The Actual Solution to the Mentor Roulette problem

[IridescentHope]

Step one: Remove extreme trials from mentor roulette. Frankly, remove Cas and Prae as well. Turn the mentor roulette into mentorship of general duties and sure, why not, remove the ability to leave duty in progress or something because you queued as mentor, you need to help the people there complete the duty.

Step two: Create a new roulette that is only extreme trials. Make this like Mentor Roulette 2.0. And sure, make it a requirement you have to've completed everything synced or whatever. Sure, why not, I don't care.

Step three: Make a really awesome mount as a reward for doing x number of successful extreme trials, like a 5-seater pegasus carriage please Squeenix feed my horse obsession?

Step four: profit.

... okay but as much as this is a joke, it's not. The biggest gripe about mentor roulette are mentors who bail on expert trials (from what I understand) but there's absolutely no real incentive for mentors to stay, especially in the harder trials. So give them an incentive. Separate the extremes into another roulette, give it a sick reward, and make it so mentors will want to drag sprouts kicking and screaming through the extreme trials to get it.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[HeulGDarian]

ironically i do wish the game had the astrope equivalent of the black pegasus. Could you imagine a black red and silver? astrope, Would be 10/10

[IridescentHope]

My god I would be in love with that mount. And if they added unique music to it-? No, wait, that's being unreasonable. But honestly!!! Some dope ass mount like that!! People will do the grind for it. I know I would do the grind for it.

[Brightamethyst]

1 - Remove EXs. They were never designed to be done with DF randoms in the first place. Sure you can straight up overpower the easier ones like Bismarck with those 100 extra ilevels, but Sophia, Shinryu, etc? Never going to happen.

2 - Make the rewards dynamic based on the content. Titan HM gives trial roulette rewards, Antitower give 50/60/70 roulette rewards, etc. Right now the rewards are insultingly low.

3 - ???
4 - Profit

[Reap00]

The EX content is doable with the hour of time allotted if you mentor the people there. I have done it on many occasions. If you don't want to mentor people why are you in queue for mentor roulette in the first place.

[Maeka]

The EX content is doable with the hour of time allotted if you mentor the people there. I have done it on many occasions. If you don't want to mentor people why are you in queue for mentor roulette in the first place.

You'd think that, but I've seen plenty of duties where people refused to learn.

Like a WoD group I had a couple days ago where we had 2 newbie tanks spamming provoke on Angra Mainyu (sp?). We kindly asked them to please stop provoking the boss and keep him facing in one direction. 3 wipes later, everybody voted to abandon the duty.

A few weeks prior, I had a SCH in Aurum Vale who casted nothing but Adloquium the entire dungeon. I spent the time and effort to type up a short primer on Aetherflow, Lustrate, etc .... only to not see any sort of response. This was after five wipes (1 in the first room, 3 on the first boss, and 1 on the diremites outside of Coincounter's area). We went through the whole dungeon, and yup. No Aetherflow. Just Adloquium the whole way.

Doesn't matter how polite you are, people will just refuse to take advice sometimes. And.... for Extreme Trials.... you really need to be on the top of your game for those, and random joes in Duty Finder are certainly not that. If you want to learn how to do an Extreme Trial, go with your FC or make a PF that specifically says you're a learning group and you need someone to help you learn.

[Kurando]

1 - Remove EXs. They were never designed to be done with DF randoms in the first place. Sure you can straight up overpower the easier ones like Bismarck with those 100 extra ilevels, but Sophia, Shinryu, etc? Never going to happen.

But they were designed for DF though. Just because NA/EU prefer to use PF for Ex Trials, it doesn't mean that's the only way it should be done. It's still common for JP worlds to use DF for such things, and besides there are still many new players who continue to queue up this way (regardless of region), and Mentor Roulette helps them to matchmake with a party faster.

Edit: The ARR Ex trials are usually quests as well and will appear in a player's journal, i.e. "Use the Duty Finder to confront Garuda in The Howling Eye (Extreme)"; it does not say oh this is really hard content so only use the PF to complete it.

[EaMett]

The EX content is doable with the hour of time allotted if you mentor the people there. I have done it on many occasions. If you don't want to mentor people why are you in queue for mentor roulette in the first place.

It's mostly that the mentor roulette is a mess. You can get a 2mn guildhest clear alongside a 1h ex trial non-clear. Yes mentors should be aware of this and only queue if they're willing to go through the sacrifice. But there's no denying the design is flawed and really doesn't appeal to actual human psychology. Not only that but it really does create an incentive for people to drop the longer content for the shorter stuff, since there's a huge grind reward at the end of the line and many a sprout parties enter content unprepared. Hard to teach someone mechanics when they don't even know their class. Yeah you can clear because with echo it's possible to carry other players hard. I sometimes wonder if my sprouts learn anything from the fights because the carry was so prominent.
Actually separating ex from mentor roulette would be a great move.

[IridescentHope]

The issue isn't whether or not synced extreme trials were designed for DF. That's an issue no one will agree on. The issue is, what will allow people to achieve the most clears of content, and I'm not sure anyone will be able to truthfully say that the mentor roulette system currently works because mentors can just skip out, chill for half an hour, and then try again to get an 'easy' duty for their mount. And since mentors are still players who aren't being paid and are doing this with their free time, that's completely okay! So instead of saying 'no, it is the mentors who are wrong!', making the extreme trials a separate, higher-tiered mentor roulette with a far better reward attached to it will entice mentors to actively queue for it and complete those duties.

'Mentors sign up for it.' Sure. Mentors also have the ability to just leave and not do them. That doesn't help the players who want to complete it through DF though. This is a different angle aimed to help both mentors and the ones who want to DF the fights.

[Seddrinth]

You can't force someone to stay against their will. When mentors leave they get the same penalty as anyone who leaves and they don't get the completion rewards. That is fair enough already.