Astro Galaxy - a realistic space exploration game

Mentoring in left menu, after Account and before Forum

How it works:

The mentors: Captains above 150k ship power can register as a mentor.

A mentors database is created with a ranking, mentor rating (how many graduates / partial grads at each step), number of disciples.
-> The mentor can open/close incoming disciple requests, so he doesn't get swamped.
-> The mentor has to be active, if he does not login for a week, he loses his disciples to other mentors and incoming disciple request is closed for him.


The disciples are:

When a new player/captain joins AG:
-> a welcome message is sent from SirEmi / AG Support (already implemented)

-> the mentor database is checked, and up to 5 mentor requests are sent to up to 5 random mentors. The first mentor to accept the incoming disciple, gets him. Upon accepting, the disciple is informed of his new mentor and how to communicate with him via an automatic ingame message at the time of the accept from the mentor. At this point the disciple will respond either via ingame message directly to the mentor, or by posting in the mentor / disciple board, in with case the mentor gets a notification similar to the new message blink in the left menu "Mentoring (1)"

-> any captain below 150k ship power can request to be a disciple.

-> the disciple graduation road is as follows: (SEA grad, 50k ship power mark, 150k ship power mark). Each step when completed is marked in the record of each captain. Once completed, there can be no more reward, although the disciple can go below 150k ship power again, and get other mentors. The mentors will see if the disciple has already completed the discipleship in the message they get to accept / reject the new disciple like this:

BEGIN MESSAGE:

A new disciple

Captain #NAME is requesting to be your disciple.

Record: SEA Grad (yes), 50,000 ship power (yes), 150,000 ship power (no)
Captain ship power: 123,457

Do you accept this assignment as a mentor?
[Accept] / [Reject]

END MESSAGE


The mentor can:
-> Remove a disciple, in witch case disciple will be informed by auto-message, and a new mentor request will be sent to 5 other mentors, excluding the old mentor. Maybe someone else wants him :) The mentor/disciple message board will be transferred to the new mentor as well, so he knows where to pick up.

The disciple can:
-> Choose another mentor, same stuff happens as when the mentor removes the disciple.
-> Abandon discipleship. Disciple is removed from the mentorship and he has to manually request to be a disciple, at witch point he will undergo the random mentor assignment again.
-> the disciple can manually request a new mentor once every 24 hours.


For each disciple, a discussion board is provided, similar to the corp board and the mentor and disciple can open a chat screen similar to the ship to ship hailing. The mentor to disciple discussion board is mainly for Q&A, and like corp board messages older then 14 days will be deleted.


Mentor incentives:
- If the disciple graduates the SEA course, the mentor gets 50 QP (or a rare module / diff type / diff marks)
- If disciple gets to 50k ship power, mentor gets 50 QP (or a rare module / diff type / diff marks)
- If disciple gets to 150k ship power, mentor gets 50 QP (or a rare module / diff type / diff marks)

I know getting new active player is necessary to maintain this game, but this feature is easily abused.
It's easy, i create a new account on an internet cafe, i use the account to request my real acc. to become a mentor. I open my smartphone and accept it. Because i am the leader of a corp, i just need to assign a corp ship with 150k power to the new account
Alakazam! 100 QP on my hand!

This feature is dangerous, please don't create this feature. It will better if you introduce Alien sooner, it will 'force' us to be active

Once again, I very dislike this idea.

It won't be like that. If you read carefully you will see the mentor is selected at random from the mentors database.
The disciple can not select a specific mentor, he can request a mentor once per day / 24 hours or AG requests it automatically for him when he joins the game.

Then, 5 or maybe 3 requests are sent to 5 or 3 random mentors from the database. The chances a request gets to a multi-account is slim, and all accounts are monitored against that kind of abuse. The mentor system will be carefully monitored to ensure a friendly newbie experience and encourage new players to socialize and join an active corporation.

Also, for counting the requirements to achieve each disciple goal, only personal ship power is used, no corp ships.

The goal may also shift to:
SEA grad 30 QP,
3 ship licenses (10 QP),
3 station licenses (5 QP),
7 ship licenses (20 QP),
7 station licenses (10 QP),
10 ship licenses (50 QP),
10 station licenses (25 QP),


I really think we can have an enjoyable mentor / disciple system this way that will benefit both mentor and disciple, while keeping it free of abuse.

This project is just a layout and I haven't decided on where it will go into the priority list yet.

Hmm...
So new player can only request random mentor?
That sounds good. But i hope aliens come first before this.

They are coming!  :wow:  :))

I like this idea. You can count me in lol

me too...

Me too ;)

Sorry to revive this old post, but I was just curious. Is this still a potential project and is any work currently being done on it?

I have no idea.  It is one I still would like to see added in though.

I don't think so. But if you have questions, just post it on our corp board. I will answer it. :)

Yeah this is still a potential project.

In terms of growing the game, i think this would be very useful.  As someone who only recently reactivated their account, it is a bit difficult to get to know and start talking to anyone in game.  Changing this and giving people someone to talk to would be great for both mentor and student.

