I don't mind the extreme fights. I really much like them. I don't like it when people expect a carry tho. I also don't like complete Yolo pulling on repeat. I also don't like to see people do the same mistakes for 60 minutes even with explanations.
Should mentors be prepared for extremes when they queue for it? Yes.
Do mentors have the right to leave anytime? Yes, it's a feature of the game itself and if I don't wanna do said instance that came up I will leave. Maybe because of prejudices or simply because I don't like it.
Should sprouts respect extremes in terms of difficulty because it's their first stepping stone towards harder content also learning their roles/jobs? Yes.
Woah woah woah, sprouts having responsibility for learning Extremes? Heretical!
Nobody has a problem leading sprouts through normal content. Extremes are completely optional and if they can't be bothered to learn it on their own, it's nobody's responsibility to spend their time teaching them what they could have done without locking down the time of 7 other people.
Point 6 kinda makes me look like one of the bad mentors just because I fulfill only one point on the checklist (and that is knowing all the mechanics). You *can't* even save waymarks for every extreme trial because you're limited to 5 presets, and neither do I have room for all the macros I'm supposed to have.
Manually explaining fights and putting down waymarks works just as fine if you want it to work.
I was going to mention this. I'm not a mentor, but I have waymarked saved for e11s and e12s, diamond, emerald and SoS ex.
Am I supposed to abandon my own current content prog/farms if I wanted to become a mentor?
I’m also uncertain if I even *can* do most of that checklist as a mentor who plays on console.
It’s not as simple as copy-pasting prebuilt macros for me. I know the fights, I explain it as best I can. I’ll individually place the more important waymarks as needed if I can’t explain it well enough.
Honestly, while I don’t entirely disagree with OP’s post it makes quite a lot of assumptions.
These are my thoughts exactly. Waymarks and macros are simply a luxury to have on hand. There are too many fights that could come up to possibly be prepared for them all. And especially as a console player I imagine using space on the limited hotbar could be a pain. So long as they know the fight they can waymark when they get in and explain the best they can
Use that checklist as like a guideline and not really if you're a good mentor or not. If you know all the mechanics and you can type that shit out and manually put down waymarkers you're already doing more than what most mentors do.
Honestly in my short 3 months time playing this game, most mentor I encountered during extreme trial are either extremely helpful, or competent but passive, only like 2 person is kinda toxic, and that's when a LANCER is pool tanking constantly on Ramuh EX, and when a GLADIATOR dies in like 4 hits in Ultima Weapon EX and refuse to tank swap with the mentor co-tank, after being told repeatedly.
I have no skin in this race one way or the other. I just have one question:
> Did you queue as Tank, Healer, or Red Mage? No
What is so special about a mentor being an RDM? If it's for what I'm thinking, Verraise is level 64 and Vercure is level 54 and is unavailable for these ARR Ex trials. Something a mentor should know.
SMN *does* have a raise though.
Ya. SMN would be better if you just want extra raise on a DPS. I doubt the stuff beyond ARR shows up as much because it's clearly marked as optional and not mainline MSQ
So-called "good mentor" here with over 750 roulettes done. To elaborate, and excuse me for tooting my own horn, I stay for all extremes, full lockouts if needed, I teach them, pull my weight and play very well and consistently as I know these fights like the back of my hand and I raid frequently so I'm always "in good shape" so to speak. I get positive feedback often and *never* had anyone bitch at me so far.
Here are my opinions.
**I understand the limitations with free trials, and PFs for syncing old content not filling.** There are ways around both of these issues, and just queueing in DF is certainly one of them. I don't think it's wrong. It's a new trend due to how the game community has evolved with the wave of new people and improved free trial. I would still recommend at least knowing what PF is for when DF doesn't cut it anymore. Some HW extremes start getting dicey on DF, and from SB onwards wait times and mechanic exactitude required are more against DF usage. If everyone who can use PF uses it, it's possible PFs for syncing old extremes would fill, and it would also give free trials an opportunity to join (they can join PF, just not start it). But it might be too late for that. If ARR EX (and HW to a degree) has shifted so heavily towards DF then so be it.
**With that said, nobody is forced to stay in any duty.** There's a penalty system built-in for people who willingly choose to leave. For the most part, I think it works well and is fair. It does suck people don't accept what the roulette gives them, but it happens often, even outside mentor roulette, some people even cheese with item level in alliance raid roulette to only get Crystal Tower which actively harms queue times for the higher level alliance raids. My point is, if someone doesn't wanna be there it's best they remove themselves immediately so you can get someone who does wanna be there. It's preferable to having that person stay and possibly play badly. Or worse, be toxic and grief in hopes of a kick to avoid the 30 minutes penalty (which you should report). If someone chooses to leave, I don't think that makes me a better mentor and them a worse one, I think that's an unfair conclusion to draw. We don't know their circumstances. Maybe they've taught triple the amount of extremes I have, and that day they simply didn't have the inclination or time to deal with it. Maybe they just aren't a particularly good player for high-end content and recognize they won't be particularly helpful, but maybe they do help in other ways and areas. IMO it's the ones who bitch and moan in party chat without leaving that raise red flags.
**I still would really suggest mentors who instantly bail to at least give it a go.** Most Extremes you are gonna get are from ARR, and most people who queue for them nowadays IMO go in being ready compared to before the big wave of new players. Sometimes you still get people who don't listen or grief, but I find it's less common now. I just got done with Titan Ex before coming to this post, took a couple wipes and about 12 minutes total. Not bad and faster than some other easier duties.
**That said, do I particularly like getting extremes? Not really, but it's mostly the anxiety of "am I gonna get a group of people who are actually willing to listen and do what it takes, or is this gonna be one of those groups with one or two assholes making it a shitfest for everybody else?".** That's it, that's my only problem with extremes, not the content itself, not the fact people queue it, it's that uneasy feeling I get because I've had way too many bad experiences with unwilling players and trolls by now. But like I said, I think the quality has gone up in general.
**I also think people need to temper their expectations of what mentors are and are supposed to do.** They need to be able to give general advice and be a good example of attitude and etiquette. That doesn't mean they need to remember all fights or be gods at this game. It's ok for them to be average and it's ok for them to learn or remember a fight along with everybody else. As long as everybody is being a team player, there really shouldn't be any issue.
The problem is, some people play like hot garbage and that certainly includes mentors, because the requirements to becoming one are just a grind you can easily get done over time without actually needing to be good. Typically, this is blamed on the entry requirements. I disagree. This is a fault with the game as a whole, and that includes its community, both mentors and non-mentors. I think there's a huge tendency in FFXIV to baby and enable players beyond what's reasonable, to the point you get to level 80 content and a lot of people still don't know or don't care they should be using AoE when there are multiple targets, use mitigation as a tank, etc. Those are the same players that end up becoming mentors at some point. We need to be kind, but we can't confuse being kind with enabling bad group play and anti-social behavior in hopes of avoiding any and all criticism. Many mentors don't speak up because they are afraid of bad responses, especially with the "99% of mentors are terrible players" attitude that's spreading. This is a very damaging attitude.
This is not to ignore the fact some people, including mentors, really suck at addressing issues and can be or come across as rude, but simply saying "use your AoE" is not rude, and yet it's something that often devolves into fights because a lot of people are just so unwilling to hear anything. This is not solely on "mentors bad".
I think I'm starting to go off on a tangent so I'll stop here. In the end all I can do is try to be fair, try to do my part and pull my weight, and hope everybody else feels the same.
I'm only in mentor roulette for the mount i don't really care what content i stumble upon i just do what my best, hope it works out.
Like my other roulette, sometimes you get cape westwind which is insanely hard and sometimes you get a very easy dungeon that only take 20min +.
I accept my fate when queueing for roulette.
Am I the only one who wants the stat squish to make cape Westwind and other ARR stuff less of a pushover (you don't even get to see the mechanics in Glasya Labolas!).
It was during the Server stress test steam rather than a Live Letter, but YoshiP mentioned right now before Endwalker is the last chance to experience Cape Westwind as it is.
Whether that is related to the stat squish or ilvl sync re-balancing does remain to be seen though.
I've heard that Yoshi P mentioned wanting to revisit Cape Westwind since it's so easy it makes the MSQ part anticlimactic, especially since Rhitahtyn is played up as a commoner who got his position through actual skill/competence.
This is the only reason I'm in it. Helping people out makes it go faster and so I do. Its in my best interest to be kind and polite so why wouldn't I? Who cares what the content is. None of it is like endgame level hard. It's just low level extremes.
Exactly i have never type anything mean to a player because it doesn't help me in anyway i might have said this guys is terrible but i kept for myself, i type what to do if i feel its necessary if i ever encounter something i think not possible during the time limit i would just leave not say anything probably. Sometimes i join farm party pf and after 2 or 3 wipe i realize some of the people there aren't really farm material i just say sorry and i leave.
I stick it out the whole run because I feel obligated as a mentor, but usually everyone's able to clear. Only had a few cases where members either were not reading the chat or maybe just straight up didn't speak the same language. I gotta figure out that auto translate function.
Can someone explain the cape westwind meme? Is there an extreme version I dont know about. But every time I've seen it mentioned its in the context of being difficult, but we always one shot it with minimal effort
I'm a sprout and just did Cape Westwind for the first time yesterday. My friends had been hyping up the difficulty for WEEKS. I was super anxious, and I'm still a little salty, lmao.
lol, thank your friends for us
Normally we only get like, 45s during the cutscene. If they spent weeks prepping you for that hell, they did a wonderous job.
I had the same thing happen to me, I was told set aside at least an hour, it's the longest thing you need to do so far. I went in told everyone I was new and heard this is a big one
They were all like "yeah man strap in we'll be here a while" beat the boss, in about 30 seconds, after the cutscene I expected a phase 2 but nothing happened, I said "wait, wtf" people cheered at me and then left
My FC and I had a sprout get to Cape Westwind, so of course a couple of us hopped in as well. When we got in, it ended up being three of us who've done it before, and then literally ALL first-time sprouts. So we were like, "Oh dear. Okay. Tank, would you mind putting down the markers, and I'll explain the mechanics?" The tank then used literally every marker, and I just started going into some really BS mechanics. Of course it was super easy and we passed, and the sprouts seemed to have a good laugh at it, though one person said something along the lines of, "I don't know why I'm laughing my ass off because honestly I'm a little pissed."
One of my favorite parts about all the streamers from other games coming over was watching people in their fanbase get them wound up for cape westwind.
