[Suggestion] Mentor Rework

Greetings fellow WoLs. I'd like to touch on the Mentor today. We all know Mentor role is ... useless.

Hear me out, acquiring a Mentor role from either DoW/M or DoL/H is not by any means hard, it is just time consuming, and it is not right.

All requirements are not hard to meet, the only struggle may be Comms, which is a silly requirement by itself, but oh whatever.

Problem about this thing is that there are no incentives for a Mentor to be a "good" Mentor.
I'll take a prime example of myself. I have acquired Mentor role by a chance, i didn't even knew i met all the requirements, so i equipped the crown. That was it.
-Did i gave any advices to Sprouts ever? No.
-Have i joined Novice Network at any time? No.
-Did i don ANYTHING a Mentor is supposed to do? No.

I simply had no reason to be a "good" and "helpful" Mentor at all.
Mentor status means nothing and the only thing you can do, and feel rewarded is Mount that you can get after 2.000 Mentor Roulettes, that is a laughable prize.

My suggestion then?

Rework the Mentor requirements to be challenging, Mentor should be only a player most deserving. Give Mentors incentives not to be assholes, but helpful people feeling rewarded for their job.

New Mentor Requirements for DoW/M: [Suggested]
- All Jobs Lv80 (BLU capped)
- All dungeons cleared (Mentor is lost with the release of new dungeons)
- All Trials, Extreme Trials, 24-man RAIDS, 8-man RAIDS, including Savages, all Ultimate fights cleared (Mentor is lost with release of new content listed here)

New Mentor Requirements for DoH/L: [Suggested]
- All Crafting/Gathering Professions Lv80
- Crafting/Gathering log finished from atleast 75% for each Profession

And with that, give Mentors a REASON te be a Mentor other than "Yay, now i have a crown before my name."

Mentor Rewards: If player with Mentor status is not reported and disciplinary punished (Temporary Ban), a Mentor player will receive XX Crysta, (Crysta is a alternate Mog Station currency) or any other monthly reward other than Grind Mount (Tokens for example that can be exchanged for Mentor unique items)

This way i know whenever i will meet a Mentor, i know that person deserves his role, and now he has a reason to be a good Mentor.

Will i lose Mentor? Yes, i will, but i don't care for that role as i literally went past by it and it stuck to my shoe (as i did to thousands of other people)

tl;dr: Make Mentor an exlcusive role not handed to anyone walking by.

You probably should take that crown off as you have no idea what being a mentor is. Like seriously, do the rest of us a favor and take it off. What does clearing savage level content and extreme raids have to do with helping a sprout whose running Sastasha for the first time??

Just get rid of the system entirely. Players just use the crown to give them an imaginary sense of superiority. Real helpers don't need a sticker by their name to assist players in need.

you can grind mindlessly thru roulettes or pvp to level jobs - that doesn't make you any good at said job at high levels.

also requiring ultimate clears? smh

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Originally Posted by Kimstar

New Mentor Requirements for DoW/M: [Suggested]
- All Jobs Lv80 (BLU capped)
- All dungeons cleared (Mentor is lost with the release of new dungeons)
- All Trials, Extreme Trials, 24-man RAIDS, 8-man RAIDS, including Savages, all Ultimate fights cleared (Mentor is lost with release of new content listed here)

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Those requirements have very little thing to do with an actual mentor. Sure, having experience on content is a good thing, but it's the exact same problem with technical experts being potentially very poor teachers. A mentor should be helpful, and have decent social skills. That's why, in my opinion, Commendations is still the best metric.

However, the commendation system could be tweaked so that less of them would be given willy-nilly. They could cost something for the person who gives it, and/or everyone could only have a limited commendations allowance to give each week. More importantly, the Mentor status should be removed if you don't receive any commendation for a set amount of time.

After that, you could give some QoL benefits to Mentors, like cheaper teleport, a larger chocobo saddle, etc...that would be revoked if you lose the mentor status, so that people would actually care to stay a Mentor.

Literally no requirement they add to the crown is going to filter out people who aren't interested in being genuinely helpful, and the only reward one should expect out of it is the opportunity to actually help those who are in need of it.

