself would give all of them bad ratings because I'm so used to Zander's efficiency. It really bugs me when the commander stops to farm flax in the middle of an HP train, and then dares to ask for tips while Zander doesn't even accept tips (he tells you to tip his helpers instead). Going off from this, people will start "mentoring" just for the monetary incentives and do a bad job. Newbies who have never seen better might rate them well and tip them well anyway because they don't know better, which only reinforces bad mentoring.

 

Then there's people who might rate people badly for inappropriate reasons. For example, once when I was offering help to newbs in starter zones, a vet pretended to be a newb and asked me a question that a newb would never ask. When I failed to answer sufficiently, he then told me that I'm not qualified to help anyone. Gee, I didn't know that I had to qualify to help people out of the goodness of my heart. And he judged me based on his own ideas of what my mentoring should be like, rather than the mentorship that I had advertised. I specifically said that I can only help newbs with newb stuff, yet he judged me based on vet standards.

 

If people want to mentor people for any reason, they will do it without the monetary incentive or rating system. Or at least, the ones who wanted more tips will look for another way to extort people. We don't want to add more ways to extort people or give people reason to mentor badly and for personal gain. If you want to learn how to raid, I suggest joining the Discord server GW2 Raid Academy. They are wonderful. For anything else, a good guild tends to do the trick.