Please moderate Novice Net

[LianaThorne]

Doesn't Square just expect us to handle our own issues for the most part and work them out like adults lolol?

I mean, that's why we don't have any real blacklist system in the game outside of them not wanting to hurt people's feelings by seeing they were blocked. XD

Pretty sure we *are* the moderation. They just don't view things like this as something they need to handle, same with any real harassment issues unless it gets to an actual dangerous point (i.e. having someone fantasia into your old character and old name before following you around the game threatening to kill you and your friends....which was my case.)

[Myrany]

When I first tried this game back when 2.0 came out I made it about 4 hours in game and was SO confused and thanks to someone I asked for help literally lost in a zone I had no business being in. I had no idea how to get back to where I should have been. I couldn't figure out how to even know where I was much less how to travel. I would have killed for a mentor that was actually willing to help. After not finding someone I left the game long before my trial ran out.

When I tried the game again in 2019 I was able to revive my old account still as a trial. I started over on a fresh character and server. For the first 50 levels I still was never approached by any mentors nor did I even see one. I got lucky the game clicked for me this time. At 50 I was in Mor Dona and saw a mentor and asked him a question and he was fantastic and got me sorted and I am to this day grateful for his kindness.

Eventually I did end up in NN on several servers on alts because honestly there are holes in my knowledge of the game and ability to google. Honestly the kind of stuff pictured in the OP is not unusual in all the NNs I have been in. What is worse is if a confused newbie dares to interrupt said conversations with a game question they often will not get a real answer. They will be told to google it. If newbie has to google answers because the mentors wont answer it, then there is no reason to have NN at all imo.

I pretty much avoid NN at this point. I find it often crude, sometimes rude and on rare occasion outright offensive. It does not do the job it was intended to do.

[anw]

I love doing walls of text so here we go.

I wanna say that I've been on a few servers from diff characters and my region moves and not all NN's are equal and I've seen every NN have idle chat and a couple stray off into weird stuff like your image. I've seen casual discrimination on gender, disability & race in one NN from 2 users in particular and all I can say is: report.
Yeah, it's gonna take time but if you're unhappy with them and the mentors aren't setting a good example then it's your responsibility to do your part too. If you're a sprout: report, if you're a mentor: kick & report.
No if's, ands or buts. If you're "busy" and don't have the time copy and paste the info into notepad and report them when you come back. It's not snitching, it's cleaning up the place. You spend the time to do that and you'll see someone's attitude be reigned in.
You won't see NN get moderated if you don't do your part. If you're not part of the solution: you're part of the problem.

If I were you, I would click on /leave and return to the NN later. in
I would just /leave if it got like in the OPs picture, or, I'd actually just Blacklist the Mentor/s or anyone else talking like that, problem solved.
But I do think they (SE) do need to put some rules on topics, like no Politics for a start.

I think if a sprout leaves NN they can't come back iirc. What I used to do when NN was going off the rails and I couldn't deal with it was untick the box in the chat filters and came back later like you suggested.
I've also seen most NN's stick quite firmly to the no politics rule during peak hours and most are in agreement that they don't wanna see 2-3 people going at it for 30 minutes. I've only seen like 3 political chats this year and they've all been very short, brief and polite. When someone says NN isn't a good place for politics they've finished what they were going to say and move on with no fuss.
The only bad situation I've seen was one user who was having a major melty because Asmongold came back to play Stormblood for like 4 hours before quitting, resubbed and went all out for about a day and a half repeatedly getting kicked between the spam. They were reported multiple times by multiple users and their account remained for that day and a half. The mentors did a good job of moderating & kicking them even between them swapping chars to continue spamming. The GM's? Can't say the same.

I would have killed for a mentor that was actually willing to help. After not finding someone I left the game long before my trial ran out.
When I tried the game again in 2019 I was able to revive my old account still as a trial. I started over on a fresh character and server. For the first 50 levels I still was never approached by any mentors nor did I even see one. I got lucky the game clicked for me this time. At 50 I was in Mor Dona and saw a mentor and asked him a question and he was fantastic and got me sorted and I am to this day grateful for his kindness.
Eventually I did end up in NN on several servers on alts because honestly there are holes in my knowledge of the game and ability to google. Honestly the kind of stuff pictured in the OP is not unusual in all the NNs I have been in. What is worse is if a confused newbie dares to interrupt said conversations with a game question they often will not get a real answer. They will be told to google it. If newbie has to google answers because the mentors wont answer it, then there is no reason to have NN at all imo.

I pretty much avoid NN at this point. I find it often crude, sometimes rude and on rare occasion outright offensive. It does not do the job it was intended to do.

I've been in your situation where I needed help and needed someone to help 'cause google wasn't doing it for me, I asked in say chat in gridania a few times but nothing, waited a few minutes and eventually I found a nice looking mentor, gave her a little wave and asked if I could be invited to the novice network. She didn't know how and took a minute to look up how to do it while I fished on a little stool, she invited me, I gave her a little bow, thanked her and asked my question to the chat & got the help I needed.

