Quote Originally Posted by birdy_reene View Post
Whats so hard about communicating with someone before you invite them?
Actually, SE has restrictions in place that DOES add quite a bit of difficulty in communicating with someone before you invite them. Trial accounts are very limited in the kinds of communication they can participate in - essentially, they're limited to using /say to communicate. So, let's say that you're a Mentor, and you've come across a Sprout. You check, and they haven't been invited to NN yet, and you don't want to be a pain and invite someone who doesn't want in. So, you communicate! How does that go?

Mentor: /s Hey, there! I see that you're not in the Novus Network, a place where veteran players chat with new players to help them learn to play the game! Would you like to join?
(Sprout is silent)
Mentor: /s Ah, perhaps you don't know how to chat! You should be set to chat in /say by default, but just in case you're not, type /say followed by what you want to say!
(Sprout is silent)
Mentor: /s Perhaps you don't have a keyboard? If you click on your chat window, you can bring up an in-game keyboard you can type on...
(Sprout is silent)
Mentor: /s Maybe you don't speak English? (Can you understand English?) Wait, that doesn't translate to Spanish... I don't know any Spanish...
(Sprout is silent)
Mentor: /s I dunno, jump up and down if you want to join?
(Sprout doesn't jump)
Mentor: /s Well, I tried, I guess...

Obviously, this is a worst-case scenario, with an absurdly patient and persistent Mentor, but there can be many reasons why a sprout does not respond. It also can't be argued that a player who can't type or understand English wouldn't be interested in joining; Novice Network DOES have multiple language representation (even if, on my server at least, it's primarily English), and players who can't type can still learn much by listening to the chat. For a Mentor that is honestly concerned about getting newbies in, "Just talk to them" isn't that simple.

It's not a surprise, then, that a lot of mentors simply choose to invite, leaving the sprout to decide whether they want to stay or not (and, thankfully, sprouts now have that choice). Or, alternatively, Mentors who don't want to be disrespectful but also don't want to invest in a potential wasted conversation (and remember, both the Mentor and Sprout have to stay in the same place, since /say might be the only possible form of conversation) wind up simply inviting a whole lot less sprouts.

Again, though, folks aren't wrong in saying unsolicited NN invites are like blind-inviting someone to a FC. The system SHOULD be changed, and hopefully will. In the meantime, both viewpoints have their plusses and minuses.