Mentoring Guidelines

Contents:
  1. Introduction
  2. Strategies to suggest
  3. Equipment advice
  4. Resources for mentors and new players
  5. Responding to questions
  6. Earning money

Introduction

This is not designed as a guide for regular players. If you are reading this guide, you should already have a good idea of how to play. Thus, this guide is nonspecific. It is up to you as a mentor to fill in the details of this guide as you see fit so as to provide your own brand of help.

Strategies to suggest

Probably the most common question you will hear is, 'How can I improve my Character?' Peter's approach is perhaps the best:

"First I ask them what their plan is with a Character. When they tell me, I give them some hints how to achieve it better. "

For rank beginners or players who insist on being told how to play, we recommend the two most popular strategies for low-level players that provide an infrastructure for ongoing character development. (For this category of student it is primarily important to not impose confusion by suggesting too many options at once.)

  1. 1T: Tanks should be trained evenly between HP/ST/DX. Bloodlust should be suggested if they are using a melee weapon. Archery is appropriate to train early if the new player has a bow to use. Tanks should not have spells trained until later when the player has had time and experience to consider whether to add spells to the Tank or to add additional minions.
  2. 1T/1(M): If asked, you may suggest that players consider adding a mage with FB behind their tank, but not until they have passed 5K MPR. More conservative mentors may wish to suggest waiting until 10K MPR. The mage should train only the FB spell and HP.

Finally, remember: The most important part of giving strategy advice is: give advice only when asked to do so. With the exception of newbie mistakes like equipping a melee weapon on a mage, most people don't appreciate unsolicited advice, even from a mentor.

Equipment advice

New Players should be advised that armor is not an immediate need but that they should read the armor penalty tables and choose suitable armor as they can afford it. Rental equipment will often allow for far faster startup than donated and/or purchased equipment. Rentals can be expensive but it is a good way to acquire effective equipment early on and to test out any equipment before purchasing it.

Resources for mentors and new players

Responding to questions

Although it is tempting to immediately give answers to new players, mentoring is about teaching a player how to become an independent and productive member of the CB community. Thus, questions other than those related to basic gameplay are best answered by direction to the appropriate resource. New players will benefit from knowing where to learn about the game once they are no longer being mentored or when their mentor is offline.

Questions about abbreviations, forge times, and spell/skill effects, weapon effects, etc. can almost always be answered by use of the wiki.

Questions about strategy can be answered by mentors; in addition, the wiki is a good resource. Game Strategies has a list of many of the most common and effective strategies.

Questions about rules, gameplay, etc. can be answered by pointing to the applicable faq/help pages and/or to one of the guides.

If you are unsure how to answer a question, say that you do not know the answer and point the mentee to an admin or to another mentor rather than guessing.

Earning money

So long as the player's strategy is sound, the money earned from normal fighting should be enough to fund any needs for their character, especially if they use rentals effectively. You are not encouraged to give new players excessive freebies.

    last edited by Miandrital at Aug 1 2006 - Edit Mentoring Guidelines

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