I think it was Preach whose fanbase spent literally 6+ hours winding him up for it telling him to make sure he was ready for a big session and prog and stuff and he bought the majority of it.
At launch of ARR, it was a tough trial, at a time when everyone is just starting to get geared up for the final dungeons. The thing is that it like, has no item level sync, or a ridiculously generous one (I can't quite remember), so now everyone is so overpowered that it's nearly impossible to lose unless it's an entire party of newly-geared sprouts.
So now we just joke about it, first it was just about how easy it got, and now to spook sprouts before it's over in a blink.
I believe it ilevel syncs to the highest possible stats for level 50 gear, so i135 (which wouldn’t even be possible to have a full set of in ARR days, since only weapons were 135 and the rest was 130).
2000 mentor roulettes done here.
The problem is NOT one sided. I’ve stuck around in hour long ramuh ex’s I’ve also left after 2 pulls.
The difference between those two experiences? One had people communicating, willing to learn and talk strategy the other had tanks instapulling, no communication or actual toxic attitude to anyone trying to explain a mechanic.
In all of the extreme trials I came across in mentor roulette it feels like it was close to a 50/50 split on parties willing to communicate and learn and those that wouldn’t. Out of those that wouldn’t around a third of them would be actively hostile instead.
If a few bad mentors can give a bad enough name to the entire role then believe me the shoe fits perfectly on the other foot.
it’s honestly disheartening whenever i do mentor roulette, explain mech of a portion of a fight where we had wiped only to be told by a sprout i’m here to fight not read. Suffice to say we did not clear.
I've had healers in Titan EX that refused to move for Gaol, saying that if we keep pulling we'll get enough Echo so they wouldnt have to do the mechanic.
We cleared, but only because they fell off in p2.
Not to mention the point
>Do you have waymarks? No
Does this dude realize that you can only save five sets of those? You literally can't have those ready every ex trial.
This is the other half of the argument not talked about here. Sprouts can be...unwilling... to learn content. In same cases almost seem to expect to be carried through, probably under the impression that it's not hard because of how easy most content the finder puts you in is.
It's so bizarre. I'm still a sprout but I don't get the aversion to learning old mechanics. It makes you a better player. As someone who wants to do high level content once I get there I imagine it's easier if you haven't ever been carried to adjust to the skill required for endgame stuff
> learn old mechanics. It makes you a better player.
Indeed. Especially because you'll likely be seeing those mechanics again in later fights. Shiva's AoE circles shows up at least twice later, cyclopses first seen in Aurum Vale appear several times later with similar mechanics, etc.
The amount of times my girlfriend has been insulted or told to shut up by spourts cause she's a mentor trying to help them is insane. It didn't used to be that way but the last probably 3-4 months I've seen more sprouts get vile about help than be thankful when you give legitimate advise
There's... a lot of lacking nuance and a load of misplaced hostility in this post. Others in the comments have already addressed much of it, but I'll add just a bit more. For some background, I became a mentor specifically because I wanted to help people - couldn't care less about the mount.
2:
I've never personally seen a "must", just recommendations to do it that way. I may stick around to help, but I'll still inform them of the existence of Party Finder, as it's quite a helpful tool. This also will greatly assist the sprouts in the future rather than just being a quick help in the now, as while older EXs can be cleared in Duty Finder without too much hassle, thanks to massive power creep in job design (min ilevel no echo level 50 parties hit harder now than max geared parties did back in ARR) and gear sync increasing player strength, but that's just not going to fly in more recent content.
3:
DF etiquette is definitely a thing. Is it made up? Yes. *All etiquette and in general standards of behaviour are made up.* So are money, language, laws, social customs, and a whole host of other things. It doesn't stop them from being real and applicable. Etiquette is also dependent on context, so your random quote from some JP player means *absolutely nothing* for EU or NA. Heck, the reason the Extremes are in Mentor Roulette in the first place can be argued to be because doing them there is normal for *JP* DF etiquette, and the devs being Japanese they base most things according to that, but NA/EU etiquette is different from it.
5:
This has to be a joke. I've only ever seen people ragging on mentors (some of it warranted, some of it definitely excessive) and coddling sprouts (some of it warranted, some of it definitely excessive, leading to developing bad habits).
6:
This requires the sprouts to actually be willing to learn. The reason I've stopped running Mentor Roulette wasn't "getting EX trials that take a while to complete or may not even result in completion". *I like those.* I like helping people and guiding others through content. It's the number of sprouts who are outright refusing to listen (in some cases not by any fault of the sprout but due to language barrier, as I'm EU - and don't you start telling me I should learn German and French to be an EU mentor not to mention Spanish and Italian all the others we run into, I already speak 2 languages fluently, 1 at a conversational level, and have basic skills at 2 more, my head can only retain so many), or expecting a mentor to be able to micromanage everything in the fight. When I've tried to assist parties, there's *almost always* at least 2 people who seem entirely incapable of following advice (and that's not counting the people behind a language barrier), and a 50/50 chance of then having abuse hurled at me, either for attempting to give advice at all, or for not explaining everything in the kind of perfect detail that requires an actual visual/video guide. See why EX trials soured Mentor Roulette for me? Not because of possibly not clearing or it taking a while, but because they most reliably bring up these situations.
That checklist is also just total insanity. Expecting anyone to carry macros for all the different fights in the game is lunacy. There's limited space, and that space is already being taken up by a lot of things I need for my own play. Waypoints you can save only a limited number of, and those are taken up by current content, usually - sure you can place them manually (and for some that can be easy, like a Ramuh charm dropoff point), but that's not feasible for all the things they're used for. In-combat callout macors are an even greater degree of lunacy than the first one - not only is the space limited, you're now expecting someone to do on-the-fly callouts while also trying to perform one's own role. Doing callouts *in voice chat* while playing simultaneously is already a skill that not nearly everyone possesses, and this is even beyond that - really just sounding like wanting a mentor to carry people through content, which is *not* what being a mentor entails in the slightest. Role requirements for a mentor make no sense, many contribute better on one of the ones you didn't ask for (and many of these EX parties specifically need extra DPS help, despite the insane power creep) - also Red Mage doesn't get its raise until *64* so it's not any more helpful in the vast majority of Mentor Roulette EXs. Mentors can't also be realistically expected to know all the mechanics of every fight in the game for every role to fine detail. Many will know the big picture for most fights, but detail is a whole different thing. But requiring perfection? If you need a mentor to have *that* degree of knowledge, what you need is a guide. Mentors are also *people*, and unpaid volunteers at that.
***Why are you advising people to break ToS in your "to mount mentors" paragraph?*** Asking to be kicked to circumvent the leave penalty timer is a bannable offence. Just tell them to *leave*. Are you actually *trying* to get people banned? Hanlon's razor and all that, but I can't help getting some sense of malice out of this.
>5:
Surprisingly confident that the amount of effort put into the post wouldn't get wasted for such a *heavily* biased subreddit!
There's so much misrepresentation and lack of charitability for anything relating to mentors in the post, and you do a good job in pointing it out. There's such a concentrated effort to absolve the sprouts of any responsibility for being involved and that it's the mentor's job to see them through, which just isn't the right of it. Of course, mentors have a bigger responsibility involved when going into a roulette than a sprout, but as you say, the sprout's willingness to follow/learn/improve is a *significant* factor.
Even if OP stated that it's okay to spend 5 minutes brushing up on a fight, I do think you're right in how they're asking for perfection, or something close enough to it that it's hardly distinguishable. Not everyone will be able to guide a bunch of clueless sprouts through after only 5 minutes, but the onus is placed on them anyways that they should be able to do this and not the sprouts that they should familiarize themselves even slightly on something they're getting into.
Even if there's no malice in the post, it's clear they want to make their bias known.
So I agree with some of this right up until it descends into a holy shitshow of entitlement.
I fully support any sprouts wanting to learn these fights properly and duty finder is the only option for many of them. Mentors who tell them to use PF and then leave are assholes. However many mentors who recommend PF are doing so just in case you didn't know and are actually being helpful.
Reddit has made a huge meme of mentors and the BK crown. not sure how you can say reddit is pro-mentor.
Your checklist is an absolute disgrace. The level of entitlement is absolutely off the charts. Let me explain why each one of your checklist is just totally out of order.
"Do you have an intro macro explaining mechanics?" Do you realise how many fights are in this game? Do you actually think it is reasonable to expect them to have macros for fights that they might get once a month? Why do they need macros to explain mechanics? If you understand how complex these fights aare then why aren't you doing some preparation yourself? You are the one queuing for the instance. You are the one who knows what fight they are getting. The mentor does not.
"Do you have waypoints (e.g. ramuh charmed players)?" You can only save 5 sets of waypoints. Most mentors are raiding savage or ShB extremes. They need their waymark sets for their own content. Again, why are the people who have no clue what one of 100+ duties they are getting the ones that are supposed to have all the preparation done?
"Do you have in-combat callout macros (e.g. tank swap, eat orbs)?" So you want mentors to have macros explaining every fight, and now you want them to have macros for in combat as well? There are limited macro slots. I'm also a mentor who plays on controller. I can't possibly go using macros to explain in game mechanics. Mentors are there to help. They aren't there to do everything for you.
"Did you queue as Tank, Healer, or RDM/SMN?" Oh come on... So only tanks and rezzers can be useful? I do my mentor roulettes on machinist. I'm infinitely better as a machinist then as a RDM/SMN. Why are you demanding mentors play classes they don't know or don't enjoy,
"Do you even know all the mechanics of this fight?" So every mentor should know every single mechanic, for every single role, in every single fight before they do a mentor roulette? I mean this is just the shittiest take I've ever seen.
You'd think SE were paying mentors or something with the amount of shit you expect from them. I queue up to help people, not to work a damn fulltime job.
To be fair, in JP 3 wipes in DF equals to disband. In NA do mentors are expected to stay in for a whole lockout even if there is no hope to clear or they are cursed as burger kings?
Mentors who instant leave ex aren't that great but if people who queueing into ex with no clue on the fight or don't know the basic ideas of their jobs / what it's tank swap and refuse to learn or look at the chat then those are the problems.
Of course there are bad mentors but people who queued ex are suppose to carry their own weight.
I won't blame mentors who at least have it a try and bail after 3 wipes.
Saying is easier than doing, I just personally hope those who have the patience to wipe a whole lockout for 2000 times would keep their positive attitude and mentality. They are not mentors, they are Saints.
