What's with all the hate toward mentors?

[QuarIm]

If you do not want to mentor, remove the crown. No one will expect anything if you wear no crown. If you do wear a crown, I expect you to be willing to mentor. Players should be able to give mentors a thumbs up/down. Too many down compared to up, and you lose the mentor status and need to get X amount of new recommendations in order to regain mentor status.

[Yeol]

People tend to forget that Mentor is your average player who is willing to give advice. He is not some FFXIV Pro.
Also, there are many good Mentors out there but you won't see anyone mentioning them on the forums.

[Martin_Arcainess]

Most of the hate mentors get are generated by themselves.

[alimdia]

If all these people who spend countless paragraphs throwing salt at the system would actually sign up to be a mentor and be the change they seek the system would vastly improve.

Instead all we get is excuses.

The common forum argument to not become a mentor is that they don't meet the requirements, but then they spend hours on the forums saying the bar to become a mentor is too low and SE should raise it (???)

Another common argument is that they don't want to be part of the same system as those "bad mentors", does that mean they're more interested in having a special status that "baddies" can't reach than in helping new players? Isn't that contradictory?

If the system is bad is because you, the self proclaimed good players, abandoned the system and left it at the mercy of those who just want the crown and the mount, and if you're truly interested in providing new players a good experience you would sign up instead of throwing shade at the system here, because SE seems to have no intentions to change it.

[JunseiKei]

Not to complain, but I've seen a few posts hating on mentors pretty badly. What's the deal? What's the opinion of the general public? I think people are expecting too much from mentors. Every mentor is different.

It boils down to mentors can do nothing right.

Help a player that may be struggling or failing, and if the advise is unwelcomed, they are immediately reprimanded.
Other times, there are genuinely "bad" mentors (can substitute bad for simply impatient in many cases) that expect players to perform to a certain threshold. This can be as little (or as much, depending on your viewpoint) as healers not DPSing, small pulls and not speedrunning. They'll remove players simply because they actually don't conform to their ideals or style of play and anything below that is garbage.
Then there are mentors that will do or say nothing unless they are personally asked questions whose answers may be found on Google.

Like everything in life, the bad travels far faster, and louder, than the good. So even if bad mentors are few and far in between, they will be the thing you'll probably only ever hear about, especially on forums.

EDIT:
Also, the system heavily relies on people actually being good people. Considering people aren't ostracized for being assholes in the gaming community, you'll always run into this kind of an issue [in NA; unsure about EU]. IE: If a player is a jerk, but is a really good player, they are often "tolerated."

This is a great read for a bit of an understanding.

[Chevronone]

I think the majority of "hate" towards mentors is rather misdirected. I feel it's more to do with SE than the actual mentors personally. People can't express their frustration directly with SE (other than in-game suggestion box) about the lack of standards/requirements with becoming and maintaining the Mentor. Regardless, SE suggests posting suggestions/feedback on the forums in their auto-reply to in-game feedback, so here people are.

[Seig345]

Personally, I have only seen the "hate" here, not in game. People aren't as likely to go out of their way to post on the forums every time a mentor they encountered actually lived up to their crown rather than brought shame upon it.

[Atoli]

^That.
I can find no basis whatsoever that suggests it is actually "a lot of mentors" (like others in this thread said) that are doing horribly.
It's always "this one mentor did something bad, omg the mentor system is horrible and should only include those 10 people that have purple numbers on FF****",
completely ignoring the hundreds of times the mentors in their other duties were just normally doing their job or even going out of their way to help.
Because why would you go to the forums to say "today I had 3 nice mentors in my Dun Scaith run, today a mentor explained to me how the mechanics of Sophia work, today...etc."?

It's a mixture of unfair expectations (many people think mentors are some kind of uber players that should be better than the average player, but they don't know that mentoring is SPECIFICALLY linked to the newbie system, and a mentor needs to be good enough to help a newbie and answer newbie questions, NOT give an endgame static advice on how to be even better, or be able to single-handedly carry a lvl 60 party through content - because that is. not. their. job).

And yeah sure, there is the occasional bad egg, but that's ALSO something most people don't realize - they can report bad mentor behaviour and the mentor will get their mentor status removed (or, if the behaviour goes against the general ToS, will get a ban for going against the rules that are in place for ALL players).

[Malzian]

...completely ignoring the hundreds of times the mentors in their other duties were just normally doing their job or even going out of their way to help.
Because why would you go to the forums to say "today I had 3 nice mentors in my Dun Scaith run, today a mentor explained to me how the mechanics of Sophia work, today...etc."?

Ayup, because it's human nature to focus on and remember the bad things while forgetting the good. It's why the vast majority of news stories are about what's gone wrong in the world as opposed to what's gone right. If everything is as it should be then no one has cause to comment, it's only when things go wrong do people speak up and because of that the only things you hear are about the bad mentors doing the bad things.

Edit: On a side note to this, I've been working on a website dedicated to helping mentors and new players connect easily along with providing a forum for role and job/class guides. I'm hoping it will be a place for this kind of positive feedback and discussion to become the prominent form of discussion... but it's still a work in progress. ^.^;;



Building a community of mentors to help sproutlings across all worlds! Please feel free to visit the website and help grow a mentoring community that we all can be proud of! https://malzianxiv.wixsite.com/xiv-mage

The sum of all hunt arguments over early pullers: http://goo.gl/IFT9IE

1.0 was terrible. It died because it was terrible. It should stay dead... BECAUSE IT WAS TERRIBLE.

[Zojha]

Ayup, because it's human nature to focus on and remember the bad things while forgetting the good.

At least until nostalgia sets in and you end up rationalizing the bad things away to remember the good.

Memory bias is a funny thing, really.