I am an extremely new player (perhaps 1 month) and so have had recent experience with two different characters revealing two extremely different experiences.
My character on Atamara and more specifically Tara, sent me a lengthy message to begin with. He was the only mentor of the realm and explained how he was busy in real life and couldn't commit to a full lesson program but would answer any questions I had. I decided it would be easier to just read the manual and, so far, have found Battlemaster relatively easy to understand (only the basics though, military tactics etc. I guess will take more time and experience). Reading on the wiki it seems some players create whole lesson plans and guides which seems very in depth and it's interesting when players take their role of a mentor seriously (as fun roleplay material more than a chore). This is certainly a minority however.
My experience on Dwilight (Morek) was, simply put... rubbish. I became a student, messaged the mentors asking who would take me as their student(I believe there was around 3/4) and none responded! I decided to just carry on and get to grips with the realm happenings myself (read the wiki) but I can see how disheartening this would be for most people and prevent many newcomers staying on.
In short, I believe mentors absolutely essential for retaining new players and anything that would encourage mentors to play their role well would greatly help. ^_^
