5. Create a player reward system for players who want to take a noob 'under their wing'. Enable players to register a veteran player to be the mentor of a new account (I did that a lot for free by the way) and give the veteran player a week or two free game time for each new player that sticks with the game for longer than a month and gives a good rating to the mentor. New players benefit enormously from the experience of old players and can turn from cannon fodder to kill landing players in a week or two.
Good story, Rip, and a good deed... I too was taken under wing early and it really helped me out. I don't have the time to devote to this that would enable me to scale the mountain of staff hood, but I do enjoy most of my sorties and always feel I have a fighting chance. I've even scored kills on some of the bigs, here and there.
That said, you got me to thinking, a little. The training arena is pretty empty, most of the time. However, what if we used, much like, for example, the Usta, a rating system here. At the beginning, the noob would self rate, based on a number of published criteria. Default would be a zero rating. Zero- rated players could play at all levels or in the open arena. All other rating levels could play up but never down, similarly. The lower couple of levels could utilize the TA's time as the TA does now, only it'd be, in all other respects, a full-on combat arena.
As for the ratings metric(s): how about k/d at level? Of course, this would have to be over some critical mass of sorties.
The only real problem with this: not enough players. Right now, probably everyone would spend all their time in the open arena. Of course, you could restrict play to "at level" play, thus giving incentive to move up to open level...
The rating level would, of course, be the topic of much bragging and argumentation - not a bad thing necessarily.
