From the game-play mechanics session came announcements of, yes, new mechanics!  Planned for LU 53 (which is targetted for September according to Brenlo):

1) auto-mentoring!  yes, you will be able to talk to someone in your home city and choose a x0 or x5 level to be mentored down to, automatically, so you can go out and complete those quests at the appropriate level without having to find someone to mentor.   So as not to discourage ‘real’ mentoring, you won’t get that 3 times increase in AA experience, but it otherwise will work the same way.  And, should you find someone to mentor while you are automentoring, you can end it, and switch to mentoring a player — they are hoping this will get more people out in the lower zones, but appropriately leveled.  Furthermore, they plan to add some missions (obtainable at level 80 only, sadly) which will require that you be at a specific level to complete them, thus utilizing the new system.

2) the current achievement system is being renamed to Alternate Advancement, or AA to make way for a brand new achievement system!  This will be account based, not character specific, as it is intended to be viewed as the achievements of a given player, not character — they compared it to XBox Live Achievements (and yes, I see the irony .  So, you will see achievements for things like kill 1000 goblins (which will retroactively play off the slayer counts) but also for exploration, completing a zone, crafting 100 tables or other similar items.    There will be meta achievements (so for instance, finish a zone, followed by finish an expansion) and achievements that are either cumulative across alts (the kill rats quests can be done by any combination of alts) or require something be done by multiple characters (get 3 to 80 for instance).  Having achievements be across the account gives the devs more freedom for class-specific achievements they said, as you were likely to have ONE character who could meet it.  They also didn’t want people to feel forced to get the achievement on every character.  Also, as part of this both the quest journal and the persona window will be revamped.

3) raid scaling — new raids (not existing ones, unfortunately) will be set up to have ‘tiers’ of difficulty, on a per encounter/boss mob level, that will be handled in a lore-appropriate fashion (not a popup select difficulty).   So, a smaller, inexperienced/undergeared guild could choose to take the zone, or just a specific encounter on ‘easy mode’ while the top teir well-geared guilds can opt for heroic/uberhard mode.   Rewards will scale accordingly, but this should both permit greater utilization of content (they want more people to see the zones and experience the lore) and the ability to work your way up as a guild through the difficulty level of a raid.

There were a lot of hints about forthcoming announcements as well, but nothing specific.

On a completely unrelated note, before the sessions I had an chance to talk to Kaitheel and tell him how much I love the live events.  He is very enthusiastic, happy to talk, and young     He did share a few tidbits though — Tinkerfest will be 9 days long, to include 2 weekends.   Nights of the Dead will likely be extended from last year’s 2 weeks to 2.5 weeks this year.  Also, having learned that players hate to have things removed, the Icy Keep will return at Frostfell! even though that dragon is likely to have shown up elsewhere in the meantime….