Please moderate Novice Net

[Skivvy]

mentors can boot people, including other mentors, for posting such silliness.

For better or worse, this is the main moderation. You can of course try reporting them if you feel it's truly out of line, but I honestly don't know how far that would go. The other mentors need to be kicking those people out.

[DinnerBlaster]

For better or worse, this is the main moderation. You can of course try reporting them if you feel it's truly out of line, but I honestly don't know how far that would go. The other mentors need to be kicking those people out.

Unfortunately this just does not solve the problem. The screenshot in my original submission is only from today, but this kind of thing happens quite often. There was at one point a player who every 30 minutes would immediately rejoin Novice Net to stir up drama until they would be kicked seconds later. This player was reported multiple times by multiple others but continued to join. Eventually they left for another server.

Removing other mentors from the Novice Net almost always leads to an even larger increase in drama, and usually harassment.

The other issue is people simply rolling a new character to join Novice Net as a sprout and continue.


Square Enix needs to either permanently account ban repeat offenders from Novice Net. or at least moderate it.

[anw]

I love doing walls of text so here we go.

I wanna say that I've been on a few servers from diff characters and my region moves and not all NN's are equal and I've seen every NN have idle chat and a couple stray off into weird stuff like your image. I've seen casual discrimination on gender, disability & race in one NN from 2 users in particular and all I can say is: report.
Yeah, it's gonna take time but if you're unhappy with them and the mentors aren't setting a good example then it's your responsibility to do your part too. If you're a sprout: report, if you're a mentor: kick & report.
No if's, ands or buts. If you're "busy" and don't have the time copy and paste the info into notepad and report them when you come back. It's not snitching, it's cleaning up the place. You spend the time to do that and you'll see someone's attitude be reigned in.
You won't see NN get moderated if you don't do your part. If you're not part of the solution: you're part of the problem.

If I were you, I would click on /leave and return to the NN later. in
I would just /leave if it got like in the OPs picture, or, I'd actually just Blacklist the Mentor/s or anyone else talking like that, problem solved.
But I do think they (SE) do need to put some rules on topics, like no Politics for a start.

I think if a sprout leaves NN they can't come back iirc. What I used to do when NN was going off the rails and I couldn't deal with it was untick the box in the chat filters and came back later like you suggested.
I've also seen most NN's stick quite firmly to the no politics rule during peak hours and most are in agreement that they don't wanna see 2-3 people going at it for 30 minutes. I've only seen like 3 political chats this year and they've all been very short, brief and polite. When someone says NN isn't a good place for politics they've finished what they were going to say and move on with no fuss.
The only bad situation I've seen was one user who was having a major melty because Asmongold came back to play Stormblood for like 4 hours before quitting, resubbed and went all out for about a day and a half repeatedly getting kicked between the spam. They were reported multiple times by multiple users and their account remained for that day and a half. The mentors did a good job of moderating & kicking them even between them swapping chars to continue spamming. The GM's? Can't say the same.

I would have killed for a mentor that was actually willing to help. After not finding someone I left the game long before my trial ran out.
When I tried the game again in 2019 I was able to revive my old account still as a trial. I started over on a fresh character and server. For the first 50 levels I still was never approached by any mentors nor did I even see one. I got lucky the game clicked for me this time. At 50 I was in Mor Dona and saw a mentor and asked him a question and he was fantastic and got me sorted and I am to this day grateful for his kindness.
Eventually I did end up in NN on several servers on alts because honestly there are holes in my knowledge of the game and ability to google. Honestly the kind of stuff pictured in the OP is not unusual in all the NNs I have been in. What is worse is if a confused newbie dares to interrupt said conversations with a game question they often will not get a real answer. They will be told to google it. If newbie has to google answers because the mentors wont answer it, then there is no reason to have NN at all imo.

I pretty much avoid NN at this point. I find it often crude, sometimes rude and on rare occasion outright offensive. It does not do the job it was intended to do.