The only rework, then, that needs to be done to the mentor system is to change the icon to something not so prestigious, like the watering can idea that gets floated here now and again, and to establish a non-novice network global opt-in chat that can be the new stomping ground for all the garbage that usually gets put into there by people using them as social linkshells.

maybe you should have joined novice network before you wrote this so you would have any idea what people even ask from mentors.

Jesus fing christ.

guys ffs a mentor is there to answer questions sprouts have about the game. he is not an optimisation sss raider master with photographic memory that knows every job inside out and has 99 in fflogs.
the only requirement a mentor needs is being helpfull , knowing how to use google and having a decent idea of how a job plays like when asked about it .

Also the "novice network is a shitposting fest" thing . How often do you think sprouts ask questions? when a sprout asks, then people do indeed try to answer. when no sprouts asks stuff people are simply gonna talk . and some how alot call this shitposting . how is it any weird that when alot of people gather theyre gonna talk. do you think SE pays them to help?
the only thing mentors get as a reward is an if you help in 2000 random instances heres a mount and according to you the crown . the only time i watched a mentor glorifying the crown was in a youtube joke video.

Also you dont need to be a mentor to be helpfull if you want to be helpfull you just have to help.

So no i dont think that the mentor stuff are too lax wasnt then wont be now . at most the changes will remove the people who didnt feel like helping at all, werent kind to others and didnt play good as dps .

i personally am a mentor .when someone asks i try to help as much as my memory wills or i look up on google if the content is too hard for a new player. was in the novice network but some of the mentors were hypocritical saying too many mentors so i kick for nothing even talking while he talked french with his mates all the time and said nothing to french people and so i quit from there. I currently have 1451 commends ammassed by 2 + years of gameplay .

I don't think mentor status needs to be anything overly difficult to get, though I do think they need to do something to keep the useless mentors who just wanted the crown out of NN due to the player limit.

Making NN opt in only would be a start since I think a lot of these players don't even know they're taking up space.

yesterday while doing the leveling roulette we had a mentor healer who was so bad we wiped 3 times from a lack of heals and he died twice on basic mechanic.
My friend and I were wondering the whole time "how is that a mentor?"

Just...no. Most mentors I've met don't even speak or say anything helpful. Your kind of mentor feels more like a Hardcore raider than an "Actual" Mentor that's suppose to be a good example and help beginner players with questions or content. The 1500 commendations thing is a good stepping stone in the right direction, because dear lord 300 is not hard to come by. Act like a jerk you most likely won't get any commendations. Time to weed out the ones who shouldn't be having that crown.

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Originally Posted by Sylvain

yesterday while doing the leveling roulette we had a mentor healer who was so bad we wiped 3 times from a lack of heals and he died twice on basic mechanic.
My friend and I were wondering the whole time "how is that a mentor?"

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Nothing says a mentor has to be good at playing a job they are currently on. Just needs to reach level 80 (60 before) and do Job quest/role quests. Mentor is more about knowing good answer to give. But if anyone, not just mentor, is failing to heal and wiping to basic stuff, that is pretty concerning. Lazy? Really bad connection? Bought account? Or really just that bad and got carried through most dungeons and got pity comms? Who knows.


Also to the main post, don't know how I missed this gold mine of a post. This is something I feel like would come from someone whose head is far up their rear. These are HORRIBLE suggestions for mentor. Mentor isn't nor should it be an equivalent to Runescape completionist cape. Dear OP, please, turn your crown off if you currently have it on. You look to be the type to give all mentors a bad image.

I don’t think that being able to clear everything in the game should be a requirement. Someone may be able to explain every mechanic in mandatory dungeons but be unable to explain a savage fight, that doesn’t make them unhelpful.

That being said, if there were to be a change, personally I think the only thing that could be done is to perhaps add a separate “mentor commendation” system where party members can commend a mentor. I think a system like that would be better for getting rewards because then those who pick up the status for said rewards have to at least be somewhat helpful to get them.

Again though, being a mentor is more about just wanting to help, like people have said. You’ll always have good and bad mentors, just like in any community.

