While manual mentoring is an interesting option it is still not as good as automatic mentoring down. With automatic mentoring down it will not be possible to complete raid zones solo and it will add a bit of challenge to old content.
Mentoring involves mentoring a lower level character, no solo. I am guessing you referring to the "chronomage" that allows you to scale your level down without having to mentor someone? They could add that to the character window to make it so you don't have to track down a chronomage to do so. Or make an inventory item that has a clicky effect that is the same as interacting with a chronomage. A "portable chronomage seal" or something.
With fast travel it takes half a second to get to your home city? I would prefer they not put something else on our character window. There is comes a time when everything is so easy, why bother logging in.
I honestly thought about that. But having to bounce around like that doesn't necessarily make it "difficult", it just makes it take longer. I mean time sinks are okay... if they are engaging, if they are entertaining, if they are part of content. But tedium for the sake of providing some psuedo-sense of difficulty is just that, tedious, not difficult. Same can be said for other mechanics too, inventory management (or as I like to call it the bag Mahjong mini game?) brought to you by the loot pinata that fills your bags after a short game play session.
Erudinel, the main idea is to make each dungeon more or less relevant again by automatically scaling down character level to a level of monsters and bosses of the dungeon. Or scaling up monsters to character level instead, like many MMORPG's do this days. It has pro's and const. Yet I think that mandatory level scaling is better then mentoring down at will (or chronomaging). And there should be some kind of small reward for doing old content like increasing health or potency just by a little bit for defeating each boss along with achievements that we already have.
The problem with rewards from such a system, is the games base itemization. Its not centered around what level the player is, its centered around what mob you kill. Each mob is tied to a loot table of things that it can provide as loot. So even automatically scaling your level wont provide anything useful to your character at its normal level. They would have to revamp the entire itemization system or create a whole new loot system to be able to implement loot that would be worthwhile to a player at their normal level. While its a nice pipe dream, it wont happen. They cant seem to even manage to get itemization right in its current form, with hand crafted itemization and loot tables.
I understand it and I suggest to reward player with raised attributes rather than giving player an item or piece of gear. The "old" dungeons should not be difficult and they should not take too much time to complete. It is just to give people a break from running the same dungeons of the latest expansion every week. A bit of challenge, a bit of reward, something new for those who are new to EQ2 and something old to revisit for veterans. I agree that it is rather a dream since we are talking about hundreds of low-level dungeons and I think that it would take a lot of time to properly scale down each one of them and "time is … a precious commodity"
