I know we already have a newbie mentoring thread, but I thought it might be cool to take it a step further. My idea is this: whenever someone joins Sylestia they are automatically assigned a "mentor" to help them with any questions/problems they come across. The mentor has to have signed up to be a mentor, and they have to have had an ACTIVE account for a certain amount of time (6 months, a year, etc). This is so a newbie doesn't get paired with someone who joined and never did anything and forgot about it. The mentor should also be a fairly active player (on at least 3 out of 7 days per week). With the "mentoring" automatically assigned, the players will get a chance to make a new friend or two, and the newer Sylestians will get help with stuff they need help with.

This wouldn't really work because the number of people willing to do that, and being as active as you want them to be, wouldn't in any way compare to the number of newbies funneling into the site during a fest.

During a fest, when the most people seem to end up joining from what i've seen, many of the people who might have signed up would already be busier than they are normally to begin with, and in many cases, already have their hands full helping people in Region chat. The forums and region chat are honestly going to get them help much faster than something like this generally.

I've been on a couple of games where they did this, and to be honest I was distinctly underwhelmed by the whole process. Usually the "mentor" gets some kind of perk for doing it, and way too many sign up just for the perk, then after a couple of "hello" messages, pretty much drop everything. They rarely help all that much, and all too often, it seems pushy to me.

Truthfully, once you find the general chat, you can get all the information you need just by asking there. And from multiple perspectives if there are differences of opinion in how to answer, lol. I think making it easier to find the chat bar, or some kind of newbie pop-up showing new users where it is would make more sense.

I don't see this as something we really need.. between the chat and various forums it's pretty easy to find an answer for any question.