Low level restrictions & mentor system

[Grenth]

My suggestion is to remove the /mentor system and remove the restrictions for trading and settling kingdoms under level 10.
Why?

1. The restrictions were originally put in to make it more difficult for players to buy mentors off of newbie's
2. Perhaps I'm wrong on this as I haven't been very active for a while, but the mentor system isn't really used anymore except for awarding Jimcav, and he's no longer updating his website and asked that people stop doing this
3. Not being able to trade or settle at early levels really limits the gameplay experience, and prevents older players from handing new items to newbies that will help them level up, or gold to buy things as they need them
4. It takes a couple hours to get to level 10 for someone who really knows the game. New players can often struggle as they are not as efficient even if given general instructions
5. Without trading or kingdoms, those first few hours of gameplay are limited to basically just levelling. You can't make enough gold to craft on your own, can't start building a kingdom (even if it's a practically pointless one), and you won't really have ash for poker for quite a while.

Cons

1. If the mentor system does still help sometimes, then that would be lost here
2. The trade restrictions had a side effect in the form of limiting inventory space for the more established players, who in most cases resort to buying mules (somewhat risky), or making them which is time consuming. It's possible to come up with partial workarounds to this issue, though no solution would be perfect.

[Grenth]

The mentor system was being exploited recently.

[mak3nsh1]

Suggestions on compromise:
1) (Mak's) Implement a kind of Guild type feature. Any player between levels 1 and 5 has two choices. One is to use the /mentor feature. If utilized, the player still must wait until level 10 to trade items. The other option is to join the Guild or group of your characters and be able to trade (up to a certain number of times) in order to be allowed to level faster when creating mules or just creating new character's to learn different classes. Utilizing either option voids the ability to choose the other.

2) (Grenth's) Eliminate the /mentor system and the level 10 restriction on trades.
Introduce a level restriction for accepting EEo(G)Ts, Tectons, and Stones, possibly level 50 or 100.

[xaivia]

I would do away with the whole thing. Mentor, restrictions the lot. With the way the game is now, helping new players get started is its own reward. Having one of the harshest new player experiences around for what is essentially such a simple game is doing no one any favours.

Limiting tect, gt, stones etc to higher level is clearly a good idea though.

When I started again recently, I knew exactly what to do, how to do it and why. It still sucked immensely. The 'get good or get out' attitude of the player base seems to be long gone. At least on server 2.