Novice Network Feedback for SE

[Rongway]

- Allow Mentors and Newbies to leave the network themselves, perhaps via sub command on their own name.
- Add / remove yourself from the Network by toggling your Mentor status.
- Auto kick AFK Mentors after X amount of minutes.
- Allow separate notification sounds for Mentors and Newbies.

(Yes, please.)
As of this writing, 20 of the mentors on Hyperion are AFK, and more are Online (non mentor) status.
Also, I expected /online and /mentor to set the respective statuses, and was surprised to find that I needed to open a social/LS/FC window and edit my search settings every time I wanted to toggle my status.
We all agree to mentor actively when we toggle on mentor status, so anyone who is afk or plain online should not be taking up one of the limited seats in the channel.

Another issue I've encountered is that it's nice that we have the freedom to self-police as a community, but it disturbs me that some of the mentors are (a) freely spoiling story/cutscene content or (b) using /n as a social channel, with none of the talk relevant to helping new adventurers. When asked to stop, on either issue, there is a divide between the mentors who agree that those behaviors are unacceptable and those who shrug it off as something that "newbs should get used to it lol".

And even when answering questions, some of the answers certain mentors give are painted with all sorts of attitude.

We as a community of leaders need to set some clear standards as to what is appropriate on the /n channel and for what offenses we can reasonably remove a novice, or perhaps more importantly, another mentor, from the channel.


Regarding kick protocols, please consider this suggested solution.

[Kosmos992k]

Regarding kick protocols, please consider this suggested solution.

Yes, this kind of vote kick mechanism would be a very good idea, it would prevent mote kick abuse, and it would also allow the mentors as a group to self police the channel. I'd suggest 3 or 4 other mentors need to be in accord rather than the 2 in the original suggestion since a smaller number of mentors in accord would make it easier for a small group of friends to dominate vote kicking from the novice network.

It would also throw some of the onus for justifying conduct onto those who are kicked since it wouldn't be a case of an individual abusing the kick feature.

[Kosmos992k]

Yes, this kind of vote kick mechanism would be a very good idea, it would prevent mote kick abuse, and it would also allow the mentors as a group to self police the channel.

I wanted to add something I posted while discussing this idea with someone else in another topic;

Personally, I think two is too small a number as it would allow a small number of people to effectively dominate the NN by kicking people of their choice. I'd suggest more mentors need to agree. I not sure that 50% would work because that potentially could run into many Mentors who are AFK, or just not interested in voting. What might be a workable situation would be for the vote kick to pick 5 random Mentors who are online, and request their vote on the kick. If the majority of them agree, the kick proceeds, if not, then the vote kick is cancelled. As you say the kicked person can appeal to a GM, but by using a voting system like this, it really removes the liability from individual mentors when it comes to kicking others, as well as making the kick more of a community response, than a personal one.

This last point is something i think is important because we have moderation power if we are mentors, and accidental or intentional misuse of that can be a problem on both sides of the coin. But if the power were tempered some, and it was more a community response in terms of kicking someone, it would carry more authority, and take some of the responsibility from individual players. Nothing is perfect of course, but it could work.

[ShizuCheese]

I know I'm repeating things people have already kind of said, but I honestly think this is the best way to go about fixing a good chunk of the problems people are running into, plus it involves features that are already in the game:

>Only have mentors added to Novice chat if they have their status actively set to "Mentor". That way, you don't have people crowding up the chat that aren't actually interested in helping people atm because even mentors have their own stuff they need/ want to do in the game (eg: If I'm working on the latest installment to MSQ or helping people in my FC, I may not have the time/ energy to also be helping people in novice chat). Also, they should change it so you can change your online status from your character page, rather than by editing your search info, for the sake of simplicity.

>Have people who are AFK for 10 minutes be autokicked, same as when you're in a duty.

>Make banning a vote-dismiss feature. Regarding Kosmos' concern about if 50% would work, I feel like my two previous suggestions would help curb that, and if 50% is really too high of a percentage than I'd say at least make it 25%.