General consensus on mentors

[sarehptar]

I'm one of the people who initially got the mentor crown just because I thought it looked cool and I met the requirements. Oops. However, since I've put it on, I have tried to be more helpful to others. Before turning on the mentor status, I basically never said anything in a dungeon or trial, no matter how poorly others were doing or if it was obvious they were struggling. Now if I'm doing mentor roulettes, I do try to give helpful advice, and I always try to be extremely polite about it, never accusing anyone of playing poorly or anything, and always wording my advice gently (i. e., when healing a tank 15+ item levels below where he should be: "I noticed your gear is a few levels low, have you checked out the vendors near aetherytes around the map?" and such).

But overwhelmingly my experience as a mentor has been negative, and I don't think that's largely because of me. I know unsolicited advice can seem condescending, no matter how nicely it's worded, but 95% of the time, even my completely innocuous comments are met with terrible attitudes from new/sprout players. Something as simple as "Playing with topaz carbuncle out in a dungeon can make it harder on our tank to hold the aggro; would you mind changing to emerald, just for right now?" literally netted me a "I don't f*cking care what you think" once.

There's honestly no way for mentors to win. If they stay silent throughout a run where people are having problems, they get treated like crap for "not being helpful" and just "farming for achievements." If they speak up, they get treated like crap for "offering unneeded advice." What can you even do?