There are like 3 or 4 FMs in my area, so are they going to chose for themselves who they want to join, or are all the forum members in the area going to be divided amongst them?

We don’t really know yet.

Should a member get referred, he goes to the mentor who referred him.

Should a member get referred by a connector, he goes to a mentor in the area (hopefully, if the connector is a card shop, the mentor would be one of the guys that plays there, as opposed to someone way off and unaffiliated with the connector)

Shoudl a member join online through Decipher (no referral), they might get assigned randomly to a mentor in their area.

At the beginning, I think we are expecting to get randomly sorted to the nearest FM. If there are 10 FMs in an city, and 20 non-FMs join at the start, logically, each FM ought to get 2 of them. But we can’t control that. They might end up with 18 of them being under one FM because he is closer to all of them.

I, personally, hope they give some degree of choice in who our FMs are (at least at the start). There are a few FMs here I would have no problem giving my 10% to. Most likely, due to distance, I’ll end up under masteryoda. But on the off chance I get placed under someone else of equal distance, I’d like the option of saying I’d prefer to be under him, you know?

It’s really more of a guess at this point.

I believe I saw somewhere the odds were 3720 to 1, but I could be wrong :)

Never tell me the odds! :-p

Well, it’s not exactly fair for some FMs to get a boatload of freebies just because they happen to live in a larger city, while FMs living in the sticks get jack. Especially since it’s the FMs who don’t have a lot of other gamers nearby who are going to have the hardest time of gathering new players…

(I live in a good-sized town outside of Seattle, btw, just so you know I’m not trying to get more than my “fair share”.)

Right now, the odds look about 3 to 1…

It’s also not fair for people in the city to be assigned FMs who are “in the sticks”, when there are a dozen others in that city, just for balance.

That’s the tricky part. Would we want a good location-based selection, or an even distribution? Which is more fair, and which will do the game more good?

Hey, you can’t contradict me, AC – I voted for you! ;-)

Anyway… I suppose it depends on what the role of a mentor is to his manatee. Er, mentee. Is it the FM’s job to simply bring on new players, or to actually instruct and foster them? To bring a lot of random people into a game, or to bring on a few dedicated ones?

What are the chances that a user on this board will actually get together with the FM assigned to him, even if they live in the same city? Will players even care who their FM is? Does any of it matter?

Sorry for all the questions. I don’t have any answers!

I know that there is 2 founding members in my city and the only reason I would like to see proximity come into play is that I know that the more people I know the better I can make the tourneys. I am really surprised at how few people came out for this from my area, but unfortunately there are alot of M:TG fans out here and introducing a new game is like pulling teeth.

I’m not contradicting you. I’m stating the other half of the argument. In all honesty, I couldn’t pick a side.

Let’s take masteryoda and myself. Both FMs, relatively close by each other. Now, I would want him to have just as many mentee people as I do. Keep things balanced and fair, you know? But at the same time, if in keeping things balanced they give him someone who’s a quarter mile away, I can’t help but be irked by that. I mean, that guy’s in walking distance, and I can’t be his mentor! But it’s not fair for me to get more mentees because I happen to live in the right spot.

I think the mentor will do what they personally choose to do. I am going to invite people, and then try to help them learn the game, and once they get the hang of it, there will be no more “tutoring” coming from me. I’m taking it from a marketing standpoint, I guess. After I get them into the game, I’m going to spend enough time with them that they’ll want to stay in. Then I’ll let them do what THEY want to do with it. Hopefully we’ll see each other at local tourneys and stuff.

If the online community is good at teaching new players the game, then it really shouldn’t matter who your mentor is. If he’s nearby, you can meet him more often. But if he’s across the planet, you could still have the online community (and maybe other players nearby) to work with. And with the gangs, I’m sure there will be at least a small part of each gang devoted to helping new members, in hopes of finding “good ones” to add to the gang.

The real trick, I would say, would be at the very get-go. Because if there are 5 players from your area, and all have a different mentor from a different area, it would be harder to get the game started than say, if 1 of the 5 lead the other 4, or if ONE guy in the closest available city mentored all 5 of them. The problem, then, arises with giving that guy all 5 members. Now he gets all of their 10%s, where an FM with no mentees to get assigned to him would get no 10%s.

I think it’s going to be tough, becaus it’s a real problem. You really want sme balance at the beginning so the mentors don’t get swamped with 5000 players, but then again you want them to have someone reasonably close. However for my 2 cents I’d favor balance to begin with because the internet is able to take the strain off the distance thing…

Since the physical product is only acessed online, most new members will be internet savvy and quick to learn the game from the website. Go for balance for the initial split. The money trumps all other considerations. If some FM’s get more than their fair share of d’mented, there will be alkot of bad vibes.

Chris Wirfs