Idea: Mentoring

[Angelo]

I know Sega of Japan will most likely never take our suggestions into consideration, and will sure as hell never see them on this board, but I thought of an idea I'd like.

I don't know if anyone remembers the mentoring/sidekicking system from City of Heroes, but it was pretty awesome.

Basically it would work like this:

-You temporarily downgrade your level to a level of your choosing.
(example: You're a level 40 and you set your level to 20)

-In this mode you gain no exp but would gain a huge boost in meseta and rare drops.

-You keep all the skills from your skill tree, but your stats are reduced to the level you chose.

-If a situation gets ugly, you can switch off this system and take care of business, you are a 'mentor' afterall.

In a game like this where leveling and cooperation with friends is the backbone... sometimes it's very hard for your level to be on the same page with all of your friends.

Something like this would make it so that you can party with your friends, and also gain some benefit for doing so.

[soulpimpwizzurd]

would be an interesting system but probably not implemented if it effected drop rates.

mainly because rare hunting is the biggest time sink/reason people play phantasy star games (i think)

if suddenly rare hunting gained a significant drop boost from this mentoring system players would be spending less time on pso2, leading to ultimately less sales (theoretically).

if it just increased meseta rates by like 300% though it'd be good imo. or gave you fun points or something. i think fun points is a better idea.

[kdrakari]

It should give you FUN points and require making a specific mentor-mentee link with a person, then only be in effect when in a party with that person.

But that's just my opinion, as long as it doesn't make it too easy to get rare things it won't ruin the game.

[Zorafim]

I think just going down to a friend's level is good enough. One things I really dislike about online RPGs is that the main draw of the game, which is playing with your friends, is something you can't do! If I'm capped, and a friend joins the game fresh, I have to make a new character to play with him. Mentors let you play with your friend without you destroying everything you breath on. And I think that's enough of a reward.

[Angelo]

It should give you FUN points and require making a specific mentor-mentee link with a person, then only be in effect when in a party with that person.

But that's just my opinion, as long as it doesn't make it too easy to get rare things it won't ruin the game.

I actually totally forgot about FUN points.

They're not sitting well with me right now because I wasted all of them trying to get a disc of World With Me.

:(...

but I agree, more FUN points in exchange for EXP would be ideal.

[Taitu]

I really don't see a need for a mentor system in PSO2. Unlike other MMO's which go out of their way to prevent power leveling by reducing the rewards for fighting monsters when you are in a group with someone of significantly higher or lower level than yourself, PSO infact changes nothing about the rewards despite group composition.

Perhaps the reward of running a lower level area with your friends is not quite appealing; however, the game doesn't discourage you from playing with them. Furthermore there is nothing stopping you from taking your lower level friends into a higher level field which would be beneficial to all involved assuming your friends can keep themselves alive long enough to reap the rewards.

[Tetsaru]

OP's idea reminds me of FF11's Level Sync system. It basically allowed higher-level character who weren't capped to to play alongside lower-level characters and still get experience, from what I remember. I thought it was a brilliant system, not sure why they didn't add it in FF14... but then again, it's ridiculously easy to level in FF14 now, with rested bonus, food effects, scrolls, powerleveling parties, etc.

FF11, if I recall, also had something called merit points, where when you reached the level cap, you could still gain experience points, but instead of gaining additional levels, you would earn points that you could spend towards unlocking unique abilities. Then again, I only played FF11 briefly; I just remember hearing about this system from friends of mine.

I guess Sega could also go the "reincarnation" route that some RPG's use, where when you reach max level, you can reset back to a lower level again permanently, but end up gaining more stats as a result when you re-level, or some other similar benefit.