The "Mentor" Interaction is Overpowered for Building Friendship

I've been using the "Mentor" interaction a lot lately, and while I love the concept, I think its effect on relationships is way too strong and needs some balancing. It makes building friendships feel trivial and unrewarding.

1. What area of gameplay is your feedback about?

• Social Interactions (Specifically the "Mentor" interaction)
• Skills

1. What works well right now?
   The core idea of the Mentor interaction is fantastic. It’s realistic and rewarding for a skilled Sim to be able to help another Sim improve in a skill like Logic, Video Gaming, or Programming. It creates a natural reason for Sims to interact and provides a useful boost to skill gain, which is especially helpful for challenges or when trying to quickly train a household.
2. What isn’t working or feels frustrating?
   The rate at which mentoring builds a friendship relationship is extremely overpowered. A Sim can go from being complete strangers with someone to becoming their best friend in a single, multi-hour mentoring session. This completely trivializes the relationship system. It removes the need for any other kind of socializing, making friendships feel cheap and unearned. It's an exploit that bypasses the natural, multi-faceted process of getting to know someone.
3. What new ideas or improvements would you suggest?
   I suggest rebalancing the relationship gain from the Mentor interaction to make it more realistic and balanced.

• Significantly Reduce Friendship Gain: The primary fix is to drastically lower the amount of friendship points earned per hour of mentoring. It should provide a small, steady trickle—enough to show growing respect—not a firehose of affection.
• Cap Daily Gain: Alternatively, the interaction could have a diminishing return or a daily cap on how much friendship it can generate between two specific Sims.
• Tie Gain to Skill Difficulty: Perhaps mentoring in a harder skill (like Logic) could yield slightly more friendship than mentoring in an easier one (like Video Gaming), but the overall gain should still be much lower than it is now.
• Increase Fun Decay: The mentoring Sim could lose Fun faster, making long, continuous sessions less viable and encouraging breaks for other social activities.

1. Why would this improve your gameplay experience?
   This rebalancing would greatly improve the gameplay experience by:

• Restoring Challenge: It would make building and maintaining meaningful friendships a deliberate process again, requiring a variety of interactions instead of just one overpowered one.
• Increasing Realism: In real life, teaching someone a skill builds respect and acquaintance, but it doesn't instantly create a deep, personal friendship overnight. This change would make the social dynamics feel more authentic.
• Encouraging Diverse Gameplay: It would encourage players to have their Sims actually socialize—to tell jokes, have deep conversations, share meals—instead of just defaulting to mentoring as the most efficient path to a full relationship bar.
• Preserving the Feature's Purpose: The main focus of mentoring would return to its intended purpose: skill gain. The social benefit would become a nice secondary bonus, not the primary reason to use it.

This change wouldn't remove the feature; it would simply balance it to be more in line with other social interactions, making the social ecosystem of the game healthier and more engaging.

Please upvote 👍 this post so we can get this feature in the game.