Novice Network Feedback for SE

[Genaxx]

After alot of people have been testing out this new feature i've seen a lot of questions, complains and idea's about how to improve this system. Therefore i'd like to condense all of those into this thread for SE to take a look at ways to improve it.

So if you have an idea or a question just leave a reply and I will add it to the list.

Suggestions
Adjustments to the requirements to be considered a “New Adventurer”

Requirements to become a mentor and the mentor population
- Requirements for become a mentor should be harder to obtain.

Inactive Mentors
- Auto kick AFK Mentors after X amount of minutes.

Configuring the Novice Network auto-join
- Allow Mentors and Newbies to leave the network themselves, perhaps via sub command on their own name.
- Add / remove yourself from the Network by toggling your Mentor status, thus removing the automatic join.

Expansion of the Mentor System
- Color coordinate mentors and newbies as well as the crown and sprout.

Conversations in the Novice Network
- Chat reply cooldown for mentors (like shouts)
- Add a global chat for random conversations so it doesn't go to the Novice Network

Invitation to the Novice Network
- Allow newbies to accept or decline the invite to join the network, if they decline they cannot be re-invited after X hours or they cannot be invited again, however they can choose to join the network by speaking to the relevant npc.

Other
- Notification when a Newbie joins the network and who invited them.
- Smaller, multiple networks with less mentors. Maybe separated by language.
- Vote kick
- Changes to the mentor roulette, removal of endgame content.
- Removal of mentor titles / rewards.



Update from Yoshi-P regarding the Mentor System 21/03/2016

Hello, everyone. Producer and Director Yoshida here.

First, let me thank you all for all the feedback on the mentor system. We’ve been poring over the feedback gathered from players around the globe since the system went live.

I’ve also been spending my time in-game as a mentor as well, and with my experiences and your feedback in mind, I’d like to take a moment to go over the current state and future plans of the mentor system.

Adjustments to the requirements to be considered a “New Adventurer”

We’ve received feedback mentioning that the requirement of having 40 hours of play time or less to be considered a “New Adventurer” is not long enough to have a chance to thoroughly experience the wide breadth of content available in FFXIV. Considering that the first expansion pack is available and that the level cap has been raised to 60, we will be adjusting it so the “New Beginner” status will remain until players complete the main scenario quest “Before the Dawn” and when their play time exceeds 168 hours.

With this change, mentors will be able to support beginners not only up until they reach level 50 and complete the 2.0 main scenario, “The Ultimate Weapon,” but they can continue to offer support on the raising of item levels through the gathering of tomestones and such. This adjustment will be made as soon as possible, without waiting for Patch 3.3.

Along with this change, the players who no longer have the “New Adventurer” status because their play time has exceeded 40 hours will once again be eligible to designate themselves as “New Adventurers.”

Requirements to become a mentor and the mentor population

There are many players who fulfill the requirements and have become mentors, which is great thing. However, on certain Worlds, there is an issue where there are too many mentors which leads to them being unable to join the Novice Network.

There have been suggestions saying that the requirements to become a mentor should be stricter but due to the following reasons, we have no plans to make any changes at this time.

Upon finalizing the requirements to become a mentor, we have investigated the achievement data of active players on all Worlds and set them under the assumption where a certain number of mentors will be active on all Worlds at any given hour.
As a result, the number of players who became a mentor is higher than what the development and operations teams had anticipated. However, there is a large difference between the three regions.

Japanese players tend to play a large variety of content which makes the requirements to become a mentor seem quite simple. However, North American and European trend more towards focusing specifically on certain types of content instead. With that said, the requirements to become mentor will remain as they are for now. (We may revise the requirements as we progress through future patches though.)

We are planning to adjust the following points in order to address the issue where active mentors are unable to join the Novice Network because it’s always full.

Inactive Mentors

To allow mentors the opportunity to join the Novice Network more frequently, we have implemented a feature in Patch 3.21 where mentors who have been inactive for a certain period of time will be removed automatically from the chat channel. We’re planning to implement a feature where mentors can manually join or leave the Novice Network in a future update.

