Pokefarm Mentors; Discussion 'Ideas'

I know I’m not a real veteran yet but since I’ve been here for almost 2 years, here’s my piece on the questions! Back when you were a newbie, what were the questions you had that you felt you had a hard time getting answers to? As a new player, the top two things that confused me were Pokerus and getting to know the forums. -For Pokerus, I had no clue how to get it, and once I figured out, I wasn’t really sure how it looked when you got it. Maybe only one Pokemon got Pokerus or you choose? It took me some time as well to understand what it meant by click the host but after a year, no I’m not kidding, of trying I finally got it and it made sense, but that just might be me -Forums. Where do I start? At first, I was overwhelmed by how many forums and sub forums there were, and I didn’t know where to start. Then understanding the abbreviations that were in trade forums confused me. UFT I knew but when it came to UFDT, H, W, LF, etc, I had to honestly dig into the threads and finally learned what it said, which don’t get me wrong, It’s good to learn, but would have been more convenient if I could have, or knew somebody to ask. Cause you know, I have great social skills, not What pointers do you wish you had been given? Like I said before, how to navigate forums and forum language but I wish I’d had been introduced to the original mentor page so I could get some help and be introduced to the game. It would have been helpful to know how to get zc without buying it, like selling items, and how you can get credits through interactions. Not proud of this, but it took me a year to figure out that in the Pokédex page, that if you click on a region, all your progress appears of which Pokémon you do and don’t have. What resources did you find it the hardest to locate? The hardest I think were the site skin maker, image uploaded and site stats. I first found the image uploaded while looking at peoples profile pictures and wondering how they did that and after finding it out was amazed I can upload my art to use. The Site skins I found out by luck and then immediately played with it, since I didn’t know that you can change the site from green to anything! The site stats I just found a few months ago while looking for site skins and it blew me away that I didn’t know about it till then. What traits do you think a good mentor should have? Here are a few I believe a good mentor should have, -Patience If a mentor doesn’t have patience, then how can they help? Teaching takes time and not everyone gets it on their first shot. If you leave someone behind, what’s the chance they’ll have a positive view on the community of the site. So far, they’ll only have you to base the community on, so if you cannot be patient for them, then I believe your not fit to be a mentor. -Engaged A good mentor should be engaged with the person they’re helping and if they aren’t active, then how will the player know a reliable source to ask questions? Mentors should also know when to pm the player, for example, it’s been two days so you pm the player, “Hey, since you’ve been able to settle for a while, are you a competitive battler or maybe a role player or an artist? We have forums for each of those if your interested!” I believe that would make them feel welcomed and part of pokefarm. -Basic Knowledge I believe a mentor should know their way around forums and if a player asks, “Hey! Where can I sell my [insert random item]?” The mentor should be able to respond with, “Your able to sell [insert item from above] at the market where other players buy it or in the trade forums by checking out the forums for someone who’s buying it or making a forum and you can sell it.” -Being Friendly Pretty basic thought. If they’re nice to you, the. Be nice back! To be friendly, you don’t need social skills! Cause who needs those, lol You just need to send a positive message towards the user! What interests you most in having an official Mentor program? What interests me is how will users be chosen as mentors and how will new users find this program? I’m guessing that selected users will get messaged by mods and told who to mentor, which I assume is how it will work. But how will new users find the program? When you first sign up for this game, the first thing you don’t really think about is, I wonder if they have a mentor program here? It’s probably, how do I hatch my egg or get an egg? After getting past these parts, you might explore forums for a while, but there really is no guarantee that you’ll find the mentor forum. So will the forum be added to the tutorial maybe just in the lab when you getting your whole team of eggs, it will say, “If you need some help from other players, come here!” Or maybe a thing in your bar at top maybe next to news, that’ll say, “Mentor”. What concerns do you have in regards to there being an official Mentor program? As I said above, how will newbies learn about it and what will the requirements be? I know that you’ll need to be patient and willing to teach, also that you’ll need background knowledge, but will you have to be a certain year in the game like 2014 to 2017/2018 or will you take a test on your background knowledge? I think these are my only regards at the moment. Can you think of anything else that would be helpful to consider? I think it would be helpful to consider how active the mentor is and how to handle if a newbie goes inactive. Maybe try to have a certain mentor, for example me, fill out a question like, what times are you usually on? So that the mentor can try to be online at the same time with the newbie. That was my piece on the matter, and I hope it helps!