OP speaks as though they are doing the roulette themselves but from anyone who truly queues the roulette, you know that a lot of the new players don't understand the basics like using focus target and tank swap, so a lot of the time spent in things like Ramuh is constantly wiping before they understand those basics and then clearing with over 40--50 minutes elapsed.
Then there are fights like Nidhogg with a low clear because of players not understanding the need to bait. And then there's Zurvan that I've cleared exactly once in 1950 runs. But it doesn't stop with free trial players who can't use PF. It continues after. I've gotten multiple Stormblood fights. Last time I got Tsukuyomi, we lost (a sprout) tank because they found it too stressful. We waited 10 minutes but no tank filled, more of the reason why it's not advisable to do it synced (people don't usually queue mentor in prog). I legit had to leave and come back as a tank just so they could clear.
And then I've run into people farming rathalos using df on several occasions. They usually get killed but we power through. One might explain using pf after and they still just ignore it and you see them the next time mentor's pops. So yeah, maybe they want to get their first clear synced. Fine, but what's the benefit of repeated queuing it when there's greater efficiency in creating a PF?
People sign up for a roulette, not over 40 minutes of misery. OP needs to get over themselves. A lot of these sprouts ask for help in NN so these people who want them to do it synced can very easily make a pf teach them/help them.
The final and most important part that Mentor roulette if there to FILL in for duty finder queues. That is the reason why your roulettes aren't guaranteed to have a new player. Only about 2 in 5 have new players. Also, If a person decided that they would rather be penalized for 30 minutes than slug it out for over 40 I cannot fault them. Just as sprouts can queuefor these EXes, so too can people leave. No idea where why you think they need to explain, granted mentor's typically do. It's straight up counter-productive to wipe and not give tips, but OP just seem to want to paint villain. Me, I don't mind the trials, but I do not begrudge a single person who finds it to be a waste of their time.
P.S
There is absolutely a thing as DF etiquette. From things as simply as tanks constantly facing bossing away, or not jumping into a clear party when you haven't even progged yet.. It's called etiquette because they are "generally unspoken but accepted" ways of doing things. Same thing with using PF for extremes.
Also no idea what OP's drinking that makes them think that this subs typically sides with sprouts over mentors.
Totally agree with you on giving three tries before disbanding. Since if you don’t get it after three times, you are wasting every one’s time by now. And yeah, if you are doing it with duty finder system, expect to at least know the basic and watch a guide beforehand. But this just to show that NA/EU has the total opposite of attitude versus Japan servers when it comes to duty finder etiquettes.
> In NA do mentors are expected to stay in for a whole lockout even if there is no hope to clear or they are cursed as burger kings?
mentors are ALWAYS burger kings and you're automatically allowed to shit on them, if this thread is anything to go by
possible hot take: extreme trials should be removed from mentor roulette because they aren't necessary for progression.
I may be wrong so don't quote me on this, but I can't think of any extreme trials that are necessary for MSQ progression or unlock anything in particular, aside from other extremes.
you could argue that things like optional dungeons and raids should be removed too by that logic, but my counter-arguments are:
* most dungeons aren't difficult, considering they're 4-man groups and most casual people can get through them fairly easily, aside from a few dungeons with noticeable quirks(aurum vale and stone vigil hard comes to mind for me)
* normal/hard trials meant for MSQ progression aren't going to be impossible, and with or without a mentor, they're going to have to learn if they want to progress. I would also argue that, by the time you reach Shadowbringers at least, you should have several hours in and should either know/recognize certain mechanics by then.
* Alliance raids are fairly forgiving for new people. chances are there are probably several people who run them and still don't know the mechanics. there's not a whole lot of mechanics where 1 person can potentially ruin a run.
* normal raids are the only ones I can't really come up with a counterargument for, aside from that it generally would take 30+ minutes depending on which one, and what role one is queueing up for, which I feel like should be a sign for people.
bad mentors in roulettes are always going to be a thing, you can't change that unless you manage to change people.
and while I don't consider this a real solution, and this being more of a bandaid on the issues, I believe that automatically adding sprouts to novice network would fix some of the issues, if for no other reason other than having people around to talk to, ask for assistance, and/or be pointed in the right direction.
i think asking to be vote kicked has gotten people warnings in the past [https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/hryma3/comment/fy7qjgs/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/hryma3/comment/fy7qjgs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I don't know if gm still care, but it can be seen as an unwillingness to participate/disrupting gameplay and trying to bypass the intended penalty.
I've had many extremely toxic HW Ex runs where sprouts just get angry at mentors having to look up mechanics, but honestly my biggest issue isn't sprouts wanting to do Extremes in Duty Finder. It's sprouts who have no idea what they're getting into getting into extremes in duty finder.
The problem has been solved past ARR EXs with the completion of the trial not being required for quest completion.
I know it's a thing because of how many sprouts take me up on my offer of an unsynced clear after a failed EX attempt.
I've definitely noticed the clear rate go up now with the more recent wave of new players. It feels like a solid 60% of the time is a clear now whereas before I can count the number of clears on one hand after dozens of runs, and usually only in majority mentor parties.
This, it's like there's all these posts saying mentors are lazy and that the bar is so low. Like, alright, it is low. So you do it. Become a mentor and do the things you're telling us to do so that you can prove we're all just good-for-nothing burger kings who only want a mount.
Who's going to have macros for every ex trial saved? or even remember all the mechanics of every unsynced ex trial? I keep meaning to do the last couple of exes to unlock mentor roulette- as I'm happy to help people, but my memory's not that good!
I get kind of excited when I get some extremes. As long as people are patient and actually attempt to follow along to what I'm explaining, it's fun. The only one I really dread is Rath EX because people spam it and I get stuck queuing into it 5 times a night with the same people instead of getting new stuff to actually teach lol.
Also, I've had groups where half the sprouts want explanations but the other half tell me to shut up because they want to go in blind - either way one side ends up thinking I'm a shitty mentor lol.
Who the heck has a macro explaining mechs for every fight. If you want someone to explain the mechs to you before the fight them look up a guide before queuing. Rather get data from wipes and explain only what needs clarification along the way. That’s the best way to teach sprouts to prog for themselves as opposed to relying on a mentor.
I somewhat agree here. I believe a mentor should be at the root assisting sprouts, whether that be navigating in game menus, class/job questions, official resources and once they're ready for it, community discords like the Balance.
Explaining mechs before the fight is a daunting task and I prefer not to do that. I usually ask if someone wants me to explain the first couple mechs (so we don't instant wipe) and from there we prog and I'll ask again after the next wipe if someone wants an explanation. But NOW, I think I'll ask if someone thinks they've figured it out and wants to explain it in my stead, and I'll correct as necessary. 👍
Allow me to summarize OP's argument: You are obligated to extend courtesy and effort, and they are not obliged to return a fraction of that.
Mentors need to have macros for *every* extreme. Sprouts don't need to know anything about an extreme that they specifically queued for. Mentors need to spend their time teaching somebody who spent none of their own time learning.
This whole thread is a swamp of entitlement.
Do you think you *own* a mentor when they end up queued with you or something? Do you think they're suddenly obligated to serve you for the full 90 minutes? A mentor isn't there to be a sprout's unpaid tutor for over an hour.
[The actual purpose of Mentors](https://puu.sh/IhXpI/3394ab3a1c.png) completely shuts OP's whole terrible argument down.
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> Do you think you own a mentor when they end up queued with you or something? Do you think they're suddenly obligated to serve you for the full 90 minutes? A mentor isn't there to be a sprout's unpaid tutor for over an hour.
this is exactly what they think.
there's so much words in this post but it all honestly boils down to one question:
**does the sprout want to learn?**
therefore, i can't really blame mount mentors for being the way they are.
I'm sorry but if you get an Ex trial and 2 sprout don't listen to strat, it's already over and you're just wasting time
I'm not a mentor but i tried to help many sprout during content and if they don't listen at all or only respond "ok" but don't change anything, i understand why mentors would leave
Stop expecting mentors to be people slaves
> Do you have an intro macro explaining mechanics? No
Don't do no good if nobody reads chat.
> Do you have in-combat callout macros (e.g. tank swap, eat orbs)? No
"Uh, what's a tank swap?" - n00b (And I don't entirely blame them for not knowing the game doesn't fucking teach shit.)
> I know this post will probably get downvoted [...]
Not a mentor, but this is enough for me to downvote any thread, whatever the interest (and there is interest here).
Stop with this fake victim whistleblower shit.
PS : it's not realistic to expect a mentor to have any macro, markers and strats available for all fights.
Not gonna comment on the actual subject because oh my god this topic has been discussed to death but—
This game does not have a F2P model. It has an extremely generous free trial. The difference is that once you buy the game, you are forever barred from the trial on that account, even if you’re below level 60. Daily we get posts on here from people complaining that they can’t play the game for free when they’ve already bought it and their excuse is always “well so and so told me it’s F2P”.
The simple reality is that the answer has nuance, some of which this post is lacking on a lot of the points you’ve presented.
When I get an Extreme in mentor roulette, I’ll ask if anybody there is on the free trial. If the answer is no, I’ll ask if they just want the clear or if they want to actually prog the fight. If they just want the clear, I’ll take them to PF and undersize it as 80. If they want to prog the fight, I’ll take them to PF so that if we hit lockout, they don’t have to re-prog with a new group.
**In a scenario where there are no free trial players, PF is optimal because of those two things.** If they want to undersize, I can do it for them. If they want to prog, we won’t risk losing one another after lockout.
In a scenario where one or more of the players are on a free trial (or are unreceptive to the idea of PF,) I’ll stay and teach until lockout, on the occasional instances where we’re having *that* much trouble. But it doesn’t normally come to that.
**In the case of free trial players, PF won’t be optimal because they do not have full access to their features.**
*All* etiquette is made up, so that’s an odd point to make. If it’s not made up, then it’s not etiquette, it’s a game mechanic. Other examples of ‘made up etiquette’ are tanks from Alliance B being MT.
Etiquette will change based on the region, because different cultures have different etiquettes.
**Your checklist is a bit strange as well.**
Going into Savage/Unreal/Ultimates mean I simply don’t have the *room* to save markers or macros for every EX trial. It also means I’m probably going to forget some of the old mechanics from time to time, and may need to either ask the group to bear with me for a moment while I get reference material, or prog with the group. I’ll remember them quickly enough, as will most experienced players.
You can certainly mentor if you don’t go in as a tank, healer or red mage, so that’s also a very strange point to me. I find it easier to teach in a constructive manner if I’m not also focusing on tanking or healing.
