Mentor needs to mean something again

[Sabrenn]

If everyone had access to the status instead of giving it a restriction people might finally use it like it should be used: a status that indicates that you're currently willing to mentor someone/currently mentoring someone.

Yes you might get people who aren't qualified answering, but those people exist who have the icon and people who don't have the icon also help a lot from what I've seen even though they don't have it unlocked.

Is that a crazy idea?

[Krotoan]

Court of public opinion? Or just trolls? Yeah no.. and I rarely defend mentors.

More like GM attention. Your chatlogs and recent party actions are sent to a team of reviewers in SE's employ. If there are an excess of abusive chats or actions (constant votekicks), you are penalized or at least your mentor status is taken away.

If everyone had access to the status instead of giving it a restriction people might finally use it like it should be used: a status that indicates that you're currently willing to mentor someone/currently mentoring someone.

Yes you might get people who aren't qualified answering, but those people exist who have the icon and people who don't have the icon also help a lot from what I've seen even though they don't have it unlocked.

Is that a crazy idea?

This is how it should have been I think. Just a voluntary Opt in with NO rewards or anything more than a "M" by your name or other tiny indicator that "yes this person is willing to help with things". They ruined it by adding incentives.

[SturmChurro]

More like GM attention. Your chatlogs and recent party actions are sent to a team of reviewers in SE's employ. If there are an excess of abusive chats or actions (constant votekicks), you are penalized or at least your mentor status is taken away.

It would be a lot more efficient if reporting a mentor's behavior specifically would actually have an effect. Blacklisting to get a GM's attention is arbitrary. I have zero people blacklisted for example, many people blacklist for different (including petty) reasons; Doesn't get to the issue. This would have GMs needlessly looking over multitudes of players, just because a few players thought they would blacklist for whatever reason. Way too much unnecessary work where the GM only has this to go by, "player has been blacklisted several times". They would have to go through potentially months, and months (maybe more) of logs to find "behavior unbecoming of a mentor"... each.

[Krotoan]

It would be a lot more efficient if reporting a mentor's behavior specifically would actually have an effect. Blacklisting to get a GM's attention is arbitrary. I have zero people blacklisted for example, many people blacklist for different (including petty) reasons; Doesn't get to the issue. This would have GMs needlessly looking over multitudes of players, just because a few players thought they would blacklist for whatever reason. Way too much unnecessary work where the GM only has this to go by, "player has been blacklisted several times". They would have to go through potentially months, and months (maybe more) of logs to find "behavior unbecoming of a mentor"... each.

The problem when you give a direct "report for.. " option is you give an easy avenue for abuse. I'm looking for things a script or formula could do on the backend to track possible abuses. There is definitely a word bank or pattern for abusive actions that can be fed into a script and the output would be much easier to go through than say just slogging through logs.

People need power to effect change, but this is one of those cases I'd think directly having players act as arbiters of wrong and right would be abused and at the very least cause unnecessary work. Better to recognize the aftermath of an abusive mentor and use that information to create a flagging script or formula.