Mentors...please!

[DarkMasamune]

Following this logic ... "I want to be a mentor, because for this SE will give me a beautiful mount and a crown. Since I don’t get paid for it, I don’t have to be polite and I won’t do what I don’t want".

Sounds great, doesn't it? One question. Why do we need mentors?

You do know there are good mentors out there ? Of course there are bad apples, just like in every community, unfortunately, but there are more good ones than horrible ones. Not every player wearing the crown is a bad player that will diss the second they don't like the duty they get in and/or the people they are working with.

And to be quite honest, I ended more on 'bad' new players than terrible mentors. Getting told to f- off because I just wanted to give a few gameplay advices is always nice.

Edit : Also, the basic of the system is to fill duties where there aren't much players going in anymore. So whenever a new player tries to tag Sastasha for exemple and no one will get in there, a mentor will get tagged in. That's the 'basic' of it, I guess.

[RajNish]

You do know there are good mentors out there ? Of course there are bad apples, just like in every community, unfortunately, but there are more good ones than horrible ones. Not every player wearing the crown is a bad player that will diss the second they don't like the duty they get in and/or the people they are working with.

And to be quite honest, I ended more on 'bad' new players than terrible mentors. Getting told to f- off because I just wanted to give a few gameplay advices is always nice.

Edit : Also, the basic of the system is to fill duties where there aren't much players going in anymore. So whenever a new player tries to tag Sastasha for exemple and no one will get in there, a mentor will get tagged in. That's the 'basic' of it, I guess.

Of course I know. But, as I said above, we are not talking about them. We are talking about a specific problem. I want to know answer to the question, why these bad ones continue to be mentors and how the system can be adjusted.

By the way, Consolegames Wiki article quote:

What is a Mentor
Mentors are veteran players who chose to offer their time and experience to help guide new adventurers. To facilitate their assistance, mentors will gain access to a special chat channel as well as a means to easily register for duties and trials with new players.
As a mentor you are expected to actively perform the following:
1. Provide gameplay advice for new adventurers and other players.
2. Be an exemplar for player etiquette.
3. Invite new adventurers to the Novice Network and answer their queries in the chat channel.

Exhaustively, isn't it?

[Silver-Strider]

Of course I know. But, as I said above, we are not talking about them. We are talking about a specific problem. I want to know answer to the question, why these bad ones continue to be mentors and how the system can be adjusted?

How exactly can you adjust the system? The bad mentors became mentors solely for the crown and mount. Remove the crown and then it just boils down to a person being rude vs a mentor being rude, which is still the same problem. Remove the mount and you just punish the good mentors that are actually helping people by denying them a reward for their time and doing content solely out of the goodness of your heart works SO well, just ask anyone that played BLU a week after its debut. Even abolishing the entire system all together would do more harm than good as now duties that are waiting to refill just lost out on an entire roulette of people to help them, not to mention new players that don't have anyone that is able to help them when they misguidedly join a DF for Ex primals and such.

The fact of the matter is that, there is literally NOTHING that can be done to solve this. Its simply a "dealing with the good as well as the bad" type of situation and people just need to accept it as such.

[Jojoya]

The fact of the matter is that, there is literally NOTHING that can be done to solve this. Its simply a "dealing with the good as well as the bad" type of situation and people just need to accept it as such.

Sure there's something that can be done. Change the commendation system.

Instead of telling players to give a commendation to someone who left a good impression on you (which can mean any number of things), tell players to give a commendation to a player they think is worthy of being a mentor. Remove the commendation entry from the challenge log so players aren't randomly giving out commendations just to clear the entry for the week.

Reset commendation counts every major patch and set a new number as the target to reach during the patch cycle to obtain/retain mentor status the following patch (obviously the number would be much smaller than the 1500 it currently is).

Change the icon for mentors to something other than a crown. A simple rectangle (think chalkboard) displaying a sword for PvE mentors, hammer for trade mentors or both crossed for a mentor who is both would work.

There are things that can be done.

[Lastelli]

Sure there's something that can be done. Change the commendation system.

Instead of telling players to give a commendation to someone who left a good impression on you (which can mean any number of things), tell players to give a commendation to a player they think is worthy of being a mentor.

We don't do that in real life, and there's a good reason for that. Students don't get to chose their mentors/teachers because they lack the knowledge to understand whether or not a person is suitable for the role. Even at university, students can at best evaluate a course towards its conclusion, and the evaluation typically has little to do with the content of the course and more to do with how it was carried out, but that happens only at the end, after several months, not after a 20 minutes lecture.