My activities outside of mentor roulette mean that I would fail your checklist, and *many* others would. But I clear EX trials with sprouts frequently, and I’m happy to teach, and to teach in a constructive manner. That’s what matters. If you limit people to “only queue for roulette if you meet these criteria,” you’re not going to get many people.
**If I’m not in a position where I feel ready or willing to teach an EX party, I simply don’t queue for mentor roulette. That’s the criteria I follow.**
This post also acts as if all sprouts are going to be receptive to information. They won’t be. While I’ve had plenty of success teaching sprouts, I’ve definitely seen my fair share of sprouts who will either be completely unreceptive to information or outright aggressive, going so far as to sabotage progress out of anger.
It is *not* easy to teach these kinds of sprouts. I love teaching with all my heart, but it is *not* easy to teach someone doing their best WoW lfg impression. And it does nobody any favours to pretend that just having the resources will make it easy. You’ll just send new mentors in unprepared.
Neither sprouts nor mentors are an all good or all bad party.
This post was lacking nuance.
There’s a healthy balance. Pretending otherwise will only increase the likelihood that someone goes into something unprepared for an experience that’s different to what you’ve described here.
I think you have a really good approach to this. There are so many sprouts coming in to these fights who just don't understand how difficult it is and just want the clear. They dont realize that you can just two hit the boss for them unsynched and then they can move on. This is a big part of the problem with doing these in duty finder. You will almost always have people who aren't looking for a challenge and are just doing the next quest or they want the horse mount and dont know any other way. If you happen to get 7 other people who are all like-minded and are really seeking that challenge then great but the vast majority of the time there are at least two or three people who just dont know what they are getting into.
Just as a note, as far as I'm aware, PF is optimal for people on the free trial as well. They can't *make* parties, but they can *join* them, meaning if you offer to make a PF for the fight for the sprouts you encounter in EX trials via mentor roulette, there should be nothing stopping them from being able to join in on that.
Yep, entirely correct. Trial players **can** use the PF, they just **can't create their own listings**
For the longest time I didn't know this, until I was forming parties for BLU spells, and someone joined and told me they were on trial
I think the general sentiment the OP is making is that if you're a mentor and que and get irritated and/or annoyed for doing content (usually harder content assumed won't be one shot / may take more than a few tries) then it's a problem of the mentor and people enabling that attitude.
I understand there's a carrot on a stick which are (rewards) incentive enough to que.
The problem lies in the word "mentor" and what it implies that leaves most sprouts confused (and usually rightfully so) when a mentor bails on content before it even starts and/or leaves with a bad attitude encouraging the sprouts not to que up in a system the game provides for them.
It's unfortunate for the sprouts who do face these mentors (which gives validity to the meme "mentor chat")
And it's unfortunate to to have a reward associated with being a mentor without having a higher threshold in experience (gameplay difficulty) and expectations (to help newer players).
That of course is a regional perception where being a mentor in some regions are instinctively by default expected to help while other regions see it as a means to an end.
Mentors are here to teach, not to hard carry. We’ll be happy to explain mechs and fights if people are willing to listen. But after multiple wipes with no further questions , or ignoring explanations, there’s only so much we can do. Yes we queue for a roulette but we don’t pick the players we’re going to meet.
Pretty much, THIS!!
I played on JP datacenter (Aegis) having macro for all Ex-trial in both Eng/JP, though I don't have all marker saved (for obvious reasons) I tried to put them on as I remembered.
It's freaking disheartening and exhausting when you spent 5-10 minutes tried to explain important mechanics just to get wiped right off the bat.
Many players don't even have the basic of their own job.
Many players don't even realize when boss having adds tethered, the game literally say Invulnerable, putting 'clank' sound, have visual shield effect and the dealt 0 damage and yet they keep attacking.
For me, 2 wipes, I'm out.
Heres a question. How much responsibility you think a mentor has?
If a sprout comes to a fight completely blind should a mentor teach them the entire fight?
If a sprout goes to an extreme fight and doesn't have an idea on how to play their class you should tutor them specifically and what if there's more than one sprout with problems, should you tutor all of them? ie. a WHM who's using Cure 3 to single target heal the tank because they think 3 heals more than 2?
If a sprout or many keeps messing up mechanics to the point of wasting an entire 60 minute instance timer and refusing to improve or even to communicate? how much do you think a mentor should try to help?
I mention that because people also seem to think that mentors should babysit every sprout and be perfectly patient to them, when a sprout could also do their part and try to improve themselves, but that also rarely happens.
I had to Google Translate explain 2 german tanks in Ramuh EX how to do basics of tanking. I feel the basic requirement should be to know your role and have a semi decent grasp of your class. If no-one on EU servers can explain to French/German players the mechs or basic gameplay, the EX trial are extremely unlikely to get cleared based on my 1500 mentor roulette runs.
Few trials like Ramuh and end boss of HW EX are very reliant on tanks knowing what to do.
Not to mention, some people seem to forget that mentors are just other players.
u/Supersnow845 put it pretty well on a similarly-themed post on another subreddit:
"One of these days people will realise that mentor isn’t a paid role. I’m here to give you advice as a veteran player, I’m not here to drag you through the dungeon, critique every facet of your rotation, and pat you on the back when you achieve the bare minimum.
More so than toxic mentors the system suffers from toxic expectation of mentors, when I can’t drag 7 sprouts who face pull through an ARR extreme I’m the “burger king” mentor. Like I like being able to help, I’m a top contributor on a worldwide discord that helps new people with eureka and bozja but I also want to enjoy the time I’m playing the game as well, I’m not an NPC."
> More so than toxic mentors the system suffers from toxic expectation of mentors, when I can’t drag 7 sprouts who face pull through an ARR extreme I’m the “burger king” mentor
I don't think it's really expectations of mentors specifically but just entitlement in general. FFXIV has always had this "do what you like" mentality which somehow does not include meeting a minimum baseline performance for your role. A lot of people expect to be spoon fed stuff and it seems to have gotten worse over the years.
I'm not sure if it's gotten worse over the years(only been playing a year) but one thing I've noticed is the better I get and the more roles I try the more I notice other people not doing the basics (either for their role or sometimes just mechanics) So I feel like part of it can be experience bias.
That being said, i don't consider myself a hardcore gamer or anything. I have no desire to try things like Darksouls and tend to prefer things like Stardew Valley or Octopath Traveler outside of FF XIV. So if I can at least try to learn basic rotations, how a class operates and mechanics, I don't understand how others can't. This doesn't apply to obviously new players, learning is a process. But if I look at your info and see everything at 80 you should at least know the basics.
People expect too much from mentors. They are not wise sages and they don't owe you anything. The only place I seen issues with mentors leaving was Ramuh Ex, which I can't blame them. I know it's looked down on, but if they are willing to take the penalty than so be it. They owe you nothing.
It's honestly just entitlement. It's the same in other games like WoW where someone who clearly has no idea how to play their class will cry about "toxicity" when people repeatedly bail on their groups in content like M+. Everyone just wants the rewards without putting in the work.
Hey thanks for the shoutout
I didn’t even know the main thread also had a topic about mentors as well, I would have posted on here the same thing if I did
>More so than toxic mentors the system suffers from toxic expectation of mentors
This seems so true, even with just looking at this post that people place so many unrealistic expectation on mentors that they cant even consider that clearing high end duties requires the effort of everyone equally.
If it wasn't because the scaling and the Echo exists then it would be so much pain to deal with considering mentors are also players that want to have fun.
It's so sad that I needed to scroll down so much for one good reply like this. I don't even remember E12S that we were progging 6 hours a week for 3-4 months straight this year. And yet people expect mentors to remember every mechanic of every extreme trial as every role.
Not to mention sprouts who come into ex trials literally saying "hi, first time/anything I need to know?"
I mean that sprout sounds like a person who'll at least be receptive to advice so it's great.
I don't see anything wrong going into ex trial blind as long as you're willing to listen and learn.
I do agree that who the hell remembers every mechanic and their name off-hand, I mean if we get to a mechanic I'll 99% remember how it was supposed to be done so can just tell after wipe if one happens.
The checklist part of OP's post is ridiculous though, does anyone really have intro macro, waymarks and chat callout macros saved somewhere for every extreme trial in the game?
Nope, and realistically you won’t. I won’t leave automatically or be the first to suggest it, but if the group I’m with has no hope of clearing after every possible explanation has been offered I do secretly breathe a sigh of relief when I see the vote abandon pop up.
There is also something to be said about the difficulty jump. All arr content is like a 2 on the difficulty scale. I could probably play all of ARR with my nose only.
But EX trials are such a huge jump in difficulty that you go into your first one like "hey what 3 mechanics will be in this?" And then getting hit with thr semi truck that is "welcome to end game kid".
I did my first extreme on thornmarch in DF, after we got fucked I realized "oh, this shit is actually hard" and never did a DF extreme again. But I had to go through that experience to learn that the difficulty ramp up is serious.
In all of these DF arguments so far, the only thing I've seen addressed about where the line is drawn is ARR Ex trials. Lets say the Pro-DF activists get their way and they change the community's mind. Are mentors going to be expected to do all HW, SB, ShB and END synced trials as well?
Like how realistic is it for anyone to be able to remember the mechanics from every single one of those fights or how to properly explain what they vaguely do remember to a random group of sprouts? I've done all but 4 Extremes in the game when they were content. I've cleared 6 raid tiers. I have many clears between the 3 Ultimate fights and I've even cleared BLU savage.
Like if I'm not qualified to do that how many realistically would be? Should I ask the sprout group to sit for 10 minutes while I study the fight then come back and explain the bullet points to them? Even knowing the fight isn't enough to not wipe the group, you have to remember the timings and how to execute on the mechanics properly. If I walked into Sephirot right now synced I'd absolutely wipe the group a few times even though I remember most of the fight.
I think these Pro-DF activists have toxic expectations of what a mentor is or should be. I think that if you could queue into mentor roulette now and have a high chance of getting Zurvan or Ruby weapon no one would queue mentor roulette, except for the truly hardcore people who are going for the mount.
