Mentors...please!

[Packetdancer]

So, as background: I left in post-ARR content around the launch of Heavensward, then came back this past August and have played all the way through to endgame. (And have begun raiding with a static!) As you might guess, I had to pretty much re-learn the game upon my return, because there were just a few changes during the time I was gone. ("Where'd Protect go? Where's Stoneskin? What happened to Cleric Stance? ...also, why am I growing flowers??")

Needless to say, I asked folks for advice along the way! And while I haven't personally had any really terrible experiences with mentors in that time, I've recruited a lot of sprouts to the game in the past two months or so, and I've heard some horror stories from a few of them about mentors in randomly matched parties. Not many, but even two or three tales isn't great. (In my opinion, a mentor should never tell a brand new sprout who's in Sastasha or Tam-Tara for the first time "You suck at playing your class.", much less have that be the entirety of their advice before they leave.)

So, yeah, the whole mentor system probably could be better put together.

Meanwhile, I enjoy discussing system design, so instead of diving into an argument, I'll provide a new facet of this topic to argue about! In that spirit, here's my personal take on how the Mentor system could be fixed: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

(Apologies for the external link. Unfortunately, the forums have a very harsh post-size-limit, and fitting this into 3000 characters or less would mean breaking it into quite a few sub-posts. Thus, a Google Docs link instead of 6 consecutive posts in the thread or whatever.)

[Lastelli]

Meanwhile, I enjoy discussing system design, so instead of diving into an argument, I'll provide a new facet of this topic to argue about! In that spirit, here's my personal take on how the Mentor system could be fixed: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

There are two main problems with this:

1) Players often don't give commendations at the end of an instance because they can't be bothered. Giving more options would probably result in even more people not bothering with the system;
2) The average ffxiv player is, quite frankly, terrible and clueless. Making the mentor's requirements almost entirely reliant on the feedback of a clueless community without some form of objective requirement about mentors' proficiency and knowledge is not a good idea. The problem is finding the appropriate requirements...right now, you can be the best, kindest and more knowledgable player in the game, with all jobs at 80 and savage/ultimate clear and not meet the requirements to be a mentor because you mostly play with your friends.

Anyway, we all know they're not going to change the commendation system, just like they're not going to change how the blacklist works. Also, they won't remove the current rewards based on the number of mentor roulettes completed, as that would be a major slap in the face to those that have been working on it for the last 2 years. So might as well stop thinking of those as viable solutions.

[Packetdancer]

(Curse you, forum post length limit! I apologize in advance for breaking this into three posts to appease the captive Voidsent that apparently power this forum software. I am, as I believe I have noted earlier, capable of getting a bit wordy.)

There are two main problems with this:

1) Players often don't give commendations at the end of an instance because they can't be bothered. Giving more options would probably result in even more people not bothering with the system;

If you keep the options to a minimum (say, four types of comm at most) I honestly don't think it would appreciably reduce the number of people using comms from what we have now. Especially since I think giving you the five-minutes-after-duty-ends grace period to comm someone would make more people use it (where right now many just go "augh everyone's leaving forget it"), so I suspect the two would come close to balancing out.

That said, either (or both!) of us might easily be wrong here; the unknown factor in any change to a system's balance is always the end-user, and this particular design relies particularly heavily on the end-user!

[Packetdancer]

2) The average ffxiv player is, quite frankly, terrible and clueless. Making the mentor's requirements almost entirely reliant on the feedback of a clueless community without some form of objective requirement about mentors' proficiency and knowledge is not a good idea. The problem is finding the appropriate requirements...right now, you can be the best, kindest and more knowledgable player in the game, with all jobs at 80 and savage/ultimate clear and not meet the requirements to be a mentor because you mostly play with your friends.

That's a fair point; I concede that that the players who most need the guidance might not recognize which folks giving guidance know their jobs best on a technical level. You could, after all, be a fairly terrible healer but very friendly in your well-meaning-but-wrong advice.

But that's also reasonably easy to address. When you go to earn your mentor title (once you have the requisite number of appropriate comms), you could take a Stone, Sea, Sky style test or solo'd duty instance as your preferred job; if you can't pass the test, you don't get the title. You could even show which jobs folks have passed the test for when you view a mentor's info, so you know at a quick glance what jobs they're particularly knowledgable about.

The Secret World had a thing like this; you had to basically solo a dungeon boss as an exam before you would be allowed into the nightmare-mode content. Since classic TSW didn't have "classes" and you literally just built your own 'deck' of eight active abilities and eight passive traits to use from among those you'd unlocked, the Gatekeeper proved a decent crash course in both good deck design and finding a proper rotation within the deck you designed before getting into the serious content. (As well as providing an eye-opening illustration of just how freaking OP Magnetic Wipe was at the time I ran my test.)

I still think requiring comms is a necessary part of any hypothetical mentor system, however, because if it's a problem to be the nicest well-meaning player and still bad at your job, I think it's equally a problem if you're super competent at your chosen job but a complete jerk. And the latter—or at least the 'be a complete jerk' part—seems to be the issue which prompted this thread in the first place.

[Packetdancer]

Anyway, we all know they're not going to change the commendation system, just like they're not going to change how the blacklist works. Also, they won't remove the current rewards based on the number of mentor roulettes completed, as that would be a major slap in the face to those that have been working on it for the last 2 years. So might as well stop thinking of those as viable solutions.

I mean, I don't seriously expect a player-written system design—much less a first draft written in a 1am fit of insomnia—would actually be seriously considered by SquareEnix as-is, even assuming a dev noticed it in the first place; that's not the sort of thing that happens often. (And I'm pretty sure I used up any "player gets to influence the design for parts of the game" points for the rest of my life on changes to the add-on API back in the WildStar beta anyway.)

But if we assume that even if the devs listen to player suggestion the commendation system can't change, that the rewards are all set in stone and cannot change, that players are incapable of actually recognizing good mentors to begin with (your point 2) and wouldn't bother with awarding any recognition even if they did (your point 1), and that the people who become mentors might be jerks under a system that doesn't take behavior into account (the gist of this thread)... I feel there's not really a lot of options for where you can go with that?

If all folks want to do is vent about the perceived issues of the mentor system to blow off steam, I suppose that's not unreasonable! But then why even pretend to discuss ways the mentor system could be improved?

[Wildsprite]

-snip-

Thank you for splitting up your reply to Lastelli into 3 posts. it made it much easier to read.