Not necessary really.

Yeah - just a thought.  But i figure they can already track who is online in impulse and in the game.  So, its simply a matter of tagging invididuals that say they'd provide some coaching when they are online and giving them some sort of pop up in the overlay that X person is requesting some coaching.  Anyway, you may or may not NEED a feature like that in elemental, but I think it could be quite worthwhile and may help some people get off the ground.  Plus I'm sure there will be plenty of folks willing to lend a helping hand. 

Here's what I wrote about it another thread - the short version is that its fun imo.

Oh - and I picked up settlers 7 over the weekend as well.  I'm actually enjoying that game alot.  Its similar to dawn of discovery.  I wasn't a huge fan of DoD, but its like this game took the things that I did like from that game and improved upon them tremendously.  It has some exceptionally thoughtful ideas as well.  It has facebook integration to post stats, etc.  It has a "find a tutor" feature.  When you first install the game, it asks you if you are willing to share your knowledge with other players.  If so, you click a checkbox to indicate you'll help.  Anyway, in game, there is always a box you can click on to find a tutor and it will go out and search for available tutors and you can chat about whatever your question is.  What a simple, thoughtful idea.  Anyway, its got a cartoony style but is very detailed.  One thing that annoyed the crap out of me and I think must be a bug is the blur effect.  In short, if you max out the graphical settings, everything gets a little hazy unless you are completely zoomed it.  As in, it looks HORRIBLE.  But, if you turn off AA and multi-sampling, the haze disappears.  I sincerely hope this is something that gets patched because there is NO WAY the dev's could have intended for it to work that way.

Bottom line - I enjoy the game play and mechanics.

The DRM is just insulting, is what it is. (with Ubisoft)

pssstt.... thread is not suggesting SD start using a draconian DRM... the thread is about adding a neat (imo) feature that might be useful. 

Sorry for the derail pacov.   I am just extra peeved because I actually think this "tutor" feature is very nice, but I can't appreciate it because of the DRM. 

On topic question, does the tutor feature have some kind of rating system?  To be fair to the tutor and the student, there really should be both a "Tutor Helpful Rating" and a "Student Quality Rating."  That could minize the amount of possible abuse of the system that could happen on both end of the tutoring process.

Perhaps Impulse could be the conduit. I could see it being cool to ask a "Tutor" via Impluse even during a SP game.

I haven't tried it yet...

It kinda reminds me of those old coffee commercials. Some guy in a suit and tie shows up at your breakfast table and says "You should try the fresh taste of Folgers". Nobody ever asked in those commercials, "What are you doing in my house?"

I tried the feature out briefly last night.  Here's how it works. 

Once you have the game settlers running, there is always a small icon on the top left that is semi transparent.  If you mouse over it, you'll see a tooltip pop up that reads "ask a tutor."  If you click on that, it brings up an semi transparent window where you can type in a specific question for your tutor.  Its a reasonably small box so its not intrusive.  Your game can actually still be playing in realtime while you are doing this or you can pause the game if you like.  Anyway, you enter a question and then click find a tutor (or ask your question or something to that effect).  It indicates its searching for a tutor.  I assume a person that signed up to be a tutor will get a message or pop up indicating that someone asked a question and shows them what the question is before they commit to responding.  If they choose to respond, both the user and the tutor are connected in a chat window.  When you are finished chatting, you simply close the window.  There is no option to leave feedback for your tutor in this implementation.  If SD were to try something like this out, being able to leave karma, at the very least, would be great.  Thanks for reading.