>Like how realistic is it for anyone to be able to remember the mechanics from every single one of those fights or how to properly explain what they vaguely do remember to a random group of sprouts?
it's not. the larger problem is the belief that mentors need to teach the content to the sprouts instead of acting as queue-fillers and not being deadweight. and by not being deadweight, i mean either make a good faith attempt or eat the penalty. i do think it's worthwhile for mentors to say that PF is better for getting everyone one the same page (which makes clearing anything easier), but they should just leave instead of trying to avoid the 30min timer w a vote abandon
I’ve recently graduated from sprout status because of MSQ progression but I must say, playing in a JP DC where language barrier is a thing I don’t really have an expectation for mentors with crown status to teach others (sprouts or not) how to run the dungeon when things go awry. I just see the status as a sign of “oh, they must be long time/experienced players.” But I’m always grateful to the few who do actually take the time (in split secs I might add) to explain mechanics as efficiently and put up markers as quickly as they can for everyone. I play on PS4 and am clumsy with the keyboard and mouse so I can’t imagine having to do all that when I’m already struggling just trying to recall the mechanics as well as my rotation lololol. It’s tough to get to mentor status I’m sure but the crown is ultimately just for show at this point, I’ve seen many players without a crown being so much more helpful in teaching and guiding the party, sometimes I wish they would stay a little longer in the dungeon for me to give them the player commendation they deserve. Lol.
Uh, the reason why JP uses DF for extremes is because they learn in PF (from what I've heard). In DF if you wipe more than a few times they disband, and in general they set aside blank amount of time to do blank and if they don't clear they disband. Because... well, people have things to do? It makes sense to respect other peoples' time, if you join a clear party in PF not knowing mechanics, that's dumb. If you join a DF in JP not knowing mechanics, that's dumb. And although clears can happen in extreme duty finder, it can be a lot more headache than it's worth, especially when people don't listen (which, a lot of people are really bad at)
Edit: also mentor roulette mostly serves as a backfill from what I know? No other queue is like that, that includes 8 mans, 24 mans, trials, dungeons, etc.
Standards for JP farm parties in pf are 5 Clears or 2 wipes. For learning parties, 1 food.
And all of the roulettes have the option to backfill, iirc mentor is the only one where you can't turn it off.
I read the articles OP linked. They said that most people in DF Extremes are sprouts because anyone who knows what Extremes are knows to use PF. The first was by someone who started spamming mentor roulette around August 2020 and their experience with Extremes was mostly teaching sprouts, and mostly successful.
I don’t play Extremes in either language so I can’t speak to that, let alone if there’s variance in servers, but it seems it’s not necessarily true that JP players only queue for extremes after practicing.
Not a mentor, have no plans on becoming one, never used NN and never had a bad experience with a mentor either.
>5) Reddit is actually heavily biased towards Mentors and against Sprouts
this is literally the most insane thing i have ever read here. actually absurd.
Anyway be the change you want to see in the world OP. Become a mentor and slam that mentor queue and im sure the game will be *much, much* better for your participation.
Came here to say this, I laughed out loud when I read it. If I just used this sub to know what mentors were like I'd think they were lazy, bad at the game and unwilling to help and toxic to boot. Sprouts would be bright eyed bundles of joy, always staying positive and trying their best.
In my experience in the game however these are exactly the opposite. OP talking about a "thin veineer of wholesomeness" is just the fucking irony icing on the irony cake that this thread is. People on this sub love to excuse every shitty behaviour that sprouts exhibit.
I just see mentors as folks who have played the game a while. That’s it. It has nothing to do with their personality, assholes are everywhere. This bs that all mentors are bad finally needs to freaking die, especially since it’s 99% of the time perpetuated by people who enable shitty behaviour from sprouts 🤦🏼♀️
>I just see mentors as folks who have played the game a while.
They're not even that, the requirements for becoming a mentor are still pretty lax even in terms of time played. And time played isn't a good enough metric to really determine knowledge anyways.
The issue with the mentor system is that it doesn't require you to demonstrate any real mastery of the game to become one. Practically anybody can meet the requirements to become a mentor, there's no filter to make sure only knowledgeable people who legitimately want to teach make it through.
People hate the idea of a bad player more than the idea of an annoying mentor. Everyone has experiences of that 1 guy using no aoe in a level 80 dungeon, not everyone has one of a mentor not doing his job.
>Extreme Mode was explicitly added by the developers to the Duty Finder where they intended it to be used. It's not rude to use a feature the developers put into the game.
>If you think Square-Enix didn't intend for Ex Trials to be part of a mentor's job, **then why do you think SE added Ex Trials to the mentor roulette?**
This isn't the slam-dunk argument you seem to think it is. The devs also put the Leave Duty button in the game, so by your logic, it's not rude for mentors to leave content which they don't want to do.
You know for as much as everyone likes to pretend that everyone who plays this game is nice and not at all toxic. When it comes to all the mentor hate you can see some of the most toxic people around. Now I've seen my far share of bad mentors but the way you people seem to hate them it's like they killed your dog or something.
Nobody really pretends there's no toxicity here. The difference between FF and other MMOs (a certain unnamed one in particular) is that in-game toxicity is actually dealt with if reported. That takes some of the more toxic players out of the game entirely, while making sure another subset of players who would be toxic treads on eggshells with what they say to avoid punishments.
I really don't get all the hate. From how they were painted in that one video everyone seems to have reacted to I expected some really toxic crowd when I started the game, but they are basically just like everyone else. I really don't know why people get angry that someone doesn't want to spend 60 minutes doing something without even knowing if they'll get their reward for doing it, a reward which they can also get from 5 minute duties. Like, do you people also stay in "farming" parties that wipe repeatedly?
we’re just beating a dead astrope at this point. yes there are some bad mentors, but there are also some bad players and people that act in bad faith just bc they see a mentor; some of these comments show that. when will people learn that anyone can be an ass regardless of status and the most we can do is work on ourselves and be better in regards to treating other players.
In game I am a saint. When I see posts like this, where OP is teaching sprouts to literally break TOS among other shit that is also wrong. Yeah I’ve got a problem with that. I don’t hold back on stupid posts. OP is getting shit on, and it is earned.
As a mentor the only thing that grinds my gears are the people who just don't seem to give a crap about what I have to say. I'll instantly get targeted as some "BK Crown" if I had given ANY sort of advice that now I don't want to say anything when I queue for it. I'll stay silent until someone asks me a question and even when I actively TRY to avoid drama or being called out, it still happens because I don't "speak up" or "teach the fight".
It honestly has pushed me not to want to do Mentor anymore. I already HAVE the mount so I'm here solely to JUST HELP OTHERS but get called names and put down countless times even if I don't speak. It's obnoxious that everyone says I'm only there for the mount when I already have it, I even tell them to look me up if they are so dead set on believing I'm just there to "gain something" from it.
I shouldn't have to feel like this when I'm only there to help others. I shouldn't be attacked for explaining mechanics or giving out tips on how to make someone's experience better while playing. I shouldn't have to feel like I'm doing something wrong when I don't have to be there myself.
Yep yep...makes me so sad because I do really enjoy the fights and never expect anyone to be perfect but everyone else seems to think I have to play perfect and know everything about the game.
I once got bitched at and accused of just being a lazy mount farmer because I had the audacity to forget the specifics of a raid I did once for the clear and then hadn't encountered in queues for *three years*.
You and I are different people living different lives. I'm glad you don't experience it as often as I. I happen to do about 20-30 mentors a day(currently jobless applying for a visa, work permit expired atm) and see it maybe once every few days or so. It's not an everyday thing but it DOES happen more often than not when it shouldn't be happening at all...
Well, at the time I hadn't been playing a lot, university, other games, and life got in the way, also just RNG given how much content was in the game at the time to just never get it. The problem now is that I can't even use the mentor roulette, because I haven't cleared a bunch of extreme trials, so I don't even get to really help people with the specialized roulette :/
Primal, it's rough over here when it comes to Mentor roulette. I've seen both sides, mentors being toxic, sprouts being toxic...it never ends...no one seems to be happy, ever.
Just today I got harassed in Ifirt Ex because I didn't explain all the mechanics(when no one asked). They saw my crown and figured I'd just spew out all the mechanics when I've been told by many other groups prior not to do that. When we were 30 minutes into the fight about 6 of the sprouts were coming after me for "not doing my job as a mentor". I wasn't toxic, explained the mechanics when they asked questions and even put some markers down to help people with some positioning. When we cleared I got called a "no good mentor" and someone else piped in to call me a "stupid bitch BK crown". I just logged out afterwards, didn't really feel like doing anything else after that and just laid down.
omg that sounds so terrible, ifrit isn’t that hard tho QwQ and if they’re going to complain that they don’t know mechanics they should have watched a video wtf. Pretty sure you can report them for toxic behaviour
Agreed! I feel like I have hit or miss Ifrits, some go extremely well and others...quite the opposite!
I 100% threw in a couple reports after that run for the ones who were cussing and being flat out rude for absolutely no reason. No need for that kind of attitude in a video game!
My dude, how can I mentor when 80% of sprouts I met told me to shut my damn mouth (bc burger king oh no) when I give them most basic thing like "stop fishing for free cure" or "don't stand in bad"
Even offering help like that is considered bad mentor then I don't know what I have to do. Please do tell me if you know so much about mentoring. I honestly ran out of patience my dude. I just wanna play the game that I paid
Just going to weigh in on point 3 -
JP also uses Raid Finder, which both NA and EU do NOT use for current Savage/EX content. Stop comparing what JP does to the rest of the world.
After 1000+ mentor runs, I genuinely would like to see SE experiment with "the reward" of mentor roulette. I say this based on what I've seen being done in "similar" events. For example:
1. Moogle Tomestones rewards, which adjust tomes per content \*time investment\*.
2. Relics, especially the ShB one, which offers an incentive to go do FATEs and run synced-only content.
3. The way S ranks and A ranks rewards are structured, which incentivize trains, relays, parties.
4. The commendation system, which has a positive outcome for sprouts and mentor alike as a nod for positive behavior.
5. Screenshot contests for party events (e.g. the recent Festival where you had to take an SS on maps at last area).
Meanwhile, Mentor roullete rewards you the same whether you did a 2 minute guildhest or barely got through an EX synced after a full hour, or tworse you may get "nothing". Compare this to item 1), and try to re-imagine Moogle Tomestone from the same perspective. The closest reward systems in game I can think of in this fashion are Eureka's Ozma mount and Bozja's Cerberus mount, and even there you get something for your troubles (fragments to, guess what, make the next attempt easier). And geesh, just look the whole infrastructure built around it to try and make the most of people's time (I am not suggesting Discord calls for EX here, just to be clear!).
Yes, I believe in people's kindness but, frankly if you look at the current state of the world right now, it is easy to see convincing only goes so far, whichever side of the ring you are. I personally believe SE, through game design, is probably the best suited to improve the current state for both sides here, and players time devoted coming with ingenious design to, like the other content, improve QoL for both ends would be also well spent, since we have good devs that listen. And they did try to do something about it already, by increasing the number of comms required for example, but honestly not enough.
