Quote Originally Posted by Mhaeric View Post
I always see this statement or a variation of it trotted out every time mentors get brought up, and it's poor reasoning. Technically it is true, but it is also a lot easier to provide help to new people with the crown than without it. Without the novice chat that the crown provides, one would have to maintain one's own friends list and/or linkshell to communicate with new players if one didn't want to rely on finding and chatting with new players via /search and /tell or just happening upon them. The crown gives access to an easy way to both communicate en masse with novices and provide access to the same service to those novices.
Novice Network could easily exist without mentors, or the crown if they chose to implement a better system. Usually, when I am helping people, I'm shot calling pointers during the duty, and the Novice Network chat serves more as a "Can anyone help me queue for X?" kind of deal.

I wasn't giving my sassy little remark because "Lol, mentors, am I right?! Upvotes to the left, guys." It was more of a "The entire damn system is still broken, the requirements don't mean jack - trade or otherwise."

(Hi I'm a crafting mentor with all level 80 crafters, 2 level 80 gathers, and I couldn't tell you the first thing about crafting & gathering.)

The system is bad, the rewards make the system even worse, and the entire thing has a giant stigma because being a good player means something different to everyone, while the best "mentor(s)" in this game is youtube, The Balance discord, and reddit for crafting macros.

The system is broken, and the only way to ever solve it is to peel it away, and make a newer, better system. This isn't even counting the problem that we have a ton of in-game systems that teach people the basics, but all of them are optional - but thank god for that because sometimes they outright tell you information that they shouldn't be feeding you! (Tank hall of novice telling players to AOE a few times, and then single target.)

I will agree, however, that the novice network chat is something worth keeping.