Quote Originally Posted by Niwashi View Post
The problem is that a lot of experienced players say things they may intend as "advice" but which are completely meaningless to an actual newcomer. If you give someone advanced high-level instructions when they're still trying to work out the most basic aspects of controlling their character, they aren't going to suddenly be able to play as though they've been playing MMOs for years and have run this specific content a hundred times. Too many players regard that inability to accumulate years of experience in a couple seconds as meaning the newcomer "doesn't listen", and then they get mad at being "ignored" by someone who never had a chance to do anything else.

Of course, part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the person giving the advice likely has no idea what experience level the newcomer is actually at. That same advice that's complete gibberish to one new player may be just the piece that another new player needs to bring together a lot of half-understood information. The result (from the advice-giver's perspective): One player was told this and got better, another player was told this and nothing changed. So clearly the one that didn't change must be ignoring me. It's taking the only pieces of information available and forming an erroneous conclusion from them.
To give very specific examples: over the past few months I have seen dozens of Black Mages and Dragoons doing... very sub-optimal things in level 50 dungeons (Dragoons doing Full Thrust combo only, no Heavy Thrust; BLMs doing single-target rotation [sometimes using Fire 3 only] where AoE would be preferred). In full i90, or nearly full i100. These cannot be "new" players. They must have at least SOME semblance of how to play.

Almost verbatim I open with "Hey (name), not meaning to be rude but can I offer some advice? You should try (rotation). It will work better." They either say nothing or otherwise do not make any effort to reciprocate. I can recall maybe 1 in 50 cases where they actually took the advice and improved on the spot.

I wouldn't get upset with low level players unless they were exceptionally disruptive. But this, I don't think, is an unreasonable standard.