So, I've been pretty frustrated with WoW (although patch 2.3 looks like it'll help a lot). I've thought it over and thought it over, and I think the main source of frustration has been that I couldn't play the way I wanted to with the people I wanted to play with. And the single biggest reason for that is, we have not been able to stay in sync. We progress at different rates.

When I have 3 70s, but a guildmate's highest level character is 54, it puts a severe damper on our ability to play together. How do we solve this problem without an insane amount of effort on the part of players?

(One common answer I hear to that is along the lines of "get better friends" or "join a better guild" or something similar. That's a very frustrating answer for me -- I've got good real-life friends I want to play with. I want the game to allow me to play with them without introducing undue organizational overhead. I want the game to help me preserve communities, not shatter them.)

The best solution I've come up with is a mentoring system, where higher level people can temporarily nerf themselves down to lower levels, in order to play with teammates without trivializing their experience.

Here's how I imagine it would work.

You right-click on your portrait. Just as you can use that to select "Heroic" mode for instances, you can also use it to select "Mentor" mode.

So, doing that indicates that you're willing to temporarily "downrank" your character in order to play with others. Next we have to decide what level to reduce you to.

One way to handle it is, whenever you join a party, look at the level of the highest level person who has not turned on mentor mode, or the lowest level person who has. Pick that for your sync target. This has the advantage that it'll work for all content everywhere.

Another way to handle it is, whenever you enter an instance, look at the level of the final boss of that instance, and set your sync target to two (three?) levels below that. This has the advantage that, if you've got a bunch of bored 70s who feel like running through Deadmines, they can actually do so and be challenged, even if nobody around is of the right level. It gives us more options. But, it only works in instances.

So, once you've got your "sync target", your level is temporarily lowered to that. Higher level spells are greyed out. Other spells are downranked. Level-based calculations (hit/crit/glance/crush/whatever) are done with the lower level. Basically, the highest-level non-mentor character or lowest-level mentor character provide a "sync point".

Next we have to worry about bringing gear into sync.

One way to handle that is, do a calculation to average up the average ilevel and gear quality of that "sync target". Then reduce the power level of the downranked charcter's gear to about that equivalent level.

Another way to handle that is, for each level, simply place a cap on the stat you're allowed to have for that level as a mentor. I am not sure what would work best.

(In either case, if the system is implemented via syncing to an instance rather than a character, you could allow gear progression that way. For example, imagine that entering Molten Core capped your level at 60 and your gear at around T1 power levels, and entering BWL capped your level at 60 and your gear at around T2 power levels...)

We also have to bring talent points into sync. I don't have a good idea for how to do that at this time.

If they added a system like that, it would be much easier for groups of friends to have a good experience playing together even when their habits result in different rates of progression otherwise. With the "sync to a character" system, you'd be able to group up with anyone for anything. With the "sync to an instance" system, endgame characters would be able to experience every instance in the game as it was intended and without maintaining a stable of alts, without having to arrange their play time so as to avoid "outleveling" instances before they get around to them.

What do folks think?

One criticism I've heard is "this is too hard to do". I don't think it has to be, but if you can think of a way to simplify it without destroying the fundamental point -- I want to play my high-level characters with my lower-level friends without dominating their play experience -- great, please follow up!

Another criticism I've heard is "nobody will do it without incentives". Well, I would, and I know other people who would, but I agree that a typical PUGer probably wouldn't. Maybe there's some way to incentivize this? Heck, maybe the final boss of every single instance drops a heroic token for everyone who's there in mentor mode or something. Ideas?

Anyone have a completely different idea for solving the same exact problem?

For a while I had 9 alts spread throughout all level ranges, filling a variety of roles (eg. some tanks, some damage, some healing). When someone wanted to quest or run an instance, I just picked the character in the same level range. Right now they are mostly in the 60-70 range, but all my friends' alts are in the same range too, so it works out.

I'm not sure why it has to take a heroic effort. Ultimately we're talking about a debuff that's essentially similar to rez sickness, no?

As for very few people using it, and the unequal footing being the nature of an MMO, I have heard that at least one other MMO ("City of Heroes") already has such a system. Maybe I misunderstood what I was told. Anyone have any experience with that? How does it work? How often is it used?