I haven't seen mentors telling someone to google something yet in the servers I've been on and the servers I've visited. Seen it posted on the forums but I've not seen it in my 2.5k hours. I've seen sprouts ask questions in the middle of the "usual" mentors having chats and usually their questions are answered, sometimes it's not answered for a few minutes.
I'm a meme trade mentor only. I've played for about 11 months, still in shadowbringers, I should still be a sprout on 5.3 but I accidentally became a trade mentor when I zoned out checking the requirements and autopiloted into it having my sprout ripped off forcefully ;_;
I meet most of the requirements for a full mentor but I don't know everything. I do disagree that it doesn't do the job it was intended to do, because it can and does but it all depends on who's on and if they have time to answer.
If I see it and I'm not in a dungeon or duty I'll usually stop to help if I can. The active mentor to sprout ratio in some networks is a bit off and mentors & even sprouts play the game so sometimes getting an answer to a specific question is a bit of luck. It's life, people are busy doing their thing. It took 4 attempts for someone to answer about wondrous tails and why I was getting duties I hadn't unlocked yet, if it was better to pick it up on a lower lvl job etc. I'd searched google and got no clear answer and eventually a kind mentor helped and when they answered a few others helped out too.
Not everyone would know the answer to that question or encountered getting WT stuff early. Mentors & sprouts all have these little pockets they know about, I help out usually for configuration & input/accessibility issues and I've sometimes left a dungeon or alliance raid and seen a message from 10 minutes ago that I missed.

It's a game of chance and people aren't there 24/7 who know about everything.
You want to ask a question about Eureka or Bozja? Better hope that the 2 people who really love them are on. Wanna ask a question about keybinds? Maybe ask a question about how to change targetting on controller? How many of those 100 mentors have done a lot of rebinding and rebinding the same thing you're doing? How many use a controller and have changed their target groups or setup shared hotbars, w cross hotbars and expanded hold controls? You want to do the Heavensward post game trials but don't know where to go? How about the moogle tribe quests and that nightmare chain? How many people remember exactly where to go to start it or what to do who are on and aren't searching google for you? What about hunts & aetheryte tickets? You're starting stormblood and you don't know how to do it, did you do all your hunting log in ARR and do your GC stuff? That's a tough one to sit through and help someone with. Got a question about PVP? Wanna know about what you should be doing as WAR in frontlines?
You get the idea. The system isn't perfect, the network is limited to 100 mentors, not all of them participate sadly and take up space and the ones who want to help may be off doing something.

I see a lot of off topic chat in downtime, regulars like to talk to each other and sometimes there's something that interests someone, that's cool. I also see a lot of help being given out, questions answered, weird questions answered, people who need help queueing for something to complete a journal like an extreme or say a specific ShB trial which is taking 30+ minutes, players share A ranks that they find and relay S ranks, sometimes someone links a nice item and someone finds out how to unlock it. There's a lotta help given out and a mostly friendly environment even if occasionally there's a bad apple who shows up.
I don't mind the off topic general chat when I see it, but I also don't have NN in all my tabs, it's in it's own tab with a few general messages & notifications so it doesn't bother me. That separation probably helps a bit and I think most users would be okay with that sort of thing if there were more than 4 chat tabs in the game...

Unfortunately this just does not solve the problem. The screenshot in my original submission is only from today, but this kind of thing happens quite often. There was at one point a player who every 30 minutes would immediately rejoin Novice Net to stir up drama until they would be kicked seconds later. This player was reported multiple times by multiple others but continued to join. Eventually they left for another server.
The other issue is people simply rolling a new character to join Novice Net as a sprout and continue.
Square Enix needs to either permanently account ban repeat offenders from Novice Net. or at least moderate it.

Sounds like the mentors were doing their job and the GM's were doing well something.
I don't think employing a squad of GM's to oversee NN on every server is quite the solution.
When you break it down by numbers, you want what 1 GM to 3, maybe 4 worlds? Some servers have chat going real faaast during peak hours. There's 81 servers So that's a team of about 20-25 people to oversee them. Put them in 8 hour shifts to see things 24/7 and that's 75 members of staff, maybe you can get away with dropping a couple of them during the quiet hours for each server but that's a lot of dedication for active moderation.
I mean that's moderation that's hard and works, but what if instead of hiring 75 GM's to read a chat and slam the ol' B&hammer at them they instead read the reports that the players should be sending and act on them in an efficient manner? Seems like a good idea to me but I'm probably deranged or something.

[anw]

The Faerie NN was actually quite a nice place and I hung around there about as much if not MORE than I hang out in Uldah in Balmung. Not all NNs are created equal.

Every time I've visited faerie to yoink something from the marketboard I've seen one of the most polite, welcoming & helpful chats.
I've seen some real clowns from faerie in my duties but their NN has always been top tier when I've passed through. +1 on this player's comment.

[Kyrj]

NN is a cesspool, delete it SE.

[Renalt]

I like the idea of a chat moderate by the players...the IDEA of it.

The problem with NN is that it is indeed run by the mentors as the moderators and it only takes a few like-minded individuals to turn it into their own playground. I've seen this first hand where things can get rather hostile and you can kick a Mentor out of the NN but it's only temporary. They can come back in a few short hours and just do it right back to you. In some cases one of their friends will just kick you for kicking one of their friends.

So yeah one NN can be vastly different over another depending on how the mentors are for that server.

[Amarande]

Part of the reason you notice it so much in XIV is because NN is the only thing even closely resembling a semi-open global chat in-game (FCs and Linkshells you have to be invited to, and other than that zone shout is as big as it gets).

So things that would normally be in general or trade chats in other MMOs end up mashed into the NN here, while in something like WoW they'd have been in another channel instead (not that that's so great a thing either since that just means Trade chat gets to basically be what I've termed "FOX News with RMT and carry ads instead of regular commercials" instead, but at least it means natter doesn't get pushed into the mentoring chat).

As for naming and shaming: I'm actually a little surprised at the policy being so strict against it here, largely because the Japanese player culture seems to be the complete opposite (see most strongly: the "do not party" blacklist they use), and usually FFXIV tends to strongly base its core philosophies around the JP players ...