Originally Posted by
Naoki_Yoshida
Hello, everyone. Producer and Director Yoshida here.
First, let me thank you all for all the feedback on the mentor system. We’ve been poring over the feedback gathered from players around the globe since the system went live.
I’ve also been spending my time in-game as a mentor as well, and with my experiences and your feedback in mind, I’d like to take a moment to go over the current state and future plans of the mentor system.
Adjustments to the requirements to be considered a “New Adventurer”
We’ve received feedback mentioning that the requirement of having 40 hours of play time or less to be considered a “New Adventurer” is not long enough to have a chance to thoroughly experience the wide breadth of content available in FFXIV. Considering that the first expansion pack is available and that the level cap has been raised to 60, we will be adjusting it so the “New Beginner” status will remain until players complete the main scenario quest “Before the Dawn” and when their play time exceeds 168 hours.
With this change, mentors will be able to support beginners not only up until they reach level 50 and complete the 2.0 main scenario, “The Ultimate Weapon,” but they can continue to offer support on the raising of item levels through the gathering of tomestones and such. This adjustment will be made as soon as possible, without waiting for Patch 3.3.
Along with this change, the players who no longer have the “New Adventurer” status because their play time has exceeded 40 hours will once again be eligible to designate themselves as “New Adventurers.”
Requirements to become a mentor and the mentor population
There are many players who fulfill the requirements and have become mentors, which is great thing. However, on certain Worlds, there is an issue where there are too many mentors which leads to them being unable to join the Novice Network.
There have been suggestions saying that the requirements to become a mentor should be stricter but due to the following reasons, we have no plans to make any changes at this time.
Upon finalizing the requirements to become a mentor, we have investigated the achievement data of active players on all Worlds and set them under the assumption where a certain number of mentors will be active on all Worlds at any given hour.
As a result, the number of players who became a mentor is higher than what the development and operations teams had anticipated. However, there is a large difference between the three regions.
Japanese players tend to play a large variety of content which makes the requirements to become a mentor seem quite simple. However, North American and European trend more towards focusing specifically on certain types of content instead. With that said, the requirements to become mentor will remain as they are for now. (We may revise the requirements as we progress through future patches though.)
We are planning to adjust the following points in order to address the issue where active mentors are unable to join the Novice Network because it’s always full.
Inactive Mentors
To allow mentors the opportunity to join the Novice Network more frequently, we have implemented a feature in Patch 3.21 where mentors who have been inactive for a certain period of time will be removed automatically from the chat channel. We’re planning to implement a feature where mentors can manually join or leave the Novice Network in a future update.
Configuring the Novice Network auto-join
Being a mentor to new players can be considered an aspect of role play and it also servers to hasten the matching of players who have not completed the content, so I’m very happy that there are lots of players who decided to become a mentor. However, I believe that not all mentors are planning on assisting new players via the Novice Network, but instead, they plan to do so through regular game play.
Currently, all mentors will be added to the Novice Network automatically, but we are planning to implement a text command that will toggle the auto-join to the chat channel in Patch 3.25. After Patch 3.25, the auto-join feature will be set to “Off” by default and those who wish to join the Novice Network will be able to do so proactively so they can better assist beginners.
Expansion of the Mentor System
We have also received a large amount of feedback asking for the ability to display which field a mentor specializes in. Especially for those players who became a mentor by accomplishing the achievement requirements for Disciples of the Hand/Land and feel they aren’t qualified to offer support regarding high-level battle content.
To address this, we are considering adding a DoH/DoL mentor icon and a separate battle class mentor icon other than the existing crown and would allow mentors to set the type of icon they would like on their own. In addition, we are looking into adding a “PvP mentor” option which the community reps have recently touched on as well.
Conversations in the Novice Network
We have received feedback saying that there have been instances where discussions relating to high-level/endgame content and perhaps even spoilers for the main scenario, which has nothing to do with an advice to beginners, take place on the Novice Network. Since the mentor system was recently introduced and there are large number of players who became mentors, there tends to be times where the conversation may stray a bit.
However, I imagine that mentors are also getting used to the chat channel and there are times where they may be trying to make the Novice Network look active by holding various types of conversation. So for now, we will continue to monitor the situation, but we’re not thinking about applying any strict guidelines or rules.
With that said, there may be a lot of beginners who are looking forward to experiencing the story for themselves, so we ask that mentors please try and avoid conversations that may lead to major spoilers!
Invitation to the Novice Network
Both the development and operations teams are checking the trends in regards to mentors and beginners through the chat logs on the Novice Network. But as I mentioned earlier, there are some differences between the regions.
Players in North America and Europe are fairly familiar with these types of open chat channels in MMORPGs, especially where mentors tend to actively invite beginners. However, in Japan, we often see cases where players are not used to inviting beginners, or cases where some mentors don’t know about the necessity of inviting beginners to the Novice Network.
Regarding the need to manually invite beginners to the Novice Network, we have received a lot of feedback asking to allow beginners to join the channel automatically or to display a confirmation window when the beginners receive an invitation.
In regards to the auto-join possibility for beginners, there would be no safeguard against RMT characters joining the Novice Network and due to this we ask that mentors make the decision whether to invite a character or not based on the character’s name.
With the idea of displaying a confirmation window when the beginners receive an invite, there may be cases where new players don’t understand what the notice means, or where it can become a hassle if confirmation windows are constantly popping up because of mentor invites. With these cases in mind, we’ll continue to monitor the situation before we decide to make adjustments.
However, sending an invite to beginners under the current system requires that mentors run a player search and send an invite manually from the resulting list, which is a bit cumbersome. So first, we would like to improve the system by adding a search button on the Novice Network where they can simply click the button to search the beginners and send invites from there.
Also we would like to quickly implement various minor updates and further increase the activity between mentors and beginners so we would like to ask you to continue to give us all of your feedback!