They also, I am told, have a sidekicking system, which lets lower-level characters temporarily go up in power so that newbies can join high-level folks and get a taste of what they're doing. (I can't see Blizzard implementing that though.)

From some CoH FAQ.

City of Heroes:-

I think its difficult to compare how it works in City of Heroes to World Of Warcraft as the play style of the game is vastly different. From what I have read there is no gear as such but power enhancers, which I think would be a lot easier to scale in the mentor/sidekick system that it would with the complex variety of gear in world of warcraft.

City of Heroes did a great job of this. It worked both ways. A L50 player could take a L20 player as their "sidekick" and temporary boost them to L49. A L20 player could rever-sidekick as L50 player to L20.

If you were the L20 player in situation #1, you'd still get XP, but it would be equivalent to what you would have gotten at L20 for killing a mob in your level range.

If you were L50 (max level) since you can't get XP you'd get influence, which is the game's currency.

It was a great way to encourage people to play with different level ranges.

I think WoW could implement at least the sidekick option. Reverse-sidekick would be harder, as currency in WoW was useless, but in WoW it's not. Maybe it can be something like increased rep gain.

Tried it over and over. Hasn't worked. Requires too much discipline -- not on me, but on the more casual players I often wish to play with. They want to play whenever they want to play. We get out of sync.

I've been trying solutions within the existing game's framework for over two years. None of those have been satisfactory. At the moment my account is inactive (primarily due to this issue). 2.3 will probably bring me back. If they added ... something ... to solve this problem, they'd get me back for certain.

I suppose another way to handle it might be to specify level caps for particular guild ranks. If we set things so that the rank of "lowbie" could not level past 20th level, we'd be able to make level 20 a sync point. Then when we had done all the content we wanted at that level, raise the level limit on that guild rank to 25. I guess twink guilds would love the heck out of that mechanic as well. But I'd prefer something more dynamic, with less organizational overhead, without requiring guild membership, myself.

First of all, pick one: do you want the high level character to drop down to a lower level, or a lower level character to jump up to a high one?

If the former, how do you manage the talent point changes? Do you automatically lose all spells not available at the level you wish to become?

If the latter, what do you propose the loot rules be? Would you really want to group with a level 12-turned-69 Blood Elf hunter named Legolazsz who would almost certainly be more of a liability to a group than help?

I still see this is an undesirable feature for most of the playerbase. If you want to play with your friends, roll an alt or help powerlevel them up to 70.

The mentoring system does exist in CoH, yes. The reason it works so easily there (and problem with trying to implement it in WoW) is that CoH doesn't have any item system (at least it didn't the last time I played a little while before City of Villains was released -- I'm not sure how close the new invention system comes to an item system). Basically, at any given level, how powerful you were was just a matter of what powers you chose, and those powers scaled to your level. When you mentored down, they simply removed any powers you didn't have yet at that level, and scaled all your remaining powers to that level. There was no worry about having to try to convert a T5 piece of gear to something appropriate for doing RFK. How would you propose handling the vast differential of gear that exists at level 70? Would a T6 equipped level 70 character scale down to the same "power level" (for lack of a better term) as a level 70 in dungeon blues? Or would they be given the equivalent of high ilvl epics for whatever level they were mentoring to (quite probably still trivializing whatever content they were trying to run with their friend)?

Not that it's a bad idea, necessarily, but I think you underestimate the amount of work that would be required to implement the system. And given how easy it is (relatively) to reach 70, it shouldn't be that hard for friends to be able to play together. As others have stated, if you have a friend that can't level that fast because of time restraints, make an alt and bring him up to an appropriate level to quest with your friend. It shouldn't take that long at all.

If you're fast enough to have 3 level 70's while they are only level 54 you should have no problem catching up if they get ahead of you sometimes.

If they really play when you don't play that often then why would you want Blizzard to write this big feature (and it's a much bigger programming undertaking than you might think) just for their benefit?

The problem is that leveling is not fun. It's possible to get to 70 quickly, but it's tedious. And it's almost impossible to do it with your L70 friends.

A mentoring system would encourage the L70 players to regularly play with the L30 players. You could temporarily remove talents, skills you wouldn't have at a lower level. I'm not sure how you'd handle gear. The game would have to somehow dynamically nerf the gear, or you could set it so the player cannot equip the gear and thus would have to get L30 gear.