It probably would convince more people so stick it through the tutorial as well.  If they have someone telling them that jump times will get better etc.

a better mentoring and social system (including public viewing in game corp webpages) will help stop all those 1 man corps out there who have the mentality, "if i build it, they will come" They wont.
It will be good to have a post sol academy mentor system (or even a mentor through academy), as well as a way for new members to look at the make up of established corporations and their various stances, team make up and direction/goals.

I think that is a great idea. You could even send like, weekly newsletters to Corp leaders letting them know of recent graduates from the academy so that they can try to recruit.

This still needs to be made...

Yeah, sounds like something tailor-made for you Rostin. You've been a fabulous mentor for me anyway.  :)

Oh shucks...  :6:

Raptor, you made him blush...

There are many of us who would make good mentors. Unfortunately right now it is hard to find new players. Not all of us stalk Earth and I suspect some may have alts in Sol corp to keep an eye out for newbies. lol

*pokes SirEmi to get started on this*

This is definitely a good idea. It has been a long time since I started but I vaguely remember that back when I started I played for like a week or two before I heard from a single person that wasn't a noob in Sol corp like myself, granted I registered for the forums here quickly so I knew there were active players in the game but if a person isn't really into forums they might play for a few days and have no idea that anybody else even plays the game. A feature like this that immediately establishes a line of communication between someone who actually knows what they are doing and a new player would solve that problem pretty quickly.

Also if I might suggest a change to the milestones, I don't think it is a really good idea to have something like getting your 10th station license is a very good milestone. First of all getting up to 10 ship or station licenses is quite expensive and I would argue that anyone with even 6 or 7 ship licenses isn't really a new player in need of too much guidance at that point (in my opinion anyway, I suppose everyone is different). Certainly getting up to 3 ship licenses wouldn't be a bad milestone but you start getting over that and you should have a good idea of what you are doing considering how much they cost. Also I don't think station licenses should be a milestone at all, my main reason being if you take a look at the top rankings half of the players there don't even have a single station. It's not like it's a bad idea to have a station but for many of us I would say it's just something else we have to defend only it can't move to avoid attacks and honestly they aren't even necessary depending on how you want to play.

I would like to see some different milestones, for example if you enabled stat tracking in this game then completing 10 SOS or 10 COM missions could be a good early-mid milestone. The Academy has you do one of each as I recal but certainly don't do an amazing job of explaining everything about them and although someone can tell you about them and how you should aproach them there is nothing like first hand experience.

I also think that perhaps the QP amounts you mentioned earlier seem a little high to me. QP's aren't exactly hard to come by once you understand the game and get your economy going but considering anyone with a ship power of over 150k could apply to be a mentor I would imagine there will be a lot of people applying to be a mentor as soon as they hit 150k power simply to try and get what they would consider really easy QP or even free QP. Those people might not necessarily be the best people to try and explain the in's and out's of the game. I myself am up over 500k power and I've been around for a fair bit (something like 3 or 4 months if you take out my 9 month abscense) and I'm still learning things about the game here and there. I would say maybe lower the QP amounts to make it less appealing to those who aren't necessarily qualified to give new players a detailed and smooth explaination of the game or raise the requirements to weed out those individuals.

I might also suggest adding a requirement that anyone applying to be a mentor have an account that is at least a month or two old. I mean if you really know what you are doing and are active you could probably get up to 150k power in two weeks or something like that but that doesn't really mean you know about what good strategies are for your economy or for combat later on. That isn't to say that people at 150k power don't know what they are doing, I'm not saying that at all so hopefully nobody reading this gets offended by that I'm just saying that you can build up power pretty easily if that is how you want to play the game (being combat oriented).

Also what about new players who end up quitting? I think it would be a good idea if any new player is inactive for say... 30 days that they get kicked from disciple status. That way if someone isn't active and their mentor decides to drop them you don't get this floating population of new players that haven't played in 30 days or more just constantly getting re-assigned to a new random mentor.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I myself managed to hit 200k power thanks to gifted modules. So anybody who joins SSS or some other big corporation can become a mentor within a few days, even if they haven't understood the game properly yet. I mean, I'm already 200k power but I often make mistakes (like installing just the WHG and forgetting the FTL Drive, and then only realized I wasted so much fuel on a trip to Tau Ceti) I suggest maybe you could make mentor-wannabes take a sort of quiz with some randomly-generated questions to ensure they understand the game properly. Although I'm pretty sure within months some players will have collected a whole databank of all the possible questions, and cheaters could refer to the databank.

I question the need for mentors on a game-wide basis. As a noob, (just over a month in), I find that being in a good corporation I receive all the mentoring I need. I recently invited my son into the game, and into the Corp.
Any player worth his salt will check the forums, so if the major Corps renew their recruitment posts there should be no problem retaining serious new players. Those players should receive their mentoring from within the Corps.

"HERE'S THE TRUTH"
AG is like an old,old car of his... it runs good,sounds good,and even may look good but there can always be improvement done to make others to look twice at it!!!
SirEmi ur baby need a spit shining !!! :pokey:
 :greatsaiyaman:

Right mentoring right after Sol tutorials

But i think Sir Emi is or was looking for game devs for AG, whom will spend time and a bit of money for it's improvement ya know what i mean $investors$

OR whoever knows what SirEmi is up to rignf now kindly spit it out. Is he making Android/iOs version of AG? Or something similar?