Mentors...please!

[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.

[Godzillaxpowerrangers]

I was a mentor early on helping when I could but because of the stigma of them going around plus other stuff going on I dropped being one.

[HeulGDarian]

This stupid complain about mentors its just ridiculus. For some reason people think that mentors should have 100% knowledge of every encounter, job ,side quest ,end game content and be a godamn 100 percentile parser.

Maybe just maybe you guys are being completely unreasonable . just maybe did that thought passed from your head?

Mentors arent there to explain everything from memory . At most they just go ahead and google stuff that they dont know. What a mentor needs is basic knowledge on how to heal, tank and dps, to know how to play his main job and lastly patience and kindness . They are there for sprouts which means from level 1 up to the start of the new expansion, at most the skillcap of the mentors should be up to ex trial difficulty.

This is why Novice network also sucks people for some reason expect when nobody asks for help for everyone to not be talking with each other or the best thing ive ever heard which is alot like this "we got enough mentors i dont mind kicking peeps for talking"
The thing you people have confused is that Mentors are not fcking esport gods they are normal players with a stupid icon next to them if a player is helpfull he doesnt need the crown to be helpfull if a player is an ass the mentor icon didnt make him an ass.

Also if anything there is more ill call it "cheekiness" from non mentors to mentors. When a lvl 70> player doesnt move fast enough in aurum vale and dies by pulling stuff while were already on the entrance to the first boss, when i ask what happened im not expecting to be answered with youre a mentor you should know. Or how about those people who play bad that blame the mentor afterwards . or how about when you explain a strat and put marks and then a new player takes the marks and puts them to draw shit while he goes and says his own "strat" and we keep wiping cause nobody wants to listen. If anything mentor icon is more of a detriment

I know nobody will listen to this but whatever i said what i had to say

[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.

[Lastelli]

Mentors arent there to explain everything from memory . At most they just go ahead and google stuff that they dont know. What a mentor needs is basic knowledge on how to heal, tank and dps, to know how to play his main job and lastly patience and kindness .

Anyone at level 80 knows the basics of their job. Anyone can understand the basics of a role by reading a few lines of text. Is knowing that a tank should keep aggro enough to be a mentor? Or telling a sprout dps that he's supposed to use aoe skills during a big pull? I think not. You can do that without the crown, and any vaguely decent player will understand that by looking at their tooltips before getting to level 30.

[RyuSaarva]

Anyone at level 80 knows the basics of their job. Anyone can understand the basics of a role by reading a few lines of text. Is knowing that a tank should keep aggro enough to be a mentor? Or telling a sprout dps that he's supposed to use aoe skills during a big pull? I think not. You can do that without the crown, and any vaguely decent player will understand that by looking at their tooltips before getting to level 30.

no, they don't know the basics at level 80 lol and even if they do, they don't always wan't to help anyone and thats why we have mentors.

[RajNish]

I know nobody will listen to this but whatever i said what i had to say

Probably because there are too many accusations and not a single constructive proposal.

People have bad days and sometimes they snap.

Sorry, but I come to the game to play, and not to listen mentor's swearing only because someone had a bad day. Bad days can be 365 days in a year and are not an excuse for bad behavior. This applies to any player, by the way.

[Silver-Strider]

Probably because there are too many accusations and not a single constructive proposal.



Sorry, but I come to the game to play, and not to listen mentor's swearing only because someone had a bad day. Bad days can be 365 days in a year and are not an excuse for bad behavior. This applies to any player, by the way.

The vote kick button is great for those toxic players but since you want constructive criticism, here's a thought.

In addition to the Commendation System, add a Demerit system. At the end of each run, you can either commend someone or demerit them. If a Mentor acquires a certain number of demerits within a specific time frame, their Mentorship status is temporarily revoked for a week (spitballing here, SE can make it however long they wish). After the week is complete, the Demerits are removed from their Commendations and they reacquire Mentor status again. If a Mentor continues this trend, they will, eventually, lose enough commendations to be illegible for Mentorship status and will have to reacquire it the same as anyone wanting to be a mentor.

Is it perfect? No. A mentor can merely leave the instance before anyone can vote and won't prevent premature departures as a result of someone not wanting to spend time in Ex primals or MSQ scenarios, not to mention Trolls can demerit you merely for their own enjoyment but at least there's something to dissuade Toxic Behaviors.

[Penthea]

The vote kick button is great for those toxic players but since you want constructive criticism, here's a thought.

In addition to the Commendation System, add a Demerit system. At the end of each run, you can either commend someone or demerit them. If a Mentor acquires a certain number of demerits within a specific time frame, their Mentorship status is temporarily revoked for a week (spitballing here, SE can make it however long they wish). After the week is complete, the Demerits are removed from their Commendations and they reacquire Mentor status again. If a Mentor continues this trend, they will, eventually, lose enough commendations to be illegible for Mentorship status and will have to reacquire it the same as anyone wanting to be a mentor.

No. The community has shown countless times that it cannot police itself. A system that allows players to punish others is ripe for abuse. Some would demerit a player who dared criticise them even if said criticism was deserved and nicely said. There are people out there who would demerit simply because they think it's funny.

Trolls can demerit you merely for their own enjoyment but at least there's something to dissuade Toxic Behaviors.

No the demerit system literally hands the players another way to be toxic.

Your idea is nice on paper but it will never work because frankly people suck.

The best way to filter out "bad" mentors is to make it far more difficult and time consuming to become a mentor. Too many have the crown because they want a mount and have no interest in being helpful. A lot of those people wouldn't bother if they thought it took too long and/or was too much effort to even become a mentor.

Again I suggest a more advanced version of the Novice Hall that mentors would need to pass as part of the requirements. I personally know some mentors who would actually struggle with the following:

There should also be an advanced form of the Novice Hall that you must pass in order to become a mentor. It would need to be a place where you get synced to specific stats that guarantee that the combat would present some degree of challenge. It would test more advanced mechanics every mentor should know: stack markers, proximity aoe markers, bosses with animations for attacks but no telegraphs, using line of sight to avoid attacks, how to use all the role actions, and so on.

That wouldn't be too difficult to introduce considering it would be using game mechanics that already exist and it's expanding on an already existing feature.