I've been in your situation where I needed help and needed someone to help 'cause google wasn't doing it for me, I asked in say chat in gridania a few times but nothing, waited a few minutes and eventually I found a nice looking mentor, gave her a little wave and asked if I could be invited to the novice network. She didn't know how and took a minute to look up how to do it while I fished on a little stool, she invited me, I gave her a little bow, thanked her and asked my question to the chat & got the help I needed.

I haven't seen mentors telling someone to google something yet in the servers I've been on and the servers I've visited. Seen it posted on the forums but I've not seen it in my 2.5k hours. I've seen sprouts ask questions in the middle of the "usual" mentors having chats and usually their questions are answered, sometimes it's not answered for a few minutes.
I'm a meme trade mentor only. I've played for about 11 months, still in shadowbringers, I should still be a sprout on 5.3 but I accidentally became a trade mentor when I zoned out checking the requirements and autopiloted into it having my sprout ripped off forcefully ;_;
I meet most of the requirements for a full mentor but I don't know everything. I do disagree that it doesn't do the job it was intended to do, because it can and does but it all depends on who's on and if they have time to answer.
If I see it and I'm not in a dungeon or duty I'll usually stop to help if I can. The active mentor to sprout ratio in some networks is a bit off and mentors & even sprouts play the game so sometimes getting an answer to a specific question is a bit of luck. It's life, people are busy doing their thing. It took 4 attempts for someone to answer about wondrous tails and why I was getting duties I hadn't unlocked yet, if it was better to pick it up on a lower lvl job etc. I'd searched google and got no clear answer and eventually a kind mentor helped and when they answered a few others helped out too.
Not everyone would know the answer to that question or encountered getting WT stuff early. Mentors & sprouts all have these little pockets they know about, I help out usually for configuration & input/accessibility issues and I've sometimes left a dungeon or alliance raid and seen a message from 10 minutes ago that I missed.

It's a game of chance and people aren't there 24/7 who know about everything.
You want to ask a question about Eureka or Bozja? Better hope that the 2 people who really love them are on. Wanna ask a question about keybinds? Maybe ask a question about how to change targetting on controller? How many of those 100 mentors have done a lot of rebinding and rebinding the same thing you're doing? How many use a controller and have changed their target groups or setup shared hotbars, w cross hotbars and expanded hold controls? You want to do the Heavensward post game trials but don't know where to go? How about the moogle tribe quests and that nightmare chain? How many people remember exactly where to go to start it or what to do who are on and aren't searching google for you? What about hunts & aetheryte tickets? You're starting stormblood and you don't know how to do it, did you do all your hunting log in ARR and do your GC stuff? That's a tough one to sit through and help someone with. Got a question about PVP? Wanna know about what you should be doing as WAR in frontlines?
You get the idea. The system isn't perfect, the network is limited to 100 mentors, not all of them participate sadly and take up space and the ones who want to help may be off doing something.

I see a lot of off topic chat in downtime, regulars like to talk to each other and sometimes there's something that interests someone, that's cool. I also see a lot of help being given out, questions answered, weird questions answered, people who need help queueing for something to complete a journal like an extreme or say a specific ShB trial which is taking 30+ minutes, players share A ranks that they find and relay S ranks, sometimes someone links a nice item and someone finds out how to unlock it. There's a lotta help given out and a mostly friendly environment even if occasionally there's a bad apple who shows up.
I don't mind the off topic general chat when I see it, but I also don't have NN in all my tabs, it's in it's own tab with a few general messages & notifications so it doesn't bother me. That separation probably helps a bit and I think most users would be okay with that sort of thing if there were more than 4 chat tabs in the game...

Unfortunately this just does not solve the problem. The screenshot in my original submission is only from today, but this kind of thing happens quite often. There was at one point a player who every 30 minutes would immediately rejoin Novice Net to stir up drama until they would be kicked seconds later. This player was reported multiple times by multiple others but continued to join. Eventually they left for another server.
The other issue is people simply rolling a new character to join Novice Net as a sprout and continue.
Square Enix needs to either permanently account ban repeat offenders from Novice Net. or at least moderate it.

