Do you think the Mentor system could be fixed by lifting most restrictions to it?

[Canadane]

Honestly, they need to at least combine the trade and combat mentors into a single general mentor status and require the criteria for both to be met in order to become a mentor.

This is already the only way to get the big crown.
So just don’t listen to specific crown mentors? Only pay attention to the general big crown mentors? I dunno what you really want here.

On a side note, the crown icon is too vain. A watering can or something would be better.

[Vahlnir]

I think there should be some sort of incentive to mentor, but definitely not such a significant one as an exclusive mount. Something smaller. It shouldn't be such a thankless job.

I know all about thankless jobs. I'm a tank. lol

That doesn't make me want to tank less though. As far as being a mentor goes it is also a thankless job, reward or not.

[EaMett]

Of course however, the reality of Mentors is that it's an elite badge of honor where the badge is flaunted and is used inappropriately. This concept is about destroying the negative stigma / elitist toxic behavior behind the mentor crown.

Personally I have rarely ever seen competent / patient / helpful mentors. I know good ones exist, I've seen them but how many parties have you been in where the mentor player yells at a sprout instead of teaching them something?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to quote one of my previous posts:

The reason [why mentors have a bad/toxic image] is survivor bias.

I've posted this before but I'll do so again here. Just like how the OP has only encountered one toxic mentor in his 1700 mentor roulettes, the data I've put together on Aether reflects this.
I've found that ~1.2% of mentor encounters are "bad". Now in my case "bad" means that they:
- Left a dungeon on start or early (ex roulettes)
- Behavior that doesn't meet my standards of mentorship. For example some mentors are helpful and give advice but get impatient with sprouts. I add these to the "bad" section
- clearly Toxic behavior

The actually toxic mentors represent under 0.14% of mentor encounters. Obviously, as the majority of "bad" mentors are just mentors who drop from ex fights.

Next to that a full 20% of mentors are helpful and largely benefit the party. The rest of mentors are just silent (exactly like how the op says he's 99% silent).
If you're wondering how the silent mentors fair, 54% have above average skill levels (This is subjective but I'm confident I'm somewhat accurate) and only 7% have subpar skill (potentially mentors learning new classes). The rest are either average or were encountered in content where it was hard to tell so I marked them as unknown.

This actually paints a pretty good picture of mentors in general. The whole "mentor system is broken" thing is, like I said, survivor bias. It's just the result of people's brains tuning out the almost 80% of silent mentors and skimming over the 20% of good ones since that's what they expect. But if 1 out of 100 mentors does something they shouldn't then that sticks around in people's minds.

Edit: This data doesn't speak to the quality of NN. Just battle content on Aether. I'm sure the NN mileage varies, especially in EU where language barriers are a thing. On Faerie the NN is good.

In other words, there was no mentor problem to start with, no elitism, nothing. The main thing that could really make a difference would be putting extreme fights into their own roulette. That would fix a large portion of the few bad encounters people have in content.

[Machka]

I know all about thankless jobs. I'm a tank. lol

That doesn't make me want to tank less though. As far as being a mentor goes it is also a thankless job, reward or not.

Agreed. I think it's cool that there is a system for people to help out newer players, but tbh I don't think any reward is necessary either. People who actually want/like to help other players will do so whether or not there is a reward.

I've never become a mentor even though I've met the requirements since the system was implemented, but I actively help and encourage other players and do 'mentor-like' stuff regardless because I genuinely enjoy helping out and seeing people get to enjoy the game. Might be a bit cheesy, but seeing people be excited and/or improving in ways that they would like to is reward enough already honestly. Because I like this game and it makes me happy to see other people happy with it.

[Liam_Harper]

I personally don't think the Mentor system is a bad thing, I've seen NN answer all sort of questions and offer help, so it has benefits. It's just a horribly neglected system that needs serious rework and polishing. The crown should be a watering can or teaching hat. The 2000 mentor roulette mount should be removed and put elsewhere. No other rewards should be added. Craft mentor is a joke and the requirements needs a serious revamp and combat mentor could do with a look at. Sprouts should be offered an automatic invite and detailed explanation of NN at around lv10, not relying on a random mentor to add them. NN should be moderated properly and toxic behaviour investigated. And plenty more smaller things.

1.5 k comms may be hard to get for a new person just starting to play the game but for anyone who's been around 5+ years if you don't have 1.5k comms by now you've really done something wrong.

I've been around on and off since ARR and I have 467 comms myself. The simple reason is that I use the Hunt for tomes and doing hard content in PF doesn't earn you any comms. I can still (and do) answer plenty of combat related questions accurately in NN. Comms are useless as a metric of how experienced or skilled a player you are.

[EaMett]

I'm of the opinion that the Mentor system shouldn't be about getting rewarded for helping people. It should just be about helping people. A special roulette for Mentors (and the long term goal that most people become a mentor for) were a mistake, period. But that's my opinion and clearly you feel differently.

Rewards can be a good incentive. If you had a mentor roulette for ex trials with an amazing reward you can bet that mentors would be putting in a lot of effort to teach sprouts the fights. The problem is neither the rewards nor the mentors. It's the way the current mentor roulette is setup. There's such a huge delta in time spent for reward in the current roulette that it highly promotes dropping some content. We could completely ignore human psychology and just go with the "all mentors should be a flawless image of selflessness" or we could just implement a better set of roulettes.

[ZattanaWen]

I know all about thankless jobs. I'm a tank. lol

That doesn't make me want to tank less though. As far as being a mentor goes it is also a thankless job, reward or not.

Tanks get plenty of perks. You get your own mounts, faster queues, and more comms than DPS.

[DrWho2010]

I've been around on and off since ARR and I have 467 comms myself. The simple reason is that I use the Hunt for tomes and doing hard content in PF doesn't earn you any comms. I can still (and do) answer plenty of combat related questions accurately in NN. Comms are useless as a metric of how experienced or skilled a player you are.

congrats you're an exception. you choose not to engage in content where comms would normally be flowing esp if you're a healer main. I will agree comms are pretty much useless as a metric for measuring experience/skill, but it's still a requirement that has to be met to gain access to mentorship status.

[Sated]

I have a sprout alt that's in novice chat; the mentors seem friendly and eager enough to help but I see them giving incomplete, uninformed, or just plain incorrect advice daily.

So currently I think the need of having helpful and friendly players is being met, and I don't think lowering the bar of entry would help fix the bad advice part at all.

[Vickii]

Mentors are just players who played in most cases too long. Many are very jaded and just want to run through the dungeon at super speed. If they use novice network it’s usually cliquey and you find the returners and sprouts are more willing to help than mentors in most cases.

To ‘fix’ it you’d need to get rid of the badge altogether. And you’d need to stop it being a min/max thing. Many mentors are getting it as just another thing in the game to complete.

I’d remove mentors from novice network altogether and put a couple of volunteer chat moderators in there instead, part of the SE community team. Maybe make it a cross server chat. Or just make a world chat anyone can talk in.

Really it’s a broken system. Mentor isn’t a gauge of you being a good person, good player or able to teach others. It just means you played a lot. And got comms probably as a healer/tank.