Mentors should have credentials that prove they have a solid knowledge about what they are supposed to teach. SE believes that commendations and play time (=jobs at max level) is enough. They're probably wrong, but it is what it is.

Thankfully, we already have a good mentor system and that's the balance discord, where mentors achieved that status because they're generally considered good players. Just redirect the sprouts there.

[RajNish]

How exactly can you adjust the system?

Sure there's something that can be done. Change the commendation system. Change the icon for mentors to something other than a crown.

This.

Students don't get to chose their mentors/teachers because they lack the knowledge to understand whether or not a person is suitable for the role.

Your comparison is incorrect. First of all, because mentors are not teachers, and beginners are not students. But speaking your language, a teacher can lose his job very quickly if he offends his students, calling them idiots etc.

[Lastelli]

This.



Your comparison is incorrect. First of all, because mentors are not teachers, and beginners are not students. But speaking your language, a teacher can lose his job very quickly if he offends his students, calling them idiots etc.

That's not the point. The point is people with no clue about the game (including many max level players that clearly didn't even spend a few minutes reading their skills' tooltips) should not be allowed to decide whether someone is qualified to be a mentor or not. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why the current system is flawed: commendations are not a good measure of players' skill and knowledge. Courtesy can be one of several factors to take into account, but you can't decide that someone is suitable to be a mentor just because they're being nice.

Ideally, there should be a system that allows players to show how knowledgeable they are and if they meet a certain skill requirement (set by SE), then let them be mentors. Remove any kind of reward from the mentor system to make sure people aren't mentoring just for the reward, or let the reward be based on something different from the number of duties you run and linked to the quality of your mentoring. The current system however is built so that you can be a mentor regardless of your skill, your knowledge and your willingness to help and to make it worse it rewards mentors depending of the number of completed duties, where duties with very different difficulty are worth the same. It's wrong in any possible way, from the mentors' selection phase to the incentive structure, but replacing it with another equally bad system where mentors would just be chatty guys that get commendations by being all nice during random casual duties is not the way to go.

[Arazehl]

From the start there were no set policies on what was expected of a mentor in both action and behavior. No overseers assigned to make sure their group of mentors met certain goals and guidelines. No real qualifications were ever put in place other than comms and having an expected level achievements. No test of one's knowledge and ability before becoming a mentor. No great incentive to work towards.

Just throw a group of people in one large linkshell and let the pot boil is what it's come down to. Not only are there a bunch of mentors who's behavior is toxic, but this sets a bad example for those upcoming novice who may one day become mentors themselves.

They need to scrap this so called mentor program that's become a cesspool as it stands. Maybe start smaller groups of mentors, and not put everyone in one large linkshell. Find a way to separate the good from the bad. Yes and have one Senior mentor oversee their one smaller group. Maybe make an app for filling out weekly requirements by mentors and those that don't meet those requirement risk losing their status as mentor. Give better incentives for being a mentor. Reward for good behavior and stop rewarding for bad behavior as well. There are many things they could do to make this program far better than what it is.

[Silver-Strider]

There are things that can be done.

What exactly would this accomplish other than limiting the number of mentors available to people with the time to grind out comms time and time again? After running the same content, week in and week out, people are just prone to exiting duties without receiving or giving out comms without so much as a "GG" nowadays that I really don't see this as a solution but rather just adding a grind to an already grindy system. How can you gauge a person that you interact with for ~20 minutes and determine, "This person is mentor material", especially when a run goes smoothly and there's nothing to discuss? 90% of the time, if comms are given at all, its usually defaulted to Tank/Healer unless someone did something absolutely amazing or the Tank/Healer were awful. Now, you want to add some arbitrary grind to mentor status to make it so that you have to constantly go out of your way to not only be an excellent player but also do something that people actually want to recommend you for mentorship every few months? That's not a solution, like at all.

People don't care about a random idiot being rude however they care when said idiot is supposed to be helpful and kind because of his mentor status. For example, if Yoshida says bad things about ff14 players and I say the same things it's not just the same problem.
There is a reason why this thread is about mentors and not about toxic players.

And yet how often do mentors get berated with the same tired excuse of "You don't pay my sub". I mean, providing advice and people totally blowing you off gets frustrating after awhile that you eventually become a bitter person. People have bad days and sometimes they snap. In relation to Yoshida, even if he said that FF14 players were morons, I wouldn't give 2 Fs about it because it doesn't affect me nor my enjoyment of the game. He starts screw with the game to an extent I no longer enjoy the game, then I just move on to another game. You get a meh mentor, you blacklist and move on. Takes more than a few negative words thrown my way to be bothered to such an extent that I feel the need to make a forum post about it.