Currently, as an incentive to teachers to help out novices and to encourage people to learn from guildmembers instead of mobs, there exists a (minimal) lesson bonus to teachers...I don't really know for sure but an Achaean told me it was 1.5 lessons gained per 100 taught. That is, teach 100 lessons of discipline and you'll have learnt 1.5 in it. This does in fact exist here, because Vix managed to push me from 99% of virtuoso resilience to 0% fabled by learning from inept. (I didn't even get a message, heh, but when I checked later it'd gone up.)

Hardly anyone even knows it exists, and those that do don't care. This is because 1) The lesson benefit is absolutely TINY and 2) Because you only get the lessons learnt as if it were in the skill being learnt. This means that if you're trans guild skills and teach 100 guild novices, you'll never see any benefit because most of the lessons go into Totems and Nature, for example.

This obviously makes it a crap incentive. Therefore I suggest that if the lesson bonus is not simply raised (which is fair enough), the lessons "earned" by the teacher should go into their main pool so they can spend it on skills they -don't- already have finished.

I agree, but they have to program something for real novices who can forget their skills over and over to relearn things. This case might be abused.
Its very minimal, yes but still. I dont know, you guys figure it out. Im too tired

I think the latter option is a very good idea.

You can already do this to farm lessons for people who aren't trans guildskills, if that's your goal...it'd just take several RL days of being AFK to have any actual benefit.

To me, the current lesson bonus seems a bit like when a shop says you can buy something for less than £50, and it costs £49.99. The concept sounds great, but the actual result is a so small it's pathetic. This definitely needs ot be changed, and I think Shiri's ideas are good ways to implement it. Seriously, if you have to learn from inept to get just 1% at virtuoso, that's just not right.

I don't think this will necessarily give people incentive to actually teach novices, only to have them learn from them in order to get that lesson bonus. To be honest I never really care/think about the lesson bonus, and I think that making it earn you more general lessons will only lead people to offer to teach who just want the novice to learn from them and don't care about actually helping them.

(A problem I've seen with people mentoring people as well)

Also, I'm interested to know how much you would think the lesson bonus would need to be increased by?

I have to agree with Veo. *naruto old-man face nod*

Having novices learn from you also involves being in a room and answering questions the novices may have about the skill. This is generally known as "teaching novices".

My opinion is, when you teach novices, it helps them understand the game better and ultimately influences them to stick around. If you have a novice who wasn't taught and ended up wondering around without a clue, that novice is more likely to leave. Them being taught helps the game as a whole by bringing in more players...who may end up buying credits.

Now, I don't think that gaining lessons from teaching should be abused. We had a certain person do that in Achaea. I think she actually transed her class skills doing so. Which caused them to change how the lesson gain worked.

If something could be worked out to avoid abuse AND encourage people to help novices more, that would be ideal.

I think a lot of the responsibility of making sure newbies are correctly taught lies on the guild leaders (in choosing undersecretaries/secretaries, making sure people are taught, offering incentives for teaching and specifying what they should be taught) and perhaps the guild's patron as well.

Yeah, you covered that. Sorry.

While a nice gesture, that isn't the only reason you should teach someone. Higher teaching bonus can be abused. Very, very easily.

It would take far too long to hog all the novices of your guild and teach them until you trans'd a skill.

It makes RP sense that should you teach someone in a skill, you'd learn a little more about it yourself. Pooling the lessons would be useful (amazingly so), but I'm more or less aiming towards sense in RP than convenience. (Please no flame. )

You would be surprised how many people would suddenly be willing to let novices learn from them while they just sit around at the nexus, enchant, read things, etc. Whether this would be a good or bad thing in terms of introducing someone to the game would depend on the person and how well a guild keeps track of how people are teaching and who is teaching.

I agree that having the lessons pool together as general lessons would make absolutely no sense. How would teaching Geomancy help me learn Environment, for example (unless you wish to argue that by teaching you're also learning how to learn, but...just no).

I would perhaps agree with an increase in the lessons you earn in that skill you are teaching for teaching novices who are under level 21 or something, because then that could potentially be used as incentive for people to teach actual novices.

I agree with this, it's a good idea. However, I just don't think people would be overexcited if the rates went up from 100 novices - 1.5 lessons to, say, 100 novices - 10 lessons. The bonus is still minuscule, and I just don't think that people would give up their normal lives to teach a novice who will give them an 0.1 bonus in that skill, just for the sake of the bonus.

But also, if it's raised to, say, 100 - 50 (one novice, half a lesson), it would just be too abusable. Half a lesson isn't much, but when you teach novices on a regular basis it can get you nice boosts.

I don't know, I guess I just think that it depends on the person. Some people don't give a rabbit's tail about the lesson bonus, partly because it's negligible, but largely because they enjoy teaching young people and introducing them into Lusternia - either to make Lusternia overall a better, bigger place, or to help the individual novice him/herself. And it is my belief that these kinds of people would still continue teaching just for the pleasure of it even if the rates went up to 1 novice: 1 lesson.

Well, that's my two coins of thought.

You're not getting a lesson bonus per novice, your getting a lesson bonus per lesson that the novice learns from you.

Has part of this been implemented? I seem to have 5 more lessons than I did earlier...I don't remember teaching much, but I don't remember doing anything else that would have gotten me lessons anyway. I hate my crap memory.

Looks like you leveled and didn't realize it!

Oh wait. I forgot about the extra lessons on levelling thing, it's been ages since I levelled. Sorry!

On one hand, we don't want people who are not interested in teaching to do so just because of the teaching bonus, but we also want to manage to apprieciate the people who are passionate enough about teaching so that hopefully they don't burnout.

Its going to be hard to do both at once, without swinging from one end to the other. That is, teacher-burnout versus bonus-abuse.

Actually, I don't see any huge problem with encouraging people to teach only for the lesson bonus, so long as it's small enough to be essentially unabusable. Learning from someone while they enchant/etc. is still much better than learning from an NPC. At the very least, the novice has the opportunity to observe how some things work and ask questions. I don't know of anyone who would outright ignore a novice who asked them questions about skills they were learning.

Personally I think that even bad teachers are better than no teachers. The problem with the current system is that it encourages those with very low skill levels in guild skills to teach others, since they see the most real benefit. This leads to some incorrect information and bad advice being passed on, since the teachers often don't understand the skills themselves. There are a lot of guilds that have implemented training programs themselves to try to work around this, but they tend to be short on willing teachers.

I never really noticed this either. I didn't know it existed. But I'm in favour of more lessons being gained from it but slightl different reasons. There are almost 2 types of people on Lusternia. Those who pump themselves up on credits brought OOCly, and the ones who are slugging it along with bound credits. It's a bit unbalanced. Perhaps this will help shift that. Also, it should go into the lesson pools so you can use it for what you want. But the other way is good too.