Idea for Elemental - Find a Tutor Feature

NT

Not necessary really.

Depending on the supply of tutors, that is a neat idea. I know these games can be pretty daunting for newbies.

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. 

Off Topic...but is Settler's 7 any good? I heard the DRM sucks but havent heard any concrete reviews on gameply.

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.

I usually don't stress about DRM, but this is really infuriating. If your connection (or their connection) goes bad, the game shuts off! I've had two instances yesterday where I just couldn't play the game I just bought. When I'm playing a single player game, I feel no need whatsover to be bothered with the status of my internet connection, much less be forced to stop playing. That is totally unacceptable. People might put up with this for a great game, but I'll be watching out for this in the future. I will not buy a game with this feature unless It's really something I can't miss.

Other than that, great game, incredible graphics.

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

Yeah.  On principle, I won't be touching any of the Ubisoft games from now on.  I am a big settlers fan and it kills me to impose this self-ban on it, but I refuse to contribute to the proliferation of increasingly asine DRM.

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

eh, "find a tutor" feature might be useful. I always thought thats what MP games were for though :p

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.

I like this idea.

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

Couldn't it be a feature of impulse::reactor ?

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?"

Good!  I'm guessing with the infrastructure you already have in place that a feature like this wouldn't require a rediculous amount of development either (but what do I know, frankly :))

I'll try it out sometime over the next few days and provide some feedback from my experience in this thread.  I'm hoping they have something built in where you can rate your tutor (as, presumably, anyone can choose to be one and not necessarily have any experience).  

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.

What a wonderful idea. Such a cool way to create a sense of community even when just playing a single player game.