Mentor Roulette

[-BlueGreen-]

I feel like the mentor roulette is pretty well broken/useless. It doesn't really feel like it lives up to it's purpose and about the only meaning it seems to have to anyone I've heard seriously running it is for credit towards a certain mount.

From the times I've run it, it feels like it's kind of a 50/50 chance or perhaps less that a new person bonus comes up, and even more rare than that is anyone in a run actually needing help. I one time did the roulette for lols with less than 20 minutes before maintenance one night, ended up in Sastasha HM and actually managed to clear it with plenty of time to spare because people knew well enough what they were doing to speed run it.

So, it might still be the best shot for trying to get into instances with new people you can help, but it just doesn't happen all that often. Because of that, I might as well run other roulettes since that covers most of the same content, but gives better daily rewards. Going that route gives me almost as much of a chance to meet a talkative new person, but if not, at least I get good tomes/exp.

I have to wonder, for the people who have actually bothered to get the mount from it, do they even run it after that? I'd guess not, and that's where I think the problem with this roulette is: a near complete lack of reason to run it.

Now I know I've seen arguments that giving good rewards in the mentor roulette could easily bring the wrong kind of players into it, and I completely understand. In a sense, though, the mount was a really odd choice and looks like most of who it attracted to the point of actually getting it pretty much was the wrong kind of people for the mentor roulette anyway.

There are plenty of opportunities in this game where you just need to grind in general, not really any specific dungeon or instance. Times like getting materials for relic/anima weapons, gearing up alternate classes, meeting the weekly scripture cap, etc. Pretty much every time I've faced something like that, I've wished that I could use the Mentor roulette as an option for it. Unfortunately, it's basically 100% waste of time for any of that with a rather high chance of getting some dungeon between 15-30 meaning you get a pointless amount of gil, 30 lore, and 10 scripture. Top it off with the fact that you only get most of that only once per day, and all thoughts of that being even remotely useful go away completely.

So, I basically have two suggestions for the mentor roulette:
1. Make the basic rewards for doing it apply for every time, not just once daily (or in other words, remove the daily bonus, and just have it give a flat reward every time it is run)
2. Make it give some kind of mentor-only token per run (perhaps giving an additional token for adventurer in need) instead of trying to pick some specific kind of tomes or whatever to give. Then make these tokens exchangeable for something like (you get one per token, not all):

• 2k GC seals

• 60 Poetics

• 60 Lore

• 30 Scripture

• 5k Gil

• 100 allied seals

• 25 centurio seals

• If possible, some option to add light/condensation to a relic/anima you're working on (equivalent to half a dungeon run)

If having these as a physical item would cause concerns for hoarding tokens to exchange later for tomes and such that normally have more restrictive caps, then this could be added to the currency window with a really low limit, like 10 tokens.

The first two options, for adventurer in need, might very well make mentor roulette the best route for farming those, but probably not by much. The lore option would probably be about on par with grinding level 60 dungeons in general (except that you wouldn't earn scripture at the same time) and likely a good deal slower than speed runs of Gubal Library HM. The scripture option gives an alternative to Expert roulette, or at least gives options to people who have already run expert for the day and still need more runs to cap. The gil reward is basically on par with what adventurer in need currently gets for it, just without any additional reward (it could probably be bumped up some, but we really don't need more ways to get gil in the game). The hunt seals I threw in as interesting options for people who might want them over anything else, but at amounts that wouldn't really take away from actually doing hunts. And finally, the relic/anima option purely because if you're on that step of either weapon, you're normally limited in what you can get credit from which instantly disqualifies the mentor roulette because you're mostly likely not going to end up in a dungeon or trial that will give you credit for that quest.

Basically, I'm not asking for the mentor roulette to have flat-out awesome rewards that make it better than anything else for farming stuff, but I am asking for better compensation for my time, especially when I end up on one of the many "anti social, everyone already knows what they're doing" teams that make it feel pointless to be a mentor. The wide variety helps keep mentor roulette valid for just about any type of grind without making it "the best", hopefully attracting people, like myself, who would be more interested in the variety and chance to meet people while working on something else rather than joining some PF team to grind like crazy in a bunch of speed runs for the fastest way to grind for that same thing.

The way it stands, it's basically like trying to run a school where teachers don't get a paycheck, instead they get free lunch in the school cafeteria and, if they work every day for 5 years, they get an brand new economy sedan. Oh, and by the way, more than half the students don't talk or already know everything anyway. Know any schools like that? Real teachers get paid to teach, so why not pay mentors for working?