Of course that is shrubbale, that is abuse of seconds and multiplaying.

Farming proteges is not by making newbs and sneaking on as a multiplayer.

It is people who do intros to novices and say "So yeah you should pick me as your mentor"

Most novices don't realise any better and quickly accept, because their first impression is 'this person teaches me things"

This was a huge problem in Achaea. It is a problem in every IRE game I have played in, meaning all of them.

Really, Estarra, given your considerable time in IRE, I expected better of your knowledge of what goes on in the games.

My only real thought about this would be to make the mentoring bonus not last forever. I like the bound credits Idea, always thought It should be like that. I think the gaining free lessons is a bad Idea the same way Myrrh gum was a bad Idea. The only people it really hurts is the people who need mentors the most.

That doesn't make sense. Newbies getting a few extra lessons by learning from their mentor hurts newbies who need mentors?

Sorry if I didn't understand what you were saying--sheesh! When you said farming novices, it sounded to me as though you meant creating novices for some sort of seconds abuse (which we've seen in the mentoring process in the past for the credits). Anyway, I hope people will police the poor novices from being taken under the wings of those who do so purely for opportunistic reasons. We'll try to think of ways to address that specific issue.

Again, I apologize that I didn't understand what you meant by farming novices and that my knowledge didn't meet your expectations.

Alright, when I first read the post I was thinking... "Oh no this is gonna be insane if we can push past Trans", but now after Estarra has kindly explained that it won't make that big a difference, I am ok with that. These additions for mentoring is amazing. It encourages for people to actually build relationships with their proteges for the hunting and etc. This seems to be an even better way to catch farmers if the admins are as diligent as they say they are going to be. No this doesn't come me "farming" or hordeing newbies from the Portal. I have had two proteges and one had to reject me because of RP reasons.

You can't gift people with actual credits, but you can send them an artifact gift. Maybe payback your novice with some artifact pipes or something if you can't think of buying anything for yourself.

Hey that's right! You can buy artifacts for other people! I'd forgotten about that.

You can only send gift artifacts with unbound credits, so bound credits are useless for artifact gifting.

HELP ARTIFACTS

Gift artifacts are purchased with unbound credits.


I do find this a bit..... drastic, but as Estarra said earlier it is an IRE decision.
Also if you have all the stuff you want with credits and have no idea what to do with them...maybe start customizing stuff? There are endless possibilities.

Wow, that's amazingly lame. You can only buy stuff for yourself with bound...and for others unbound...This just blows my mind. What are you admin thinking with these conflicting rules

Oh. Well, they should change that and make gift artifacts buyable with bound credits too.

the point of bound credits is that htey are BOUND to you

I think you're all way overreacting. After spending roughly 24,000 credits on skills, artifacts, and other miscellaneous things, I can honestly say that if you run out of ways to spend your bound credits, you're not trying hard enough!

Sheesh.

you can't run out of things to want. you can always customize items, buy pets, and the like

Nerf You.

*checks to see if it's April*

Nope.... Is there a new September Fool's Day that I wasn't alerted to? Because I really hope this is a joke.

Seriously though, novices are going to want to maximize the total number of lessons they can learn. They get 5% bonus lessons by learning just from their mentor, but what if, as is often the case, the mentor goes on vacation/back to school/some other unfortunate circumstance? Then this novice loses their 5% bonus, while everyone else who has login times that match perfectly with their mentors get an edge. I think I've ranted about edges before, and how even slight ones make a huge difference. Also, what about all us old players? Can I get a retroactive 5% bonus on all lessons learned? Plz?

I'm all for being able to batch 20 at a time, that's a great change. The bound credits thing is probably pretty good too, and even if it's not, I don't throw credits around to alts anyways. The 5% grouping bonus, if it doesn't stack, is also a great idea to encourage mentors to go do stuff with their munchkins.

Skills going over trans? Seriously? Why? This seems like a terrible terrible idea, if only for the aforementioned edge reasons. There are already enough incentives for mentors to hang out with their proteges (alerts, xp bonus, prospect of credits). We don't need this, too. It's going to result in people forcing themselves on novices saying OHAI I MENTOR YOU NOW, LRN UR LESSUNZ. They can learn from the denizens, that's what said denizens are there for, and we don't need incentives for mentors to scream at their proteges.



I dunno, I'm getting there. Mostly 'cause I don't feel like making customizations, getting a pet, or whatever.

Well, me might as well start boosting damage attacks with the assumption that resilience/magic are going to be 30% protection (or whatever it is with maxed out mentor lessons) instead of 25%, because that's what people are going to strive for. The same goes for skills with similar lesson based effects, and the clearest example is tracking. Remember all the complaints by trackers of how they had to trans not only tracking, but environment too? Apparently, now they also have to mentor x amount of tracker newbies in order to disarm the traps of people who have maxed out. I can't imagine this will turn out too well for the newbies either:

Unwitting Protege says, "Everyone says totems/rituals is the better choice if I'm not sure what I want to do. Sound like a good idea?"

Tracker mentor, "Nonsense, they don't know what they're missing. Pick hunting and let's start your learning!"

EDIT: Please remove the above trans bonus. It is going to mess things up (much like truefavours already do, as you pointed out), and there is already enough incentive for proteges to learn from mentors because of the lesson bonus the protege gets. Any half-decent mentor will want to ensure his protege gets this bonus, even if it is of no direct benefit to himself.

Is that not the point of a mentor to be there for you? Thats why you talk with the person to know they are there for you.


We take the position of mentor seriously, and if your mentor is not performinghis duties, then you should report him or her to a God.

I'm sure this should start being enforced even more, especially with what has been said thus far.



This "edge" is barely anything and has a cap. I doubt the difference will be that large, especially with how much work must be put into it. You already go over Trans with a favor so whats it matter?

Favours wear off, there are some skills that having above trans in means that anyone below will be unable/extremely difficult to counter.

i.e illusions and traps.

It was common knowledge to anyone in a trapping skillset in IRE games that if you wanted your traps to be immune to disarm get a favour, because only people with above trans would be able to disarm them then.

I agree 100% with this, but the thing is, most novices don't take the time to go around and find someone who actually will be a good mentor. I sure didn't, and got royally shafted in terms of having someone around to ask questions of, talk to, RP with, whatever. Since guild advancement usually says "get a mentor" and people want to advance as quickly as possible, they just go attack someone who might be good and then take them as a mentor and that's that.


A favor isn't permanent. Also, as Vathael showed in his post regarding the huge numbers of ways he has to boost his damage, adding even 5% to that can get rather large. Tiny edge + tiny edge (... .... x100) = freaking huge whomping stomping edge.