And I don't mean that having games for new players is bad. No, that's totally fine. What's bad is that there's months between games in which new players are twiddling thumbs waiting to play and not getting their game filled. That is bad. So let's change that.
We've been chatting it up about ways to fix NFM and are coming up a bit dry. We've been able to poke not insignificantly sized holes in just about every system that's been presented thus far but the best we've got right now is a mentor system.
The goal with the system is to more quickly get newer players into games without needing to wait through a needlessly lengthy queue time. Additionally, the advice of a mentor ideally should improve the overall game knowledge of the new player more so than getting passive aggressive advice in a NFM would. It also lets newer players get to know some more time worn players and ideally helps to build community.
So, here's how the current iteration of the proposed mentor system would work:
- The NFM queue will be deleted. No more NFM games will be run.
- In place of the NFM queue will be some form of "Request a Mentor" thread/queue in which new players will enter a queue to be assigned a mentor. Veteran players can apply to be mentors by submitting an application to the FM moderators.
- A mentor and new player will be paired together and will decide on a game to join. Ideally the mentor and new player will make some sort of discord chat or just DM each other a lot, it's up to both of them how exactly they want to do this and be in communication. We're going to strongly recommend using something more than just forum DM's though.
- The mentor and mentee will join the game technically as a hydra, although the vast majority of the posting should be coming from the new player. The role of the mentor is not to play the game, (and in that vein they don't even need to be fully caught up on the game if it's moving very quickly) but rather to serve as a backboard for new players to bounce ideas off of (and to show the newer player how you as the mentor formulate reads and opinions and contrast those with their reads to help with read progression and/or play as not blatant scum etc). Of course if things are going to shit and the mentor needs to post some sort of clarifications or something in the thread no problem but the mentor shouldn't be posting every page or anywhere even close to that. This is the new player's game and other players should be seeing the play of the newbie not of you. Their reads should be made around the play of the new player not based off your constant interjections.
- Game hosts are able to, if they wish, disallow mentees from joining their games by submitting to the moderator overseeing their game a brief justification for the decision.
That's pretty much it. It's a pseudo-hydra in which the mentor really shouldn't be posting (although they can if they need to) and the mentee gets someone to talk to that shares their pov in the game. NFM queue would burn in a fire and this would replace it.
Some of the issues so far that we've brought up:
- Will there be enough mentors? There will likely be a huge surge if this goes live but then in a year or a year and a half, will there still be active mentors?
- It's quite possible that some people won't want to play in games with brand new green players and since this technically opens up new players to most games would that be a problem? Yes there's a mentor who should be guiding them but given the history of activity on this site who knows how much the mentor will actually do.
- If there's a surge of new players this system breaks down
- This is very similar to the IC's system that was in place way long ago and got removed for issues regarding lack of experienced players wanting to be IC's. This might have the same problem.
So what do y'all think? Go ahead and fill out the survey and write some comments down below.