a guide is not a mentor. players should mentor.

a guide is not paid (to my knowledge). if they are not playing to play, they have little incentive to be logged on.

guides most often have to deal with vets, not new players. there is no reason to tie a guide to a sector or station.

I have never been a guide, and so all the above is strictly my uneducated opinion. but what is it that you expect from guides, that we are not getting now?

as [active] guides were before my time in vo, I don't know what used to be, nor what powers a guide had beyond any other player account. My suggestion stems from the last mmorpg.com promo. I made a temp alt in each training sector to help the infant pilots at the point in the game they are most likely to need help, and simply act as a welcoming committee. It seemed to work, and I know I sold a few subs, but then again: I was giving away free HE & HD mining beams, and advanced mineral scanners to my students, so I was obviously biasing the game.

Miners Unite! (and hide)

Interesting. Since I appear to have been mentioned in despatches I feel I must make some observations.

Firstly let us consider what guides could do.

1. Assist new players with the technical aspects of the game. ( Equip , Launch , Navigate etc )

2. Assist new players with the game progression. ( explain levels, standing etc )

3. Spawn npcs for fun or as part of player events. ( capship battles in b8, errant hive bots etc )

4. Give small amounts of cash or xp to players taking part in events.

5. Create simple 0 cr cargo widgets for fun and rp value ( pirate dog tags, christmas stockings etc )

6. Carry out some emergency maintenance. ( restart jammed sectors, fix some player bugs )

7. Mute a player. ( Only for dire cases of racist or similar behaviour on a public channel )

8. Provide feedback to the devs about any problems being encountered by players in game

Guides may have had other " powers " available, but those are the ones that I have seen in use.

So how could these functions be implemented within the structure of the game as it now stands ?

1 and 2 . Many players offer to mentor new players to do this. The mentoring system could do with some tidying up with a more intuitive mechanism, but it essentially works. Additionally the tutorial missions are far more comprehensive than they used to be though other things like an in game help manual would remind new players of the basics.

3 and 4 Increasingly this is being done through the mission mechanism. I can imagine a " join a capship battle " mission which if taken by a group of players triggers the b8 capship battle event. Many pcc missions create npc opposition and the devs are moving towards more of this sort of thing.

5. I'm not sure whether the PCC can do this : if not why not ?

6. To be fair VO is much more stable then it used to be. Sector jams are now rare, and anyway guides would have no control over timeouts and complete client crashes.

7. /ignore and for very rare cases /vote mute seem to me to be adequate mechanisms.

8. The bugs forum and customer support seem to do this already.

My conclusion is that unless a different role is envisaged for guides creating new ones is not really necessary. Remember too, if you make three veteran players into guides then three veteran players are effectively removed from the game. They may contribute more by being active as players; commanding Guilds, running events or merely being spotted moving about space in mysterious ways .

One last point, which may be controversial. Several original guides had links to the devs outside of the game. Because of that they could provide a feedback perspective that was outside of the official structure of the game. A player elected or dev approved guide would not be able to do that with ease and I feel that was probably one of the most important contributions that guides made to the overall development of VO.

Ecka

Wow, that's uhm, not really what guides do at all.

As a PCC member I jump at the chance to strike down any PCC involvement. I work on the test server not on production. Baby sitting was not something included in the terms.

Thanks.

Yes, even when you make a PCC mission, there is no guarantee it will show up in the game. I've heard rumors about some very good missions stuck in the test server.

I think 3-4 would be nice to include as powers for the guide, as well as the white lettering which should awe some ppl into submission XD

Crusader, when I said that was what guides could do I meant that those were things that I had seen guides actually do in game when they were still active. Ask any vet, we have seen these things happen. The command set exists and guides can do all those things if they are ingame.

For that matter they can also do universal announcements in white.

So Genka I appreciate that I'm never in game, I have never been buddied with two guides and not been in the same guild as one. I have never attended dozens of guide organised events, killed guide spawned bots and the 20 assorted unusual widgets in my inventory are a figment of my imagination.
So do tell, if guides didn't do the things I listed what did they do? Clearly you think they did something entirely different. Care to enlighten the rest of us ?

Fair point CS, though perhaps bringing them in via more missions?

We need to gather up all the original guides, blindfold them, stuff them in a Behemoth, and dump them in B-8.

They're still alive, just not playing VO. :p

If a guide was a paid position, then you could reasonably expect all sorts of things from guides. As far as I know, it is not a paid position. Since it is not a paid position, the only thing you should expect from a guide, is what needs to be done, that a player can not do otherwise.

This might include:
Muting a trouble making player.
Preventing a player from using unintended mechanics to disrupt an event or disturb other players.

It would not include:
Mentoring. players can do this. you do not need to be a guide to mentor anyone, or help a newb.
Run your event for you. If a guide feels like running an event, they can run their own. If you want to run an event, run it, on your own. You don't need a guide to run an event.

I am really curious why the great need for guides? I would not mind there being more guides, but what would they do? Most specifically, what would they do, that you can't do now?

Why, exactly, do we need more guides?

This is one reason why we need more guides. :p

heh, those are the same picture you showed me on irc when we were talking about the old days.

Ya, and Roda: guides would be able to spawn bots for events and stuff, things that a normal player cant do :)

That sounds like incredibly important stuff.

Events seem to be important to the developers, so yes. They are. :p

And crusader, they are slightly different pictures, but from the same things. :)

Thanks for the vote of confidence!