Sounds like the mentors were doing their job and the GM's were doing well something.
I don't think employing a squad of GM's to oversee NN on every server is quite the solution.
When you break it down by numbers, you want what 1 GM to 3, maybe 4 worlds? Some servers have chat going real faaast during peak hours. There's 81 servers So that's a team of about 20-25 people to oversee them. Put them in 8 hour shifts to see things 24/7 and that's 75 members of staff, maybe you can get away with dropping a couple of them during the quiet hours for each server but that's a lot of dedication for active moderation.
I mean that's moderation that's hard and works, but what if instead of hiring 75 GM's to read a chat and slam the ol' B&hammer at them they instead read the reports that the players should be sending and act on them in an efficient manner? Seems like a good idea to me but I'm probably deranged or something.

[Bunnycake]

Yeeah this is why I completely avoid NN, mentor or returning characters.

[WP1990]

Oh make no mistake, I wouldn't consider it bad. Some opinions are best left unsaid and even more are simply not appropriate for some of the groups main goals. E.G Novice Network.

[GTK0HLK]

For better or worse, this is the main moderation. You can of course try reporting them if you feel it's truly out of line, but I honestly don't know how far that would go. The other mentors need to be kicking those people out.

The unfortunate thing, is it relies on mob mentality, and that mob maybe the inappropriately held(in location) chatters

[Skivvy]

The unfortunate thing, is it relies on mob mentality, and that mob maybe the inappropriately held(in location) chatters

Yeahhh, true. I can see things turning petty real fast. I didn't really frequent the NN much in all the years I was on a populated DC, but I imagine they can become rather cliquish. ><

[GTK0HLK]

SE at minimum needs to Set the standard of what the NN is for, and the make some examples of players. and then after that, just leave it to the report system.

at best, I hope they have someone occasional check, and have a system record the previous communications for a short time before it disappears by their decision to delete the logs.

[Avoidy]

Between the off topic garbage, the ERP "mistells" that seemed to happen from the same people multiple times a day on purpose for attention, the uppity new people who acted like mentors were paid to be on-call and helping them 24/7, and the sheer amount of incorrect advice I read in that place, I was so glad when my crown died in endwalker. I didn't even bother renewing it. I hear on the Japanese datacenters, the novice network is a nice place. Our devs probably just assume that because theirs is a nice place, ours is a nice place too. This is not true. One vivid memory that I'll never forget, was of a mentor who decided novice network was the place to brag about his new 5,000 dollar alienware laptop, which he admitted was only used for final fantasy 14 and browsing the internet. When somebody inquired about why on earth he would spend so much on a gaming laptop only to play 1 ps3 game and browse the web, the mentor got really angry and began fanboying hard. The conversation spiraled, and in the end he melted down and kicked a bunch of people out. I looked away for part of the conversation, and when I looked back we were basically missing all of our sprouts, and the guy in question had been kicked by someone with that ability. Another fun one: a sprout unsynced a heavensward dungeon and mentioned it in the chat. A mentor told him this was impossible, and to stop lying about it. He went all in on this, really chewed the guy out for being a supposed lying braggart. When myself and a few others corrected him and told him that a level 60 dungeon was definitely soloable, he moved the goalposts and tried to walk it back, but he never actually apologized to the guy for calling him a liar to his face. Oh, another one. A mentor was in the middle of giving a sprout some advice in the chat, when his queue popped and he had to go for a little bit to actually play the game. Said sprout got PISSED that this mentor DARED to do such a thing, as if the mentor was being paid by square or something. The sense of entitlement on display from that one, and a few others like him, was massive.

I could go on and on. NN is such a shitshow. It was so bad that a friend and I actually made a linkshell of our own for helping new people out because the NN was so damn bad that we couldn't refer people to it in good conscience.

[Renalt]

The Faerie NN was actually quite a nice place and I hung around there about as much if not MORE than I hang out in Uldah in Balmung. Not all NNs are created equal.