Configuring the Novice Network auto-join

Being a mentor to new players can be considered an aspect of role play and it also servers to hasten the matching of players who have not completed the content, so I’m very happy that there are lots of players who decided to become a mentor. However, I believe that not all mentors are planning on assisting new players via the Novice Network, but instead, they plan to do so through regular game play.

Currently, all mentors will be added to the Novice Network automatically, but we are planning to implement a text command that will toggle the auto-join to the chat channel in Patch 3.25. After Patch 3.25, the auto-join feature will be set to “Off” by default and those who wish to join the Novice Network will be able to do so proactively so they can better assist beginners.

Expansion of the Mentor System

We have also received a large amount of feedback asking for the ability to display which field a mentor specializes in. Especially for those players who became a mentor by accomplishing the achievement requirements for Disciples of the Hand/Land and feel they aren’t qualified to offer support regarding high-level battle content.

To address this, we are considering adding a DoH/DoL mentor icon and a separate battle class mentor icon other than the existing crown and would allow mentors to set the type of icon they would like on their own. In addition, we are looking into adding a “PvP mentor” option which the community reps have recently touched on as well.

Conversations in the Novice Network

We have received feedback saying that there have been instances where discussions relating to high-level/endgame content and perhaps even spoilers for the main scenario, which has nothing to do with an advice to beginners, take place on the Novice Network. Since the mentor system was recently introduced and there are large number of players who became mentors, there tends to be times where the conversation may stray a bit.

However, I imagine that mentors are also getting used to the chat channel and there are times where they may be trying to make the Novice Network look active by holding various types of conversation. So for now, we will continue to monitor the situation, but we’re not thinking about applying any strict guidelines or rules.

With that said, there may be a lot of beginners who are looking forward to experiencing the story for themselves, so we ask that mentors please try and avoid conversations that may lead to major spoilers!

Invitation to the Novice Network

Both the development and operations teams are checking the trends in regards to mentors and beginners through the chat logs on the Novice Network. But as I mentioned earlier, there are some differences between the regions.

Players in North America and Europe are fairly familiar with these types of open chat channels in MMORPGs, especially where mentors tend to actively invite beginners. However, in Japan, we often see cases where players are not used to inviting beginners, or cases where some mentors don’t know about the necessity of inviting beginners to the Novice Network.

Regarding the need to manually invite beginners to the Novice Network, we have received a lot of feedback asking to allow beginners to join the channel automatically or to display a confirmation window when the beginners receive an invitation.

In regards to the auto-join possibility for beginners, there would be no safeguard against RMT characters joining the Novice Network and due to this we ask that mentors make the decision whether to invite a character or not based on the character’s name.

With the idea of displaying a confirmation window when the beginners receive an invite, there may be cases where new players don’t understand what the notice means, or where it can become a hassle if confirmation windows are constantly popping up because of mentor invites. With these cases in mind, we’ll continue to monitor the situation before we decide to make adjustments.

However, sending an invite to beginners under the current system requires that mentors run a player search and send an invite manually from the resulting list, which is a bit cumbersome. So first, we would like to improve the system by adding a search button on the Novice Network where they can simply click the button to search the beginners and send invites from there.
Also we would like to quickly implement various minor updates and further increase the activity between mentors and beginners so we would like to ask you to continue to give us all of your feedback!

[Rongway]

- Allow Mentors and Newbies to leave the network themselves, perhaps via sub command on their own name.
- Add / remove yourself from the Network by toggling your Mentor status.
- Auto kick AFK Mentors after X amount of minutes.
- Allow separate notification sounds for Mentors and Newbies.

(Yes, please.)
As of this writing, 20 of the mentors on Hyperion are AFK, and more are Online (non mentor) status.
Also, I expected /online and /mentor to set the respective statuses, and was surprised to find that I needed to open a social/LS/FC window and edit my search settings every time I wanted to toggle my status.
We all agree to mentor actively when we toggle on mentor status, so anyone who is afk or plain online should not be taking up one of the limited seats in the channel.