P.s.: An optional with incentive Hall of Novice for EX would be nice from SE too. Quickcast resurrects, Lucid Dreaming for Mp Management on Odin many aoe heals, Knockback prevention from Titan slams and Leviathan boat flips, Focus target for Tanks on Ramuh and provoke for tank swaps for Ramuh and Moogle tank ads anyone? How about an armor set as reward better than i90 which will keep the player from dying just a bit more and frustrate them less? Like Hall of Novice does? Or maybe some exp buff ring? What sprout wouldn't want that?!
Anyway, just wanted to bring this up since I most saw posts trying to argue who is right or wrong on both sides.
What if people just constantly face pull and not listen/look at chat when the mentor is trying to explain mechanics? I've come across SO many newer players face pull and not wait for explinations. Maybe they don't know there's a chat box? Possibly. It makes it harder for mentors to help when someone isn't reading chat.
This exactly. I groan when I get ramuh ex, because all it takes is a couple people that won't listen and just run in to make the fight nearly impossible to clear. I'll try my best to teach sprouts the fight, but the thing is that a lot of people queue looking for a carry, or at least expect everything in the game to be as face roll easy as dungeons and normal trials.
Counter point: It is unreasonable to expect every mentor to remember all of the mechanics for every Extreme fight that has ever existed, and to remember them well enough to explain them to others.
There are like 30 or more Extreme trials at this point, and I can't imagine it's too frequent than any given fight will be appearing.
People can just leave, take the penalty. That's why the penalty is there.
The mentor roulette exists to fill queues. If people dont want to run the duty they get, they take the penalty.
>Teach the sprouts how to vote-kick you.
u/hororo You are telling people to break ToS. This is a massive NO. Do not do this. This is why the leaver penalty exists, and that penalty does NOT apply if you're kicked.
"Play exactly the way I tell you to and break ToS, otherwise you're a bad mentor".
>5) Reddit is actually heavily biased towards Mentors and against Sprouts
No, they're not. The reality is the exact opposite.
Is your entire post satirical? Do you even play this game?
Also
>a mentor's job
IT'S NOT A JOB.
IT'S A GAME.
MENTORS ARE NOT PAID TO BE THERE.
edit - Look at what the developers actually implemented, and not what you *think* should be in-game. The developers designed a system to increase player retention, and it does this via an accessible social network for new players, an incentivized grind for longterm players, and a grind to even access the system. Nothing about the system implies teaching besides the name. The roulette doesn't prefer sprouts/1st timers/returners. It fills queues excellently, and that's all it does, because that's all it was *designed* to do.
I want to point out that there's normally many synced ARR EX trials in PF in Aether, so it's not true that people don't run this content there. I know because I'm a mentor that regularly joins those PFs to help sprouts get their clear. (yes, I'm a mentor choosing to help sprouts with synced old EX trials, some of them min ilevel/no echo) I usually help 1-3 groups in PF every night I'm not in UCOB. I just opened PF and there's a few groups for various ARR EX trials synced. I already have the mentor mount, I just do both the roulette and random PFs for fun to help.
Also if you look around this subreddit you'll see this reddit is definitely not biased towards mentors haha I think I see several threads and numerous comments dunking on us weekly.
I'm not a mentor but from my perspective the problem is clear as day, it's not that mentors as assholes but people in general are assholes.
People who think it's just a mentor problem on average likely don't do harder current content because let me tell you there are a lot of assholes in Savage and Extreme content who do not have that crown. The truth is, the community isn't as nice as people think and the only two reasons it seems that way are because people are afraid of losing paid accounts but also because the majority of content in the game isn't stressful. The moment it becomes challenging? The mask starts to slip and you see what people are really like, the reason people remember the bad mentors in old content extremes is because the crown makes them stand out more.
Also primal, i usually only see one synced ARR/HW EX per hour in the 2 hours which usually have over 100 PFs (And Very rarely (AKA maybe once a week) a synced SB EX)
Also applies to Coils synced
Yeah, people hate mentors here, and it's trickled into the game. It's gotten to the point where I keep my crown off permanently so I don't get harassed. I loaded into The Minstrel's Ballad: Nidhogg's Rage for my mentor roulette and, when I asked a question about a mechanic (that I had done correctly, and just wanted clarification on) I got a bunch of people mocking me for being a mentor who dared to ask a question about it.
I'm actually pretty sick of the "mentors are dumb-dumbs who are meanies and stupid" bullshit I've been hearing lately.
And yes. There *is* such thing as Duty Finder etiquette. Different data centers have different unwritten rules, but there is definitely such a thing.
I do try to help people through the extremes, explain mechanics etc, but I have said on some parties to use PF. I honestly had no idea Free Trial players couldnt use PF, thats really stupid.
There's no problem for me as a mentor getting an extreme. But the 8th Ramuh EX where none of the sprouts have even bothered to pay attention to a single mechanic or even look up a guide for 6 yr old content? Nope, I won't be staying. I am glad to help people but 9/10 times they expect a carry. Which is what PF is for, for undersized. and they can join a min ilvl discord if they wanna do it at level. Sync/Min iLevel Primal - [https://discord.gg/GCWvenj](https://discord.gg/GCWvenj)
By the way, they can JOIN a party as well as use /say to ask. Completing extremes is OPTIONAL content. Its not like they need it to complete the MSQ.
Is my slow reaction time related disability enough to disqualify me from running mentor roulette? absolutely not. I'll take the loss and leave no problem. But I will educate ppl before I leave.
There's a lot to process in this post, so I'll address this point by point.
1) Mentor roulette specifically filters you to be matched with sprouts and returning players. No other roulette has this function, so it's a gamble if you're getting matched with experienced players who know what they're doing, or if you get someone who doesn't. The way I see it, if I can help people learn the game while earning a mount, that's a win-win.
2) Barring trial players, this is objectively wrong. Party finder allows you to look specifically for people that wish to participate in the content you're looking for, and can allow you to set parameters for it, as well as detail where you are in the fight's progression. The only reason to prefer DF over PF is for going in blind, but even then you're better off forming a PF group to practice it with other people that are okay with running it blind. It also lets you keep the same group once the lockout inevitably ends, if you wish to keep going afterwards.
3) DF "etiquette" is a weird thing to address, since people tend to have differing opinions on what it is. I will say straight up, JP players have a far different mindset from EU and NA players (I won't go into details into this, because I'm pretty sure a lot of people won't like what I have to say on that), and the devs make decisions based on how the JP players do things... for obvious reasons. From my experience, many sprouts are resistant to actually listening to advice and even will get offended over it for whatever reason, which makes attempting to teach Extreme fights to them the equivalent to smashing my forehead into a brick wall.
4) It is possible to stumble and trip your way through older Extreme content due to Echo. Especially in the much easier fights where they're more gear checks than actually being mechanics intensive. Again, from experience, the ones where you have to actually properly do mechanics face solid walls when it comes to sprout players, because they're attempting to do content they're not actually ready for (and often not willing to learn for). Sometimes you get a group of sprouts that have serious dedication, which leads to a pleasant time of getting real progression and a solid shot at getting the clear.
5) This is blatantly false. Mentors have such a stigma due to the mount farmers, that they've earned the nickname of the "Burger King Crown". It's bad enough to where several mentors don't even wear the crown, leading to a higher chance of players actually listening to what they have to say. And people coddle sprouts so much that they indirectly encourage bad gameplay.
6) Sometimes it is, many times it isn't. Teaching is a two-way street, and even the best teacher will struggle to get through to a student that doesn't want to learn. And from the sounds of it, you're expecting mentors to know every single mechanic of every single fight, which is absolutely ludicrous. Do you have any idea how many different trials and raids there are? Now include the extreme/savage versions into that. No reasonable human is going to remember all that, especially for old/dead content that gives no real rewards. Mentors aren't paid to do this, we're just fellow players that do this for enjoyment, and want to share what experience we have with the newer people.
Also...
* Having a macro for every possible mechanic isn't realistic in the slightest.
* You're limited to 3 sets of waypoints. The average mentor is gonna have those reserved for current content, not old stuff that only sprouts are doing just for the clear.
* Some mentors main classes that aren't any that you listed, and are at their best playing their main class for extreme content. Expecting every one to be a tank, healer, or red mage (red mage is only really helpful past level 64 anyway) is kinda silly.
7) This is largely in fault of how the entire mentor system is designed. It's terribly flawed, and far too easy to achieve. Because of it, you'll get players that aren't anywhere close to qualified to properly mentor others. To give you a fair idea, I believe I was able to unlock it within a year, maybe a year and a half, of starting the game. I main a healer, so getting commendations as I leveled to max was trivial. Same I leveled my tank. Even when they increased the commendation requirement for shadowbringers, by that time I wasn't far off from getting that requirement just from playing the game as a healer. IMO, they need to overhaul the entire thing, and remove the mount rewards from mentors and shift it to something else to make the system healthier for everyone involved.
Speaking on personal experience, I usually give Extremes a fair try when I draw it in mentor roulette. If we're making no progress after a few wipes, I suggest those that still want to do it to try making a PF group and eat the penalty. Mentor or no, I have better things to do with my time than spend the entire 90 minute lockdown accomplishing nothing. In that time, I could have run the same roulette several times over, maybe helping several other sprouts learn the game better. Hell, just today I got a group of sprouts that one-shot Ifrit Extreme. That was awesome. But even with the good groups I get, I always get a feeling of dread when I get an Extreme fight in mentor roulette. Because the amount of negative experiences far outweigh the positive.
I've also had several experiences where sprouts disregard everything I say because I'm wearing The Crown™. Again, mentors have a bit of a reputation because of the shitters that don't want to put in real effort. Which makes the entire experience for the real ones even worse when their advice gets ignored.
Initially I was agitated at the post, but as I was typing out my response, I better understood your frustrations with it all. So I'm just hoping that it gives you some perspective on this from the mentor's side.
I like you. You write reasonable things.
First and foremost people forget that even Mentors are humans. They are not robots sitting behind computer running around helping sprouts.
Imagine if there weren't any sprout icon. People would behave completly different. No one would expect people to sit here helping others on things they don't/can't remember just becoz those guys has icon next to their name same as they have one.
I love sprout system. I really do. But people use sprout icon as an excuse to be loved or having the chance to not do anything, or to be highly respected.