Bumping this up; just letting you folks know we haven't forgotten about this ^^

i'm going to be honest, i do this regularly when i see a new user. I'd love to see a clan on this, or at least it be remade? and i think something like "how many times a user has helped somebody" for the mere sake of going "hey, you've done it a lot, can you cool down so other users can help, maybe?" i'm not thinking of a bragging list, but i'm sure that i dunno, one of the top 5 users who helped the most people are entered into a raffle for a suprise, or something like that.

Honestly, I’m not a big fan of that idea. Maybe there could be some kind of rank for “helper” or “mentor” at most, but it feels like it would just limit everyone. It shouldn’t feel like a competition for helping others. Though I understand. If you’re working with a lot of helpers, it can make you feel like you don’t help as much. But honestly, it just comes down to what you can do yourself. I can say from working in a leadership position that if you want to help, you have to just step in and help sometimes. Sometimes you can’t, and sometimes you’re the only one. In my experience, you just have to jump in when you can, and just because someone beats you to it, doesn’t mean that you failed or weren’t fast enough or anything. No one will look down on you for that. If we hold people back from helping others just because they’ve helped a lot of people... It treats help as a privilege, as if only certain people can help. (And honestly, in my opinion, too much help is better than not enough) I don’t hate this idea though. If the clan were remade, and raffles were being held. ^.^ But I don’t think we should tally the number of people helped, but rather include the clan as a whole. Every mentor, every part of the clan. As a fun thing.

Personally, I am a little iffy on the entire idea of a raffle or any other 'surprise reward system' in exchange for helping other users. I feel that if you were to help someone it should be for the sake of assisting them, not for gaining a material reward or for the sake of a shout out. If anything, that feeling of joy you receive upon helping someone is enough. Besides, helping each individual user would involve different needs and a different duration (an example being a quick question on how to trade items versus a full run down on melan hunting) each time, so it would be difficult to compare and place each mentor into a list of how helpful they have been.

I agree with you completely. I myself was just saying that a raffle for the clan sounds fun. Just some small commentary on my part. Man, I worded that kind of weirdly. XD

I understood your main idea, and I agree with your statement that if any raffles (or any similar ideas) were to occur that it should involve the entirety of the mentors, not a specific selection of mentors. ^^

Personally I've been being a mentor to new players for a while now I send a long paragraph of quick tips gift them a shiny or albino of there choice and help them with trade evos and answering any questions someone may have I think a mentor program would be great but at the same time I do have to disagree with the things some people have said for example why help only one person at a time like I've been doing 3-4 at a time and it works Also from what I've been reading it seems to me that once a player reaches a certain rank they no longer get assistance but even that makes no sense I mean even at master rank I still have questions about things

Waywørd, I do like your points of being able to mentor multiple users at once and not having to be within a certain rank range to apply to become an apprentice. However, I feel that there should be some limit to how many users someone is actively mentoring. That would be so that the mentor could spread above, or at the very least, the necessary amount of attention to each of his or her apprentices. Though I fully support the suggestion of not having apprentices be within an exclusive rank range! I do know of many users who come back from a hiatus or somehow manage to climb the ranks very quickly but are still quite clueless to aspects of this site. Should there be different groupings of mentors for those users? Say, one group for users who are completely new, another for moderately new, and another for those with few questions?

Hey guys! I'm popping in to tell you that I'm working on getting this Clan up and running soon. We appreciate all of your feedback received thus far - so thank you guys for that! We haven't forgotten about this at all, so please don't feel like we have! Things have been hectic all across staff lately, but we're definitely planning on implementing this on-site. Thank you all for your patience with this and for working with us on making this Clan an actuality instead of just a discussion!