How to give advice

[TaleraRistain]

Unless you've established a mentor-student or teacher-student relationship where said person is actively seeking advice from you, then you should ask if someone wants advice. The reason is because it's important to keep the control in the person's hands. They're a random person in Duty Finder. You and they will probably never meet again. When you say something like "I'm going to school you" you are disregarding any experience the person may have and setting yourself up as the ultimate authority. But that person does not have to see you as an authority.

Someone might try to call it sugarcoating or hand-holding, but that doesn't change the fact that it's essential that the person maintains control over whether they want to seek out advice or not. If they don't, then you may just need to exit yourself from the situation. Or grin and bear it until the end and then leave, having gotten what you came in for.

[Nixxe]

Someone might try to call it sugarcoating or hand-holding, but that doesn't change the fact that it's essential that the person maintains control over whether they want to seek out advice or not. If they don't, then you may just need to exit yourself from the situation. Or grin and bear it until the end and then leave, having gotten what you came in for.

Or kick them for playstyle differences.

[Berethos]

Unless you've established a mentor-student or teacher-student relationship where said person is actively seeking advice from you, then you should ask if someone wants advice. The reason is because it's important to keep the control in the person's hands.

Agreed, especially if you want your advice to be effective and not just a waste of your own typing.

I'm a teacher in real life - there's an art to getting someone to buy into the idea that they should both listen to the knowledge that you're imparting and that it will actually benefit them. Chances are the drive-by advice drop approach is going to be ignored, unless that individual came into the experience wanting you to share your knowledge already.

Seriously - butter-em up a bit with pointing out something they did right, but then tell them that you've got something that will help them even more, and be surgical about it. You might just be surprised at how well that works so that the time you could have spent doing more pressing buttons in combat isn't wasted on typing words. Doesn't take much extra effort either - "So you've got this part of the job down pat, but I noticed this other thing, and if you do x and y you'll really see things come together." Obviously this is for when you have a couple seconds to type it out, and barking out commands in the middle of combat cause whatever they're doing/not doing needs to change yesterday is appropriate for those moments. I wouldn't want anyone here getting their hempen pantalettes in a twist thinking I'm suggesting any command needs to be couched in that approach.

Maybe it's just me, but we seem to be in general so fixated on the "Don't make it easy, make it harder, gotta be tough, school of hard knocks, or it's not legitimate" approach that we generally just suck at actually teaching each other how to get better, and that definitely extends to gaming more often than not.