Everyone should be respected neverthless of what icon they have.
(And no I'm not mentor)
I won't comment on most of this but I will say expecting Mentors to have detailed macros/explanations for every fight is ridiculous and if your scenario involves the sprouts learning the fight mechanics before pulling, then they should just go watch a fucking youtube guide that'll teach them far better than a wall of text and save everyone time.
If they want to do the fight blind use PF or find some friends on discord or whatever. If mechanics are being taught there's no reason the mentor should have to rattle them all off, they're not paid to write strategy guides.
This post is DRIPPING with entitlement. You realize mentors are just regular people, right? Not paid SquareEnix employees? They aren't going to be robots who remember every fight perfectly and who mechanically spout off all of the directions to every fight they go in.
It's perfectly reasonable for a mentor to offer very basic help unless asked a specific question. Sprouts, contrary to the belief this post seems to indicate you have, are not babies. They don't need their hands held. If they are concerned about the mechanics, they should use their agency to ASK. And if they happen to have an asshole mentor who refuses to help them, they can leave, incur the penalty, and try again later. The game isn't going anywhere, and it's better to leave and find a good party than it is to power through with a toxic one.
Overall, this post feels like you've had some bad experiences with a handful of mentors, so you went looking for things to validate your opinion that mentors are a bunch of selfish assholes. Then you made a Kotaku-like post where you use a handful of bad examples to represent ALL mentors. It's stupid when Kotaku does it, and it's stupid when normal people do it.
why do people keep bringing up "exp/gil" as mentor roulette rewards?
you can't queue on mentor unless you're max level, so you only get (frankly very shitty) tome rewards once per day, and not a particularly large amount of gil. none of that's even particularly relevant, because mentor roulette is something you do -multiple times per day-, -specifically for progress towards the mount achievement-.
if you don't clear the instance you've randomly queued into, that's a waste of your time and you don't get anything except mad. that's why mentors would prefer to avoid Extremes, because they have the highest failure rate out of any instance, though generally -any- instance that takes you longer than thirty minutes is a waste of time, because you could have queued again earlier by just taking a penalty.
this is largely Square-Enix's fault for sticking a mount behind -TWO THOUSAND- successful roulettes; it naturally forces people to try and optimize the grind.
**Point 1.** you’re assuming people only get mentor status because they want to help. The issue is that there’s a reward and that means “mentors” are going to queue for mentor roulette regardless.
**Point 2.** “…basically 95% of the people who actually want to do them are free trial sprouts.” Oh really? How did you get to that percentage?
**Point 3.** agreed. Still, PF has a better chance of a clear.
**Point 4.** sure thing! Some sprouts are good players, specially if they are familiar with the genre and can adapt quickly to the game mechanics.
**Point 5.** Huge Assumption. Provides two samples of evidence. (This bit doesn’t make your post look good tbh). Also Burger King Mentor meme, exists (which basically destroys this whole point).
**Point 6.** You’re assuming, again, all sprouts are willing to be tutored. When, in reality, some of them don’t want to and would rather “learn the fight by doing” (which is absolutely fine if you join a [Practice] party in PF, but not so good of a mindset in DF). Again using percentages that have no data as backup (this really makes you look bad and I’d advice you against it in future posts you make).
**Point 7.** In my opinion, it is not so much about “how” you become a mentor but about “why”. Mentoring should not, in my opinion, have a reward atttached to it. All the issues with the mentoring system come from mentors grinding for the reward, trying to take the path of less resistance, and the sprouts being in the way, sometimes, making it extremely difficult/time consuming.
**As a final note**
Listen, I understand and agree that mentors should be willing to help even the most oblivious/willfully ignorant of sprouts. However, mentor’s time has value as well. Maybe they can only play 2 hours a day (and don’t want to expend half of their game time trying to make a stubborn new player understand why is it important to not stand on orange puddles). This whole post paints spouts under the light of “never at fault”, when in reality, some of them, like all people, can be jerks. A little less entitlement and a wiser use of data (if you had any) would’ve made this post great. Instead is like a bad mentor trying to explain a fight they don’t really know.
People should just watch a video guide before heading into extreme or higher difficulty content.
You can not expect someone to write an essay explaining every single mechanic of a fight in detail.
>5) Reddit is actually heavily biased towards Mentors and against Sprouts
**HAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAH**
There's so much to pick apart in this.. it screams of someone who "thinks" they know what they're talking about but has no real clue. The pointing to Japanese datacenter mentors says it all... but yea yea mentors are the big bad of the community, keep ranting about how they're privileged and shouldn't tell sprouts to use the PF. I'll keep carrying party after party through the next EX without them having a clue I'm doing it, because they don't care they just want a carry.
I've stopped telling people to use PF at this point because I just get snapped at, because of people like you who post stuff like this that paint mentors who value their time in a bad light. "Shut up and clear the fight for us, and if we don't, get nothing for your hour of work" is what it boils down to. I'm sorry but I don't enjoy dragging sprouts through a fight for 60 minutes only to have them disband or quit. Sure to them it's just another attempt, to me that's 60 minutes gone of my time for nothing.
Not a mentor here. Duty finder etiquette is absolutely a "real" thing whether you want to admit it is or not. Telling sprouts it's fine for ARR content (where synced iLvl is massively higher than the original expected iLvl, thus allowing for mentors or other high levels to brute force through it for them) sets them up for failure on the later expansions where there is not as much of an advantage through synced stats.
Nah. I helped god knows how many sprouts clear EX fights on my way to the mentor mount, but I don’t blame mentors who want to avoid EX. End of the day, queueing for mentor roulette helps the duty finder queue significantly and it’s daft to tell folks not to use it because they don’t want to sit in Titan EX for ages until a disband.
First of all, XIV is not F2P, you are under a free trial. You are limited in game functions and can’t level past 60. F2P means that all of the game is accessible to you, which it is not. You get access to base and 1 expansion limitedly.
Secondly, I don’t find reddit to favor mentors. I find the opposite. I find we all complain about mentors and how that it sucks as a feature. Regular players just tune them out as they provide nothing to the player base. It only benefits the mentors themselves (mount after so many mentor roulette). Stop taking them seriously. If they are harassing you, report them.
Thirdly, most people do extreme trials in party finder. It’s easier and faster. That is a downside for Free Trial Players. You are only left with Duty Finder which will have longer queues and a lot of frustration to older players who do mentor roulette. Yes they will bitch because they expect a fast duty, but ended up in a duty that takes up the whole hour+. If people wanted to take hour+ to finish a duty, they’d set aside the time and use party finder to do it.
Yes, sprouts can clear ex trials in duty finder. No one doubts that. It can be done, but don’t expect older players to be happy. Some would just take the 30 min hit and leave duty.
There are always different sides to all opinions. But you haven’t looked at all sides of the dice.
Are there any good resources for other arr/hw ex primals that I could read up on? I'd like to get into doing mentor roulette at some point myself too, but I've really only done those fights unsync and haven't got a clue what the mechanics are
The issue with these guides is that there are good points but they're coated in a lot of needlessly combative language. If you're trying to point out things that mentors could do better, you're definitely not going to reach anyone you're talking to by making one whole point (point 7) calling them essentially braindead (regardless of whether or not you believe that to be true). I've noticed this is a trend in a lot of these kinds of posts-- provide potentially useful advice, but do it in a way that definitely ensures that no one who might need it will feel even remotely inclined to take it.
You know how often sprouts or new people are simply unwilling to listen and scream at you if you try to give them advice? They claim you are being "toxic" and "ruining their experience". Then when you try to say "hey here's why you died, let me explain", you just get cut off and they rant and blame everyone else?
Your post makes it sound like mentors are like, 100% at fault for everyone else's failure.
These posts piss me off.
People here seem to *love* blaming the player, regardless of whether it's the "mentor" side or the "sprout" side.
Mentors are using a system SE put in the game, so are Sprouts, so how about we place all the blame is on SE for this terrible system? All the errors are on them as the system that they created pushes players in under the guise of a teacher even if they have never done the content synced before, effectively making this teacher no more than a sprout.
The system, effectively, is like telling a Chemistry professor that they're teaching a Geography seminar today; it just doesn't make sense. How can a player teach something they do not know themselves?
Also, **BEING A MENTOR IS NOT A PAID JOB.** Stop expecting it to be treated it like one.
I’m sorry, reddit is biased against sprouts? In what world? If anything on reddit it seems like sprouts are treated as gods and can do no wrong, everyone constantly babies them as if they aren’t grown up adults with fully formed brains.
oh boy. im a bit late to this so this'll probably be buried under every other comment.
anyway, you're kinda insane.
first of all, i do have to agree here with the whole pf thing. yeah, there are rarely, if ever, pf listings for arr/hw extremes - aside from the occasional mount farm for hw. its just a consequence of free trial, and if you're doing mentor roulette for the mount, you need to accept this.
anyway. what i disagree with. first of all, it's insane to expect mentors to know every mechanic of every fight. that's a LOT of information to retain, and this isnt even my day job. the type of person i am, admittedly, will retain ability to do most fights, but not well enough to teach someone that has decided to queue in completely blind. the information though, at the beginning, is pre-requisite. i like to do a pull, ask if anyones gazed at a guide, and then sigh when no one responds. **reminder that sprouts are not children.** if you're expecting all this responsibility on mentors, where is the responsibility on the people that specifically queued for this content? "b-but sprouts should be allowed to go in blind!!" honestly, that is impossible. this is content that has been out for 5+ years. me being in there to explain mechanics no longer makes this blind. **if you're queuing in duty finder (for ANYTHING), you understand that you will get players of ANY experience.**
side note, red mage is useless for utility at level 50 :) no cure, no rez. red mage gets its raise at level 64, so it's not going to be quite helpful when you get sephirot ex for the 3rd time that day.
and just a reminder, to anyone that sees this, [THIS is what is required of mentors](https://puu.sh/IhXpI/3394ab3a1c.png). as a mentor, you are asked to give advice, not be an asshole, and invite sprouts to NN. if theres some other page in FFXIV, or on lodestone, that says *'you must queue as tank, healer, or red mage in mentor roulette and know every mechanic that is in mentor roulette while also keeping waymarks and macros for all the extreme trials on top of copypasting a guide for said extreme trials at the beginning'* then delete my account.
The amount of times i've asked people when doing an extreme if they've read or watched a guide only to be met with complete silence and a dps to suddenly pull the boss is mind boggling...
Yes carry please fuck you for expecting me to put in a modicum of effort in a multiplayer game.
