Mentor Roulette's Achievement Grind Harms New Players' Experiences

[Deceptus]

All too often whenever I get into an EX, I wind up with sprouts confused why half the party just immediately dropped, including both tanks and a healer, which now means that the duty is basically not going to fill and they just need to back out. While it reflects poorly on the players who act this way, it's ultimately a problem encouraged by the design of the achievement grind not taking into account the time or effort involved with the kinds of content that go with it. Nor the fact that, if you can't help them through, that you've spent an hour of your time only to get no reward at all.

This toxic behavior is being reinforced by design that doesn't consider the kinds of incentives they're setting up for players who just want to grind the achievement and by doing so is creating an environment that really harms a lot of new players' experiences with extremes.

If my first experiences with extremes were as bad as what I'm seeing lately in mentor roulette, I'd probably have never bothered to try them any further. I hope that the designers are willing to look into this and recognize how the system encourages bad behavior, and how new FFXIV players are negatively impacted by the system as it currently exists.

Straight up Extreme content should NOT be in the mentor roulette. It has no business being there. When you get to that level of gameplay, Pugging really isn't an option.

Many Extreme fights have complicated mechanics that can't simply be explained before or typed on the fly.

"But but ARR Extremes are easy!" Yeah, we're not in ARR anymore are we? When they were current they were harder then too.

[Liam_Harper]

Personally I'd remove the mount reward from Mentor Roulette entirely and create an open Adventurer in Need Roulette for all lv90 players which has the achievement mount instead. This new roulette would award a nice chunk of tomes, would not include EX trials and would basically prioritize filling queues for any Duties that have slow queues.

It would solve 2 issues in one go. Mentorship would no longer be all about grinding duties for a mount reward and queues would be filled much faster.

[LittleImp]

I think they should add savage and coil to Mentor roulette. Getting content like that breaks up the grind and gives me a chance to actually mentor.

[Kes13a]

I would be completely in favour of removing the mount for being a mentor.

you have too many people in there for just the mount and couldnt care less about helping anyone else. removing that reward alone would go a long way in improving the quality of the mentors you get in my thinking.

[Jojoya]

Isn't part of the problem that NA/EU players approach Party Finder and Duty Finder differently from JP players when it comes to EX?

My understanding is that JP expect players to use Party Finder for learning then only use Duty Finder once mechanics are known. Veteran NA/EU players expect players to use only Party Finder for EX while new players have been used to Duty Finder for getting a party so naturally they turn to it when wanting to do EX.

I doubt SE is going to adjust Mentor Roulette if it is working for the JP worlds. I also doubt they would ever impose more stringent penalties on mentors who abandon duties. It seems like the best thing for everyone to do is encourage new players to explore Party Finder and let them know when the community expects them to use that to find parties for higher end content over queuing via Duty Finder.

[hagare]

We have the same reply's from people like you everytime too, maybe you should be contained too 1 thread as well?

if it was contained in one thread, then yes the responses would also be contained in one thread.
You didn't really think this one through did ya xD

[Mika_Zahard]

I think they should add savage and coil to Mentor roulette. Getting content like that breaks up the grind and gives me a chance to actually mentor.

Have you gone mad?

[Wolwosh]

if it was contained in one thread, then yes the responses would also be contained in one thread.
You didn't really think this one through did ya xD

Nope! but it got a response so I win

[SturmChurro]

My response prediction: "then they should just remove hard duties (especially EX) from the roulette."

Yep, that is the usual response. People want their mount grind easier.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

However, the system, as it's designed doesn't really give the players much incentive to cheer them on, and I think this is a failure more on the design side than a failure of the players. You can talk all you want about how this is bad behavior on the players' part, but ultimately the system is designed such that there is no incentive to actually, really be a mentor and help players through difficult content.

The reward is supposed to be a bonus for doing your job, not the true motivation for suffering through the inconvenience of helping beginners who you despise as you progress on the path to the sweet mount.

Of course it's a failure on the player side. This...obsession with "incentive" is the problem and the only failure in design is expecting people to not the garbage to each other. Solution is, of course, to remove the "incentive" and watch as the mentor system crumbles as nobody cares anymore. Ugh...