Especially considering the new and improved dungeon loot, many players will wish their friends could join them. Of course, their friends could just bring over their level 70s and rush them through, but for a certain kind of player, this is less interesting because it takes away all the real challenge and teamwork of the instance. They may be able to find PUGs at that level, but it likely won't be the same.
Douglas at the Elitist Jerks forums has been having this problem for a long time now. He and his friends very much want to play together, but have never been able to make their schedules work out. Before long, their characters inevitably level at different speeds and can no longer level up together. He says he longs for a "mentoring system" like City of Heroes has, where players of different levels can become one another's "sidekicks" and go to dungeons together as if they were at the same level. At first glance it seems like WoW could implement such a system too, to make something like a temporary downgrade or upgrade in ability power and gear quality so that friends could fight together across the level gap. But further discussion reveals some serious problems.
City of Heroes, apparently, doesn't have any loot -- character advancement has to do with more linear ability improvements that are easier to scale up and down. WoW, of course, has gear and loot and buffs and stats to confuzzle even the best players of more straightforward games. It's not as simple as "better" or "worse." The fact that less-experienced players so often find themselves all geared up in all the wrong ways demonstrates how very complex the system is -- at some point every WoW player needs to sit down and do the math or the research on his gear to decide which armor benefits him most at whatever task he wants to accomplish in the game. If reasonably intelligent people have to work to get the hang of this, then getting the computer to understand and modify these choices upwards or downwards seems doubly impossible. (The closest thing we have to this now is the "find an upgrade" function on the armory. Certainly this could work well in some characters, but for many others it would get things totally wrong. It's fine if a website gives a bunch of strange suggestions, but if the game mechanics mess up the stats it could break things on a whole new level.)
So, it looks like a mentoring system couldn't work out for us in WoW because of this gear complexity, but some posters on the Elitist Jerks forums found other ways to work around it. A few posters found that they could remove or change certain parts of one's gear for example, and with some classes, use lower spell rankings in order to simulate a lower level with a high-level character. For me that sounds like too much hassle to be fun, but it's certainly one way to approach the issue.
In the end I fear that, unless friends happen to have alts at around the same level (which actually isn't all that unlikely for some of the more prolific altaholics out there), they'll be spending most of their new leveling time by themselves or with strangers. Of course some of these strangers might become new friends, and that's always nice. But for old friends who want to keep overcoming challenges together, the only way will be to just switch back to their mains and let their alts get some rest.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-09-2007 @ 5:41PM
Drayna of Auchindoun said...
I don't have to worry.
I'm in Dude Where's My Shaman
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11-09-2007 @ 5:46PM
PeeWee said...
Alts is a fun way for me to relax, a room for myself. Sure, levelling alone means either PuG's (*shivers from the mere thought of it*) or simply skip them. Now I can still see a level of improvement even on my alts, and it's gonna be fun to explore the new quest hub as well!
@1
I feel your pain. Must be hard to QQ so much.
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11-09-2007 @ 5:57PM
Basic said...
I don't think mentoring would solve much... it might let you take your level 64 and help a level 30 finish a few quests and give you some experience for your trouble.
The core problem in grouping up to quest and level is there is too small a reward for helping people finish quests. If you could "virtually share" a quest with your group and give them the option of completing it again for say 30% of the original experience reward it would certainly help. This is far from a perfect solution, but if there were some kind of bonus it would help encourage more grouping up and help reconcile what happens when one person in a group moves ahead and finishes quests ahead of his partners.
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11-09-2007 @ 5:58PM
Mila said...
It's a shame that they're removing the outdoor elites in 2.3. Non-instanced grouping of two or three players to conquer a difficult quest was always a nice way for friends to hook up without the two to four hours required to run dedicated instances.
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11-09-2007 @ 6:08PM
Yosh said...
I'm leveling my first toon on Malfurion. It's often pretty lonely work (being a hunter doesn't help), but luckily I have RL friends who play on that server who I can chat with. The LFG channel is pretty empty for mid-level people as well. I hope the XP change means more people for me to group with and /wave at.
Still, I love the game :)
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11-09-2007 @ 6:14PM
Stig said...
What about a system where you take your current character to an instance, chose an option (similar to normal/heroic instance modes) and your character is replaced inside the instance with a pre-made character at appropriate level to the instance. So if I roll up with my 70 feral druid to help a friend through Uldaman, I chose the "Correct Level" option (or whatever they call it) and when I zone i'm no longer Stig, i'm Joebob, the level 44 feral druid, with level 44 feral gear. It wouldn't be too hard to come up with a standardized set of gear for lower level characters for the mid level instances. As soon as you leave the instance, you're back to your level whatever self and Joebob is gone forever.
Another alternative could be some sort of temporary premade system, where you pick a race/class/spec and level for the character. Once created, it is deleted after x amount of time, and it has restrictions on where it can be used, what it can do, etc. Guild Wars does something similar for PvP.
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11-09-2007 @ 8:00PM
Super Guest Man 9000 said...
Out of 9 characters I only have 2 that will benefit from the increased xp gain from 20-60, my other 7 60+s will just have to deal with the trials of outlands.
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11-09-2007 @ 8:05PM
Anteia said...
When I hauled my friends back to WoW, or sometimes to WoW for the first time, I level with them as much as I can on my alts...then I switch back to my main and help them there. True, you don't get to the experience the "OMg, we totally shouldn't have survived that!" thrill that you get sometimes, and thats' sad. But, if you're really friends with the person....just go help them with those lower dungeons so they don't have to beg for a group. Yes, they get a little less exp, but they're assured to get through the dungeon in a reasonable matter and probably not wipe. Which is always nice. I did Darkshire/Duskwood in a few hours one day with a friend, and could move on to a different zone with a bunch of rewards and the exp from getting all those quests done. I've also run friends through ZF and Sunken Temple and the like so they could have some nice blues to work with in their push to the portal at 58. Do I get anything out of it? Nah. Though I did get all of the leather of the fang set from wailing caverns for the heck of it on one run with a mail wearing friend who didn't need it and I thought it looked fun. But that's the purpose of it, isn't it? You're helping a friend out, and as friends, you should be able to have fun doing so just because they're friends. You're also making it a ton easier for them on those harder group quests when they don't have people around their level. So you don't get a tangible reward- so what? The sooner your friend gets higher up, the sooner you can tackle the level 70 instances with them and have fun in the challenge. :)
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11-10-2007 @ 12:26AM
Timothy Brown said...
Everquest 2 has mentoring and it's a gear based game.
When you mentor someone, it auto down-ranks your spells in addition to lowering the stats of you gear to the equivalent range. In addition to this, whoever you're mentoring gets a small boost in XP.
Mentoring in EQ2 was one of the best things about the game, WoW really needs to implement it.
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11-10-2007 @ 12:41AM
Raaj said...
@9
Precisely what I was going to say. I don't know if I'm actually happy with the system because if you have a group of 5 friends (group size is 6 in that game), they can all mentor down to your level to help powerlevel you, as you get a 5% XP bonus for each mentor you have.
Add to that the fact that someone mentoring down is roughly as powerful as a person 2 levels higher (mentoring to a level 40 character would essentially make you a twink or a very well-geared level 42 character) and you can see a huge system of potential powerleveling taking place.
I wouldn't mind seeing a mentoring system, but only if the person either gets no real bonus from having a mentor or the person mentoring is only marginally more powerful than a character that's really that level.
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11-10-2007 @ 10:59AM
TheMinority said...
The only mentor system that should be implemented should be one that teaches new players how to use the unique abilities to their class to perform specialized tasks.
Essentially, teach that damn noob huntard how to kite properly.
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