Another issue I've encountered is that it's nice that we have the freedom to self-police as a community, but it disturbs me that some of the mentors are (a) freely spoiling story/cutscene content or (b) using /n as a social channel, with none of the talk relevant to helping new adventurers. When asked to stop, on either issue, there is a divide between the mentors who agree that those behaviors are unacceptable and those who shrug it off as something that "newbs should get used to it lol".

And even when answering questions, some of the answers certain mentors give are painted with all sorts of attitude.

We as a community of leaders need to set some clear standards as to what is appropriate on the /n channel and for what offenses we can reasonably remove a novice, or perhaps more importantly, another mentor, from the channel.


Regarding kick protocols, please consider this suggested solution.

[Kosmos992k]

Regarding kick protocols, please consider this suggested solution.

Yes, this kind of vote kick mechanism would be a very good idea, it would prevent mote kick abuse, and it would also allow the mentors as a group to self police the channel. I'd suggest 3 or 4 other mentors need to be in accord rather than the 2 in the original suggestion since a smaller number of mentors in accord would make it easier for a small group of friends to dominate vote kicking from the novice network.

It would also throw some of the onus for justifying conduct onto those who are kicked since it wouldn't be a case of an individual abusing the kick feature.

[Kosmos992k]

Yes, this kind of vote kick mechanism would be a very good idea, it would prevent mote kick abuse, and it would also allow the mentors as a group to self police the channel.

I wanted to add something I posted while discussing this idea with someone else in another topic;

Personally, I think two is too small a number as it would allow a small number of people to effectively dominate the NN by kicking people of their choice. I'd suggest more mentors need to agree. I not sure that 50% would work because that potentially could run into many Mentors who are AFK, or just not interested in voting. What might be a workable situation would be for the vote kick to pick 5 random Mentors who are online, and request their vote on the kick. If the majority of them agree, the kick proceeds, if not, then the vote kick is cancelled. As you say the kicked person can appeal to a GM, but by using a voting system like this, it really removes the liability from individual mentors when it comes to kicking others, as well as making the kick more of a community response, than a personal one.

This last point is something i think is important because we have moderation power if we are mentors, and accidental or intentional misuse of that can be a problem on both sides of the coin. But if the power were tempered some, and it was more a community response in terms of kicking someone, it would carry more authority, and take some of the responsibility from individual players. Nothing is perfect of course, but it could work.

[ShizuCheese]

I know I'm repeating things people have already kind of said, but I honestly think this is the best way to go about fixing a good chunk of the problems people are running into, plus it involves features that are already in the game:

>Only have mentors added to Novice chat if they have their status actively set to "Mentor". That way, you don't have people crowding up the chat that aren't actually interested in helping people atm because even mentors have their own stuff they need/ want to do in the game (eg: If I'm working on the latest installment to MSQ or helping people in my FC, I may not have the time/ energy to also be helping people in novice chat). Also, they should change it so you can change your online status from your character page, rather than by editing your search info, for the sake of simplicity.

>Have people who are AFK for 10 minutes be autokicked, same as when you're in a duty.

>Make banning a vote-dismiss feature. Regarding Kosmos' concern about if 50% would work, I feel like my two previous suggestions would help curb that, and if 50% is really too high of a percentage than I'd say at least make it 25%.

[Genaxx]

On Phoenix we've agreed that it should not be used for chit chat, recruiting for PF, farming, statics etc.

[JediFirefly]

I started a post about this earlier...

[Lone-wolfe-02]

On Phoenix we've agreed that it should not be used for chit chat, recruiting for PF, farming, statics etc.

Same on Odin well mostly anyways.

[Taika]

On Phoenix we've agreed that it should not be used for chit chat, recruiting for PF, farming, statics etc.

I wish... It was full of spam and endgame discussion this morning when I checked it. I actually felt bad for having invited new players there. But hopefully it will settle down a bit in a few days.

[aesteval]

...

Yes, all of it.