Mentor abuse DC on purpose

[Arazehl]

Mentors shouldn't be doing any dungeons, trials or raids with sprouts period. Telling someone the mechanics of any battle is revealing spoilers and ruining the discovery and exploration of the game for any new player, which imo should not be allowed.

Not only that the bad mentors have tarnished the program from day one. Finding those cracks and holes in the program to take advantage of it without moderation by any senior official or without consequences was and still is a ticking time bomb. Unless the program and it's incentives are reworked by SE, this is what it is.

[Vahlnir]

Mentors shouldn't be doing any dungeons, trials or raids with sprouts period. Telling someone the mechanics of any battle is revealing spoilers and ruining the discovery and exploration of the game for any new player, which imo should not be allowed.

Welp, guess I better stop doing any roulettes at all then! I keep my mouth shut most of the time, but that probably doesn't matter much. Being a mentor in this situation is clearly all that matters. Just ignore the fact that there's many people who aren't mentors that are just as capable of spoiling anything at all, which probably accounts for most of this "problem" you think there is. If anything, mentors have largely been beaten into submission and will only speak up when asked to do so.

[SturmChurro]

Welp, guess I better stop doing any roulettes at all then! I keep my mouth shut most of the time, but that probably doesn't matter much. Being a mentor in this situation is clearly all that matters.

Nope, I've suggested players don't give unsolicited advice in general. I don't give advice unless asked specifically either.

[Xirean]

snip

That's all interpretation. "Examplar of player etiquette" can mean whatever you want it to mean. Some people want dungeons to be harder and anyone who thinks otherwise is therefor stupid and bad and shouldn't play, are they an examplar? Probably not, but that person can become a mentor and go with the mindset that their perception meets that description. I personally find that Extremes and Savages are better dealt with when a group comes together collectively acknowledging how they want to engage with the content which you fundamentally cannot do with a que. In a que you can get people that just want the clear so unsync is fine with them if they are informed, people who want a blind run, people who want to troll, people who want you to guide them, and people who came in watching a guide. You have no way for controlling for any of that in a que. Which is why I suggest to people resources to use for them to engage with the content the way they want and not go pissing people off by getting stuck with them.

To me an "examplar" is someone who helps people reach the content they want to do, but not necessarily do that content with them. I will gladly help people find guides, discords, statics, etc for doing harder content, but I don't want to actually do that content.

I've also seen suggestions that the mentor roulette is nothing more than "fill this missing spot with an experienced warm body" and quite frankly I think that is exactly what the mentor roulette should be. Just call it "Fill Roulette" or something similar and not attach this status to it. We don't NEED the status of mentor in this game and if we want to keep it then we need other systems to support it. Some have suggested modifying the commendation system or putting in monthly requirements. Others think that mentors need to be punished into falling in line with whatever the role is supposed to be. The only thing people can agree on is that it sucks.

Additionally there's the "rewards" such as the mount and the crown. These rewards really shouldn't leave the game but putting them under a separate, perhaps similar system is where they should go. Heck if we have little symbols next to our names then why not make that a wholly separate thing in itself with the crown simply being a member of that system? Some people want status symbols in the game to lord over others and some want the existence of bragging to be taken away. Those two ideas cannot agree.

TLDR: SE made a bad system and we should collectively try to get them to make a better one and all suffer forever because they likely never will.

[RitsukoSonoda]

*Puts Mentor crown on and finds 7 sprouts*
*Tells sprouts to poke a giant murder hornet nest with sticks*
*Watches 6 sprouts run off and poke murder hornet nest with sticks and get stung all to hell before coming back*
*Looks at the 1 sprout that didn't poke the nest*

Ok now that I know who the smart one is, what did the rest of you learn? :P

[SturmChurro]

...

I think it's pretty black and white actually. A player who queues for a roulette and then immediately DCs to avoid any in-game punishment is NOT an "exemplar of player etiquette", and no, I do not think they are required to do it if they don't want to. This is what the leave button is for, or they can just not queue for mentor roulette entirely.

The mentor roulette is more than just "fill this missing spot", in my opinion. The mentor crown is turned on specifically, which tells me that any new player seeing this icon (in a perfect world) would see this mentor as someone who they can ask assistance of, which is also why mentors get extra exp (if I recall) for being grouped with new adventurers. Players can thank the prevalence of "mentors" who aren't acting as one, for the way the community sees them nowadays.

[Shin96]

Why go after mentors in the first place? If your problems lie within the system itself, it makes absolute sense to critcise the system instead of the player. The people who have a problem with mentors are for the most part inexperienced and take their frustrations out on those they believe are responsible for them in the first place. Advice can only go so far, and there is a certain threshold of burden going hand in hand with your own performance as a player.

