Lets talk about the FFXIV player base..

[Packetdancer]

This is a lot of people's first MMO. I know it was mine. Especially people following the Final Fantasy franchise (as in standalone games), FFXIV is a very different animal.

Unfortunately there is little in-game training save for very basic first time lessons (Smiths, Guildhests) and these are not exactly pointed out to new players and are easily missable.

The game largely depends on the player base itself to lead the blind and most can't be bothered while the rest refuse to be led. I feel like an improved mentor system or even incentives for teaching other players (that doesn't involved random ques into synced Extremes content that is no longer relevant) would help a little but as far as I can tell no one has come up with a viable solution.

I mean, 'viable' is fairly subjective when it comes to theorycrafting, but I wrote up hypothetical revisions of both the mentor system and a system for helping players improve their performance.

Obviously they're just off-the-cuff and not real full systems design documents, with zero real chance that Square-Enix would actually use them. But I think they illustrate that the systems can be made workable, and don't need to be just scrapped outright.