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Originally Posted by CastoaKardos

That being said, if there were to be a change, personally I think the only thing that could be done is to perhaps add a separate “mentor commendation” system where party members can commend a mentor. I think a system like that would be better for getting rewards because then those who pick up the status for said rewards have to at least be somewhat helpful to get them.

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How would that be different from current commendations ?

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

How would that be different from current commendations ?

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In theory, it wouldn’t be. I’d imagine it’d work the same way, just having mentor rewards locked behind them. It’d be by no means a perfect fix, since people tend to hand out comms all the time anyway, but personally I’ve always thought it’d be at least a better system than having them locked behind mentor roulette. Though that’s mostly because most of the complaints I see about the current system is over people becoming mentors and spamming the roulette for the mount with no regard for new players. I know other issues are around, but at least on my server, that’s what I hear about the most.

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Originally Posted by CastoaKardos

Though that’s mostly because most of the complaints I see about the current system is over people becoming mentors and spamming the roulette for the mount with no regard for new players.

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You can use current commendations for that. Make it so that you need to keep receiving commendations if you want to keep your mentor status. Of course, it would be related to the times when you actually do instanced content (No Mentor removal if you go on vacation for a month :p)

That's also why I suggested that mentor should receive ongoing QoL so that you won't reach a point where you have all benefits secured and can quit "mentoring" completely.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

You can use current commendations for that. Make it so that you need to keep receiving commendations if you want to keep your mentor status. Of course, it would be related to the times when you actually do instanced content (No Mentor removal if you go on vacation for a month :p)

That's also why I suggested that mentor should receive ongoing QoL so that you won't reach a point where you have all benefits secured and can quit "mentoring" completely.

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Yeah it's the first time I've heard of a mentor QoL idea and honestly it sounds really interesting to me. I think it'd be really fun to see what all could be done with a system like that if it was implemented right.

"Mentor" is a status like "Online", "Busy" "LFG" and "RP". If you don't want to mentor, don't have your status set to mentor. You qualified to mentor, but that doesn't mean you should mentor 24/7. If you're not mentoring, don't advertise to sprouts that you are currently willing to mentor and take space in the nn from people who want to help. That's all. I qualify for both pve and doh/l mentors but if i'm just farming trials or leveling a new class I don't know how to use yet, I don't have it on because I am not currently mentoring. Would you have "RP" status on then complain that people whisper you about rp because you just want to have "RP" next to your name? No.

That's all I have to say on this topic. Nothing wrong with the reqs.

What you're asking for is an "Elite" player badge. That's not what the mentor status is for, sure it's how some view it, but it's wrong. And I'd say an "Elite" player badge has no place here, it just encourages the wrong kind of attitude. Ultimate already gives you a title to wear as a badge of honour and exclusive weapons to parade around for completing it.

I agree there needs to be a better way to determine who is and who isn't a mentor. But a mentor should only be that, a mentor. Somebody who helps and is willing to help people who're new, unsure, need questions answered, need help and so on. You don't need to have done the latest content, to have cleared savage or ultimate and so on. They need to be knowledgeable enough to be able to offer meaningful help and to be the helpful sort.

As suggested in another thread, I'd be more in favour of replacing the comm requirement with a new comm option called "Commend for Mentor Status" it'd still tally as part of your regular comms but it'd also contribute towards the number of mentor comms you need to get the status. This then means if they're comming you because you were helpful or had the right attitude then they're more likely to comm you for mentor status, but if you did your job right or helped carry or they thought your name was funny or you made them laugh then they might just regular comm you.

A mentor is here to help and guide new players without any promise of reward. This is not capitalist network, this is novice network. The only reward I always had was smiles and happy sprouts that were sad to eventually graduate out of it, and that's the only thing that matters. If you introduce rewards, the only mentors you'll get are mentors that aren't here to help sprouts but that are here to farm rewards.

While it's always good to have a general idea of certain advanced game systems, 99% of the questions asked here are "how can I unlock my chocobo and when?" or "what are retainers?" or "how do I change class?", or maybe "how do collectables work exactly?". Some might go as far as asking for melds, but that's about it.

If you really want to be a good mentor, 1) be happy and willing to actively help new players and 2) have a big dictionary of useful links and resources, as much as for the sprouts than for yourself