It's nice that FFXIV decided to mark all the jackasses in Duty Finder. They're the ones with a crown beside the name.
For those of you who don't play FFXIV, the crown denotes a "Mentor", a high-level player who is supposed to help new players. However, in my experience, people marked as Mentors are equally likely to be the people who are unpleasant in groups.
There's no denying that the Mentors are qualified players. FFXIV has quite high requirements. You need to have at least three classes at max level, a tank, healer and a damage dealer. You also have to have done a thousand dungeons, which is a crazy amount. As a result, Mentors are the top slice of people in the game.
However, I'm not sure if they are the best players to advise new players. Being edge players, they have a tendency to use and expect edge strategies. Giving too specific and complex advice instead of ensuring mastery of the basics.
Also, and this may be a skewed perspective, they also seem to be most impatient, especially on older content which is trivial for them.
In some respects, I think the people below the edge tier would make better mentors for new players. They would still be decent at the game, but would be closer to the new player experience, and better able to give advice from that perspective.
To put it into a WoW perspective, currently you need to be a Mythic raider to be a Mentor. It might be better if the Heroic raiders were Mentors, and Mythic raiders expressly prohibited from being Mentors to new players.
It's kind of like a university, where professors give high level lectures, but graduate students are the teaching assistants and help students with problems. A lot of time a professor is too far away from the student experience to really see the issue.
A more appropriate example would be that elementary school teachers are NOT university professors and most university professor would fail hard in teaching kids to read, write and 5*4 = 20.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, Rohan's example is more than appropriate. Yours is not really dissimilar.
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Rohan, I agree with you completely as the system stands (and am more than amused by your delivery). I think we'd agree that this is a good feature in theory, though.
If they had different tiers of badges.. perhaps multiple types of badges.. this would be better.
One badge based solely on progression/repetition so that those who have progressed past the current area would be distinguished from those who are just reasonably experienced in that area.
Another badge based solely on each group member's experience with the other group members after an instance (a +/- reputation weighted based on the voter's voting history to help prevent abuse). This is usually done with an optional Up/Down vote of group members, I think.
With even just the two, one would presumably be able to distinguish between no-life jackasses and very experienced community MVPs.
Gevlon, that would be a good example too. My mind jumped to university, because students, grad student teaching assistants, and professors are all part of the same community.
DeleteDurentis, good ideas. However, I'm wondering if it's even worth separating out the two groups. In my experience, edge players, even kind and well-meaning edge players, simply think differently than new players. Their entire perspective is different, and is perhaps *too* removed from the newbies perspective.
DeleteIt's funny because I usually get either a quiet or a helpful mentor in Duty Finder. I've only had like a handful of bad Duties as well; I'm either extraordinarily lucky or you are extraordinarily unlucky.
ReplyDeleteYeah, maybe I'm unlucky. I don't normally have bad duties either. I think it's because I've been trying to do Crystal Tower lately, and that is trivial content which requires a raid, which seems to be the trigger for annoying mentors.
DeleteI've been playing daily since November of 2014 and I think I just passed 800 dungeons.... I've also got all of the combat jobs to level 60, my main job is in a full set of i230 Lore gear (obtained by grinding dungeons for months. . . ) and do at least 1 dungeon a day, if not more. And I've cheesed the count by repeatedly running Ifrit Normal unsync'd at times. Probably about 50 times now, all told, though I usually forget it's an option, even if it only takes 9 seconds to get the kill and then I can re-queue and do it again, but... it's a) boring, b) cheesy, and c) grindy and for what, so I can have a little crown next to my name?
ReplyDeleteI occasionally see the crown on a person in my group, but it's very rare to see in the Expert queue. Sadly, since I've got all my jobs to 60, I don't really ever join the leveling queue anymore, so I can't really mentor anyone anyway. When we get the "someone's doing this for the 1st time" notice on a dungeon I'll explain the bosses, but that's about as far as I get to mentor anyone anymore.
Yeah, I'm only at 300 or so dungeons. It's clear that the bar was set very high. I do wonder if the Mentor program would be better if it was 500-1000, and after 1000 dungeons you're no longer a Mentor.
DeleteDoesn't FFXIV let you commend people after a dungeon? Maybe the mentor should be the player with the most commends among those who've signed up to mentor.
ReplyDeleteThey do, and I think there's even a commendation requirement for mentoring. But to a degree, commendations also track the number of dungeons you do. They also vary greatly by role (tanks find it a lot easier to rack up commendations).
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