Mentors...please!

[Lastelli]

Sure there's something that can be done. Change the commendation system.

Instead of telling players to give a commendation to someone who left a good impression on you (which can mean any number of things), tell players to give a commendation to a player they think is worthy of being a mentor.

We don't do that in real life, and there's a good reason for that. Students don't get to chose their mentors/teachers because they lack the knowledge to understand whether or not a person is suitable for the role. Even at university, students can at best evaluate a course towards its conclusion, and the evaluation typically has little to do with the content of the course and more to do with how it was carried out, but that happens only at the end, after several months, not after a 20 minutes lecture.

Mentors should have credentials that prove they have a solid knowledge about what they are supposed to teach. SE believes that commendations and play time (=jobs at max level) is enough. They're probably wrong, but it is what it is.

Thankfully, we already have a good mentor system and that's the balance discord, where mentors achieved that status because they're generally considered good players. Just redirect the sprouts there.

[RajNish]

How exactly can you adjust the system?

Sure there's something that can be done. Change the commendation system. Change the icon for mentors to something other than a crown.

This.

Students don't get to chose their mentors/teachers because they lack the knowledge to understand whether or not a person is suitable for the role.

Your comparison is incorrect. First of all, because mentors are not teachers, and beginners are not students. But speaking your language, a teacher can lose his job very quickly if he offends his students, calling them idiots etc.

[Lastelli]

This.



Your comparison is incorrect. First of all, because mentors are not teachers, and beginners are not students. But speaking your language, a teacher can lose his job very quickly if he offends his students, calling them idiots etc.

That's not the point. The point is people with no clue about the game (including many max level players that clearly didn't even spend a few minutes reading their skills' tooltips) should not be allowed to decide whether someone is qualified to be a mentor or not. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why the current system is flawed: commendations are not a good measure of players' skill and knowledge. Courtesy can be one of several factors to take into account, but you can't decide that someone is suitable to be a mentor just because they're being nice.

Ideally, there should be a system that allows players to show how knowledgeable they are and if they meet a certain skill requirement (set by SE), then let them be mentors. Remove any kind of reward from the mentor system to make sure people aren't mentoring just for the reward, or let the reward be based on something different from the number of duties you run and linked to the quality of your mentoring. The current system however is built so that you can be a mentor regardless of your skill, your knowledge and your willingness to help and to make it worse it rewards mentors depending of the number of completed duties, where duties with very different difficulty are worth the same. It's wrong in any possible way, from the mentors' selection phase to the incentive structure, but replacing it with another equally bad system where mentors would just be chatty guys that get commendations by being all nice during random casual duties is not the way to go.

[Arazehl]

From the start there were no set policies on what was expected of a mentor in both action and behavior. No overseers assigned to make sure their group of mentors met certain goals and guidelines. No real qualifications were ever put in place other than comms and having an expected level achievements. No test of one's knowledge and ability before becoming a mentor. No great incentive to work towards.

Just throw a group of people in one large linkshell and let the pot boil is what it's come down to. Not only are there a bunch of mentors who's behavior is toxic, but this sets a bad example for those upcoming novice who may one day become mentors themselves.

They need to scrap this so called mentor program that's become a cesspool as it stands. Maybe start smaller groups of mentors, and not put everyone in one large linkshell. Find a way to separate the good from the bad. Yes and have one Senior mentor oversee their one smaller group. Maybe make an app for filling out weekly requirements by mentors and those that don't meet those requirement risk losing their status as mentor. Give better incentives for being a mentor. Reward for good behavior and stop rewarding for bad behavior as well. There are many things they could do to make this program far better than what it is.