To put it bluntly, the way the mentoring system is set up now, it rather discourages me from using it than it motivates me to strive for the benefits I could reap (UltraCharge, anyone?).

First off, I do not like the fact that mentoring is being rewarded. I just think passing on knowledge to new players should be an action free of personal endeavor for profit. You may object that no-one would help the new players if there is no reward, but I hold against that the fact that it worked without for pretty long beforehand, and even now, there are quite a few players I know of who do not ask for mentoring points when helping new players (this could be due to the fact that they already have the gold mentor badge, but I haven't conducted extensive research on this and thus cannot say anything conclusive).

Secondly, the system is very unwieldy. If you want to group with your student (for obvious reasons, like explaining the radar screens, finding your mentor quickly even though he is beyond 3km, knowing the location of your student for her or his benefits), the student cannot take on any other missions because only group missions are available to her or him.

This problem could be counteracted by creating a new proprietary chat channel, much like group/guild chat, but only for mentor/student communication. Because doing it all in private messages can be rather difficult and also frustrating (as well as misleading) for the new player. And ch1 does not show player locations (luckily).

Thirdly, I don't think a reward such as the UC battery is fit to be dished out for mentoring badges, I see it rather as a reward for a pretty tough combat mission string (but this would discourage player-to-player interaction), or make it available as soon as a player has reached a sufficiently high duel rating. I'm not entirely clear on how the duel ratings are distributed, but I was under the impression that they are influenced by your levels, the opponent's levels and possibly damage relations, and, of course, by who won.

Conclusion: I think that the mentoring system needs a revamp, along with the tutorial (I will not talk about that, for others have done so at length already). I don't think this should supersede any of the current works in progress, but to know that the developers are thinking about it would be nice.

I have always been a proponent of a /help system, whereby a group of volunteers can be contacted anytime they are ingame (or heck even the irc bot could work). Confused newbie asks for help ingame, and rather than having to sort out answers among the general chatter, perhaps a new tab could pop up for a conversation between them and their volunteer helper.
Easy to use, quick answers can be given, both questions and answers can be seen clearly, and you have dedicated and hopefully correct teachers for those who have questions.
We could even go so far as to tie in the the helper system with guides so as one would have the ability to ask a guide for a warp to their newbies area, but only if the helper is actively talking with a newbie.
I always say this when I talk about a /help system and I'll say it again, I'll be the first to sign up :>

All sounds great, anything is better then what is in place now. Every new player has questions and since the tutorials are lacking in a lot of the answers a better mentoring system would be awesome!!

I don't think that the ultra charge should be a reward strictly for duelers though, thats just as bad as mentors only. I like the idea of a difficult missions string though, perhaps harder then the current "Raptor Test Pilot" mission.

I for one, do not ask for mentor points, I'd rather just help out a new player then try and force them to rate me and only help them if they are willing to become my student. Never understood why that was put into place.

Whenever I am mentoring a new player, I will first ask them to type /join ### (where ### = any random channel). Also, I tell them they can /leave 100 if they don't want to see all the spam and focus on my messages only. This is almost as good as group chat. Sure I don't get their location, but when I mentor I will always do it in person, so I can observe their behavoir and give them suggestions or answer questions before they even ask them baised on what they are doing. They can still take the tutorial and the basic combat mission and still have a line of communication to me.

Getting the UC battery from mentoring is nice, but then some people may abuse the system by creating alts and such to pyramid their mentor points. Though this is bad, the UC battery is not that much better than the FC, so I have no problems if thats how people want to get every edge they can.

I will frequently answer new players questions on 1 and 100 without the need to mentor them. I only deserve mentor points if I have trained them in person.

I gave up on the mentoring system a really long time ago because it was a pain in the derriere to give a newbie some tips and then ask them to go through a relatively complicated process of inviting me to be their mentor, and then having them follow through with giving me the mentor point.

Maybe if experienced players were the ones to initiate the mentor session, and simplifying the acceptance/rejection process on the mentoree's side might be better. The mentor types "/mentor invite newbie001" and on the mentoree's side, they get a message in the mission tab that reads "Do you want veteran001 to be your mentor? Enter 1 to accept, 2 to decline. This invitation will expire in 2 minutes" or something. The mentoree would then simply need to press 1 or 2 to accept or decline the invitation. Once a player has become a mentor, they cannot invite any more people. Likewise, once someone has become a mentoree, they cannot accept any more mentors.

It could also be possible create special "mentor groups" that would be the exception to the one student-one master rule, where one veteran player could create a "mentor group" and invite several newbies into it.

Besides, it's much more interesting for me to just help people without asking for anything in return (I guess that was impressed on me by the Boy Scouts). That's probably also the reason why I don't have much (real) money, but that's besides the point.

And yes, it always sort of annoyed me that some players who don't help anyone other than their own alts managed to get the UC battery.

It is very true that VO does not make it a simple task to mentor newbs. I do so frequently, and can honestly say that 90% of the challenge is in overcoming the communication barrier. (It's absurdly difficult to just explain to them how to /mentor invite you, join a group, or reply to a PM).

I do think that offering people incentive to mentor is a good thing in its own right, not because they need it to help the newbs, but because I think people who go out of their way to do so should be rewarded in a more tangible manner than mere newbie-appreciation.

That said, I think that holding back the REPAIR GUN is dumb. If anything, using the repair gun should give rewards of its own, not BE a reward. (medic badge, anyone?)

I say keep the mentor system, but give it a revamp (find something other than the Repair Gun to hold back) and add more functionality to facilitate actual teaching (mentoring groups/channels that don't disrupt mission strings, etc..) and please, bring back the dedicated newbie channel (channel 1) as default, so they're not thrust into 100 drama, but rather in a channel where people willing to help can help them.

I've wanted the medic badge for a while, and the repair cannon MkII would be a much better reward there.

I like CP's idea of reversing the process of becoming a mentee/tor, great idea!!