What do you do? Give advice to a spoiled brat with zero regards for you as a person, a player. Or to the ones asking kindly? I think the larger demographic hints towards the first, given how much vitriol you find perpetuated against mentors recently. The ones that have decided to dedicate themselves in helping other people. Judging by the posts in this thread you'd think this is a full-time responsiblity and there's little place for your own enjoyment. Seems narcissistic to me.

What you will find here are people virtue-signalling for brownie points and fishing for likes, because anything is more productive than being the better example of taking up the mantle of Mentorship and doing the hard, albeit required work of restoring the balance of trust within the playerbase. Why are you guys not creating FC's and Linkshells among a multitde of ways to help other people like I did? Because it's easer to cry like a baby than deal with the almost psychotic hate you get by simply existing as a mentor. And if you do help, why can you not afford the necessary levels of empathy when someone in your community gets harassed for absolutely nothing?

There was a girl I helped the other day. She got harassed in PF because people visibly hated her performance. Almost quit the game actually. I helped her, taught her the rotation for MCH to the best of my knowledge, bought Materia out of my own pockets, trying to calm her down, despite being stressed with a real life job. I could have said no of course, but they mattered to me, and the only reason I bring this up here is because all the assumptions against mentors are for the most part, based on the crown and not the personality associated with them, that's what I believe.

Again, asking for a rework in itself is not a problem. But when people get harassed for a few, that's when the alarm should be ringing. All of this seems like a witch hunt to me if anything really.

[Arazehl]

Welp, guess I better stop doing any roulettes at all then! I keep my mouth shut most of the time, but that probably doesn't matter much. Being a mentor in this situation is clearly all that matters. Just ignore the fact that there's many people who aren't mentors that are just as capable of spoiling anything at all, which probably accounts for most of this "problem" you think there is. If anything, mentors have largely been beaten into submission and will only speak up when asked to do so.

Being a player is not a "program" for other players. What they reveal to another player is up to them and the other person, as being consensual. Yet this is a program put in place by the devs of this game, which in their case would never reveal or spoil the game in the same way for it's players. It should hold true for the mentor program as well. And yes you (if a mentor) and the program as a whole should be reworked and exclude the practice of step by step instructions of the mechanics of any battle. Leave it for the new player to discover on their own. Rather you should direct them to where they can begin to find those answers, without sending them to a third party website. They're smart they can do that on their own. I know this because we did it way before their ever was a mentor program. We found the discovery fun. You doing roulettes just as a player is irrelevant, but as mentor doing a mentor roulette with a sprout to reveal game play mechanics is again taking away from them the exploration of the game. More hurting than helping.

[Xirean]

I think it's pretty black and white actually. A player who queues for a roulette and then immediately DCs to avoid any in-game punishment is NOT an "exemplar of player etiquette", and no, I do not think they are required to do it if they don't want to. This is what the leave button is for, or they can just not queue for mentor roulette entirely.

The mentor roulette is more than just "fill this missing spot", in my opinion. The mentor crown is turned on specifically, which tells me that any new player seeing this icon (in a perfect world) would see this mentor as someone who they can ask assistance of, which is also why mentors get extra exp (if I recall) for being grouped with new adventurers. Players can thank the prevalence of "mentors" who aren't acting as one, for the way the community sees them nowadays.

I don't think someone purposefully DCing is an Examplar either. But they play the game and pay a sub like anyone else so their opinion is just as valid. I don't think them doing what some consider rude to change that. A lot of people don't want there to be a penalty for leaving in any game. I've felt like I'm being held captive in an instance on more than one occasion in this game and others. Yes there is the leave button, but why should someone be penalized for trying to get away from what they perceive to be a toxic situation? The system has no way for detecting this which is another flaw within it. I don't think trying to get around that makes someone a bad person. Since getting rid of the penalty is probably not the best idea I prefer changing up the content selection in roulettes. "Oh people leave this a lot? Maybe we should remove this instance from this Roulette and put it somewhere else?"

Saying "just don't que" is the easy answer and one that does not satisfy me just like the "fill this missing spot" perspective does not satisfy you. Ultimately this comes down to which is more important the status/expectation or getting clears and not upsetting people? I lean towards the latter as I don't expect people to rise to the occasion; therefore I don't ask them to.

[Eien713]

All posts so far

I just wanted to say that I agree with everything you said. Also, people who keep bashing mentors, say that the mount should be removed, and/or suggest not queuing for the Mentor Roulette if you don't want to do extremes are pointless to argue with. I know this from experience since they've been saying the exact same thing in every single post about this matter and never once changed their views or listened no matter what arguments/logic/explanations/etc. people gave them.

You want the reward removed? Fine with me. I'd definitely run the Mentor Roulette a lot more if it didn't have Ex trials, and I'd certainly do that without the reward being involved. And if I want to help people with Ex trials, I'll hop into PF like I usually do.