Delete the Mentor system or rework it.

[Packetdancer]

The problem isn't that mentors are universally bad, honestly. The biggest problem is that you have plenty of folks who wear the crown like a status symbol, and the mentors actively trying to be helpful are generally so disgusted by the "LOOK I HAVE A CROWN I'M SPECIAL" crowd that none of us ever turn on the status except when Mentor Roulette forces us to. Which only further reinforces the crown's bad reputation.

The only reasons I'm a mentor is because being one lets me help answer questions on our Novice Network, and opens up Mentor Roulette (because I actually do enjoy helping parties get unstuck or learn early extremes when those come up); if I could do those things without being a mentor, I personally would not have bothered to speak to the Smith and gotten the crown that I promptly stuffed into a drawer.

I've been told more than once when helping gear up an undergeared sprout, or seeing someone struggling with their job in a dungeon and offering to meet up afterwards and help them practice, etc., that the advice/help was appreciated. And often it's contrasted with a bad experience they had previously with a mentor. The fact that they associate the actual help with "just other normal players" rather than "mentors" does the already-tarnished reputation of the crown no favors.

I know this, yet the crown's reputation is so bad that I still won't turn it on, or correct the sprout when they assume I'm not one... thus only allowing that overall impression that mentors as a group are universally terrible to continue to grow unabated.

There are, of course, other problems with the system. Like the fact that the criteria for becoming a mentor have absolutely no bearing on how good anyone will be at it, for one.

But the fact that people actually acting like mentors actively try to disassociate themselves from mentor program in many cases is just... It's a situation that kind of makes it blindingly obvious something has gone horribly wrong with the system somewhere along the line. (Possibly back in the original concept-and-design phase.)

Sorry excuses for mentors aside, the system is kind of fundamentally broken when most of the 100 slots in Novice Network are occupied by non-mentors who just wanted the crown and related achievements and have no interest in actually helping people.

I have not been able to consistently join the Novice Network since Endwalker's launch. I'm assuming people are still actively answering questions there—because I do see some people chiming in on the occasions I do manage to join—but I sure as heck don't know for sure because I can't join the dang thing in the first place like 75% of the time.