Novice Network is Unusable

[Marcus89]

I finally achieved Mentor status today, and I was eager to start helping new players with any questions or problems they might have. However, what I found was that the Novice Network chat channel was completely unusable. The channel was full of other mentors chatting and making inappropriate sexual remarks. They treated it like their own personal social gathering. The chat log was so flooded with this kind of nonsense that if I were a new player, I would feel uncomfortable even posting a question. This Novice Network channel needs to be moderated, and players who use it for purposes other than its intended function should be removed.

[Jeeqbit]

On most worlds, it is used to help new players and answer their questions. Sometimes there are brief periods, especially after a major patch, where it gets rowdy, but the culture changes after those people get bored and go to play other games.

It is, in general, used for chatter on a lot of worlds, sometimes about life and sometimes stemming from a question that was asked, but the chatter makes it inviting in the sense that if it was quiet, a sprout might think it's a dead channel with no activity. That said, the discussions should be calm and civilized, not inappropriate and not spoiling anything. Unfortunately, there exist a few worlds with a few individuals who ruin it for everyone else by constantly engaging in this behaviour.

Sometimes a novice network could benefit from mentors actually diluting it with sprouts. You can open Player Search, click the sprout symbol and search and invite them to the novice network.

Although most novice networks try not to share spoilers, they do happen occasionally from both mentors and sprouts/returners. Sprouts and returners are sometimes very excited by a story event and want to discuss it, forgetting that others have not experienced it yet. Mentors are sometimes just inconsiderate when discussing something. Nevertheless, the story is very sophisticated and difficult to completely spoil the whole thing with any one comment.

If you don't like the Novice Network on your world, you could try visiting another world and spend time there. Novice Networks often see improvement after a few months as the people who were in there have moved on, but it depends really.

[Raisin297]

You can definitely try cross-world travel as the quality of the Novice Networks seems to fluctuate pretty heavily from world to world.

Personally, I'd recommend just muting the Novice Network entirely and helping via the Mentor Roulette. More often than not you'll get some newer players going through old content, and even if they don't ask any questions you get the satisfaction of knowing you helped their queue times out a bit.