After much thought to the new mentor system, I’ve decided on a few things that will impact the direction it’s going to go in, as well as the current team involved. I wanted to share my thought process behind it and get your feedback.

The initial approach to this was to maintain a mentor team - one that was separate from leaders and staff. It honestly didn't make sense to me last night and now there are technical reasons as to why this would be a bigger headache to maintain long term. There’s a steep cost for development too (would have to maintain a separate database and in-world scripts for tracking and online time reporting).

That being said, I think the right approach for the mentor program, and to ensure it’s long term growth and sustainability, is to fold it into the staff team. Furthermore, I am going to merge the responsibilities of moderators in with mentors … so that means, current moderators are mentors. Those who signed up to be a mentor AND on staff, but are not moderators, may be bumped up to one based on their OOC history so far. Those who are currently mentors, but not part of staff at all, will be considered to be invited to the staff role but starting as security first. This only applies to the existing set of mentors we have right now; in the future, we will invite folks who show interest and whom we feel would be a good fit for staff.

Mentors will be the primary point of contact on the new Live Help page and I think it’s important that we maintain a single roster of staff members who are consistently showing up in-world for the community, and are committed to helping out. A lot of new comers will assume mentors are part of staff, anyways… AND I would only need to maintain one database of staff and continue maintaining one scanner in-world that helps show online times on the website.

I’ve developed a nice portal on the admin dashboard for GM/admins to help me track the presence and activity of staff so we can maintain an active roster at all times.