Everquest II's Mentoring System

More Experience Players Can Take Lower Level Players as Students

Aug 6, 2008

The sequel to Sony's premier mmorpg has a unique system that lets older players show newer players the ins and outs of the game world.

Everquest II offers a mentoring system that would work well in many other games. The idea behind the mentoring system in the sequel to the popular mmorpg Everquest is simple. A higher level player takes a lower level player under his wings, shows him the ropes of the class and helps him get experience from time to time.

The mechanics of the system are simple. The higher level character and the lower level character join the same group and the higher level character right clicks on the lower level character's name and selects the option to mentor them. The Everquest II mentoring system causes the mentor to temporarily act as though he were the same level as the pupil, but with a full experience bar.

The Advantages of Everquest II's Mentoring System

The mentoring system allows players to group up with friends and other characters who are at highly different levels. It allows players a chance to learn the ins and outs of the world from more experienced players, according to Warcry's Everquest II web site.

The mentoring system is an option currently offered by few of their competitors, or even the original game set in the world of Norrath. Many people do convince their friends to play such online games, but the level differences often mean that a person comes in at a much lower level than the friend who brought him into the game. The mentoring system is designed to overcome the limits of higher level players grouping with lower level players normally imposed by mmorpgs.

The mentor does earn some experience while mentoring, although the rate is not as high as experience earned while fighting monsters at his level. Useful features of a competitor often get added to the older games eventually and the mentoring system that Everquest IIoffers will probably be copied by its more popular competitors, such as World of Warcraft.

Other Aspects Everquest II's the Mentoring System

The mentoring system is a unique feature offered by Everquest II and it is currently the only mmorpg that offers such a system. If the mentoring system proves to be successful and popular, many of the competitor's games will introduce their own mentoring system. At the time this article was written, no other mmorpgs has done so, although Final Fantasy Online offers a similar system. In no way should Everquest II's allowing other characters to take a pupil under the wings of a higher level character be confused with Sword of the New World's multiple character control.

The copyright of the article Everquest II's Mentoring System in Online Games is owned by Shawn Landis. Permission to republish Everquest II's Mentoring System in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Aug 27, 2008 8:17 AM

PDS :

City of Heroes had this feature first, and they had it at launch in April of 2004. Exemplaring is the City of Heroes equivalent of Mentoring. City of Heroes also features Side-Kicking, which bumps a lower level character to just below the power of a higher level character. Again, both of these features were available at City of Heroes' launch in April of 2004.