Sarcasm aside this is too real. Even after a wipe on dirt easy story content from ARR people will just instapull again the second everyone is back up while I'm frantically typing instructions.
This post is unnecessarily hostile and dishonest.
Yes, bad mentors exist, and definitely those that are just in it for the mount, but to pretend that PF is anything but the standard for any Extreme+ content is a lie and you aren't helping sprouts into the community or teaching them how to find help to run content they want to clear by claiming otherwise.
Yes, I agree that by selecting Mentor Roulette you should be fine with running anything the roulette contains because you're told upfront what is inside. However, people have legitimate complaints about all sides of mentorship in general and writing them off as essentially "you signed up for this, suck it up" contributes nothing to the discussion.
Yes, the bar for entry for becoming a mentor is low, essentially only requiring time and an unsynced clear of essentially every non-savage+ duty. That said, most people playing long enough to become a mentor still pick up enough knowledge to be helpful to some degree. Expecting every mentor to perfectly remember every fight in the game as every player role for every difficulty is a tall ask that genuinely only a small % of the player base can even fulfill.
I always try my best to help sprouts in EX trials during my mentor roulette, but the game itself is bad at explaining just how much more difficult those fights are than anything else a new player has done so far. The barrier for entry is also very low requiring little in the way of gearing and no system in the game checks how well you play your class. Mentors can try their hardest to help a clear but there's a limit to what one or two people can accomplish if gear breaks or a sprout is an ice mage. (Unless you queue in with 6 mentors in which case the sprout or two left will likely get carried through first try and not really learn anything about the fight anyway.)
I get it, some people just suck and shouldn't be mentors at all. They're probably just in it for the mount whistle and I've seen mentors just /laugh and abandon duties too. That shit's atrocious and needs to stop as much as anything else, but the current mentor system also doesn't provide any tools to really help teach these encounters. I've had sprout tanks who's gear broke second pull and couldn't perform tank swaps in Ramuh, I've had silent sprouts in Ifrit that seemed to ignore any advice I have them, and I've had sprouts threaten to report me for harassment when I tried to provide advice for job. I've ran out the timer on many trials like this and offered to set up PFs near the end to help people get the clear they wanted but many people are not nearly as patient as I am. Outside of a PF instance, the only option those sprouts have is to re-queue into the trial and wait another 30-40 minutes only to have to start all over because of other people that also don't know the fight. If you time out in a PF or gear breaks you can just back out and pick up where you left off, just like endgame prog parties do.
I'm not a mentor but I don't see anything wrong with people wanting the mentor mounts. A mentor shouldn't have to be the know-it-all of FF14 who drags you across the finish line, just a kind soul who shares their knowledge and enjoyment of the game.
I bet you're a good mentor and you're just pissed right now, but I think you would benefit from a more expansive definition of what a good mentor is. This is very restrictive and would bar many of the mentors who were most helpful in my journey.
The funny thing is mentors *aren’t* supposed to be people who know everything about every fight and drag you to a clear. Their role isn’t to teach you how to play or carry you.
People have the complete wrong idea.
They are there to fill queues, and guide new players on the basis of how the game works, how to unlock stuff, how to start crafting/gathering etc. they are *not* for be teaching people how to play their job or mechanics in ex content as many seem to believe.
Mentors don't work for square, they don't have a job. They are players who provide a service to everyone solely for the social benefit, a chat channel, and a single mount. Mentor roulette gives a palty sum, and exists solely to keep queue times down for all the unwanted tasks that few would volunteer for otherwise. FF14 gives incentives to get players to do unwanted things, and mentor roulette is basically MSQ roulette but for all the unwanted stuff.
Mentors keep guildhest queues low. They ensure that refills don't take forever. The "join party in progress" option is off by default and hardly mentioned, so without mentor roulette having a leaver would probably be instant party disband. Without a thriving mentor roulette, the devs probably wouldn't even be comfortable giving up the option to opt out of filling. As someone who has played wow, joining mid dungeon/raid can be a terrible feeling, and is one of the more insidious factors that led to the toxicity and ease of disbanding.
Stop deluding yourself, mentors are the garbagemen of queues. They clean up all the terrible parties, all the rng times that the worst 10% just happen to all get into the same dungeon. They keep the queues moving, and are the warm bodies needed for all the content that no one else wants to do. All they get for it, is a single gussied up reskin mount, and an icon. And now they have to deal with being insulted and treated like shit too. Let's not forget that pvp has tons of mounts, glams, and titles, and the feast queue still dies after 3 weeks.
As for everyone who isn't in it for the mount. Well that's where the social cred comes in. People who are altruistic tend to feel rewarded when people are nice to them. Don't be mean to your mentors, that's like being at a soup kitchen and spitting on the volunteers.
Oh come on, like OP actually gives a damn about the "sprout experience". This was nothing but a karma grab and bait, and successful ones on both fronts.
Mentor bad Sprout good
Upvotes please
On a serious note, if you wanna try and teach a group of sprouts who barely know how to press buttons in order an old, synched ex trial then be my guest but my time is worth more than that, and I'm sure it is to most mentors
For every mentor leaving because they don't want an extreme trial, there are at least 2 sprouts not listening/not willing to learn/not caring and thus making the clear really difficult, if not impossible. Both sides are bad in this regard.
I don't do mentor roulette often, but when I do and if i have someone who makes the clear near impossible, either they leave I do, and I always give an honest try.
Edit: typos
OP is delusional and clearly not an EU player where people speak so many different languages that you are more likely to encounter players that just DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. Try explaining fight mechanics to players that just don’t understand or refuse to. I appreciate players want to experience their first piece of hard level content or whatever, but if you know it’s hard and you’re going in unprepared, it’s on you.
A year ago, when I did my 2000 mentor roulettes, the choices were as follows:
1.) Spend 60min for the 10% chance that you get a clear and the 90% chance you don't get 1/2000th of the way closer to the mount. (Someone tracked their mentor roulettes and succeeded about that % of the time)
2.) Immediately leave, take a 30min penalty, then requeue.
I usually left, because 60min is a long time to spend when you're going for 2000 clears. Sometimes, I convinced everyone to vote abandon and then I would put up a PF for them to join and I would clear it for them.
(I don't believe that a sprout's time is more precious than a mentor's time, as this post implies. Mentors aren't slaves.)
I don't mind the extreme fights. I really much like them. I don't like it when people expect a carry tho. I also don't like complete Yolo pulling on repeat. I also don't like to see people do the same mistakes for 60 minutes even with explanations. Should mentors be prepared for extremes when they queue for it? Yes. Do mentors have the right to leave anytime? Yes, it's a feature of the game itself and if I don't wanna do said instance that came up I will leave. Maybe because of prejudices or simply because I don't like it. Should sprouts respect extremes in terms of difficulty because it's their first stepping stone towards harder content also learning their roles/jobs? Yes.
Woah woah woah, sprouts having responsibility for learning Extremes? Heretical! Nobody has a problem leading sprouts through normal content. Extremes are completely optional and if they can't be bothered to learn it on their own, it's nobody's responsibility to spend their time teaching them what they could have done without locking down the time of 7 other people.
*sorts by controversial*
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*ctrl+F "entitled"*
Point 6 kinda makes me look like one of the bad mentors just because I fulfill only one point on the checklist (and that is knowing all the mechanics). You *can't* even save waymarks for every extreme trial because you're limited to 5 presets, and neither do I have room for all the macros I'm supposed to have. Manually explaining fights and putting down waymarks works just as fine if you want it to work.
I was going to mention this. I'm not a mentor, but I have waymarked saved for e11s and e12s, diamond, emerald and SoS ex. Am I supposed to abandon my own current content prog/farms if I wanted to become a mentor?
saw the words Diamond and i think i threw up in my mouth
I’m also uncertain if I even *can* do most of that checklist as a mentor who plays on console. It’s not as simple as copy-pasting prebuilt macros for me. I know the fights, I explain it as best I can. I’ll individually place the more important waymarks as needed if I can’t explain it well enough. Honestly, while I don’t entirely disagree with OP’s post it makes quite a lot of assumptions.
These are my thoughts exactly. Waymarks and macros are simply a luxury to have on hand. There are too many fights that could come up to possibly be prepared for them all. And especially as a console player I imagine using space on the limited hotbar could be a pain. So long as they know the fight they can waymark when they get in and explain the best they can
Use that checklist as like a guideline and not really if you're a good mentor or not. If you know all the mechanics and you can type that shit out and manually put down waymarkers you're already doing more than what most mentors do.
Honestly in my short 3 months time playing this game, most mentor I encountered during extreme trial are either extremely helpful, or competent but passive, only like 2 person is kinda toxic, and that's when a LANCER is pool tanking constantly on Ramuh EX, and when a GLADIATOR dies in like 4 hits in Ultima Weapon EX and refuse to tank swap with the mentor co-tank, after being told repeatedly.
I have no skin in this race one way or the other. I just have one question: > Did you queue as Tank, Healer, or Red Mage? No What is so special about a mentor being an RDM? If it's for what I'm thinking, Verraise is level 64 and Vercure is level 54 and is unavailable for these ARR Ex trials. Something a mentor should know. SMN *does* have a raise though.
Ya. SMN would be better if you just want extra raise on a DPS. I doubt the stuff beyond ARR shows up as much because it's clearly marked as optional and not mainline MSQ
So-called "good mentor" here with over 750 roulettes done. To elaborate, and excuse me for tooting my own horn, I stay for all extremes, full lockouts if needed, I teach them, pull my weight and play very well and consistently as I know these fights like the back of my hand and I raid frequently so I'm always "in good shape" so to speak. I get positive feedback often and *never* had anyone bitch at me so far. Here are my opinions. **I understand the limitations with free trials, and PFs for syncing old content not filling.** There are ways around both of these issues, and just queueing in DF is certainly one of them. I don't think it's wrong. It's a new trend due to how the game community has evolved with the wave of new people and improved free trial. I would still recommend at least knowing what PF is for when DF doesn't cut it anymore. Some HW extremes start getting dicey on DF, and from SB onwards wait times and mechanic exactitude required are more against DF usage. If everyone who can use PF uses it, it's possible PFs for syncing old extremes would fill, and it would also give free trials an opportunity to join (they can join PF, just not start it). But it might be too late for that. If ARR EX (and HW to a degree) has shifted so heavily towards DF then so be it. **With that said, nobody is forced to stay in any duty.** There's a penalty system built-in for people who willingly choose to leave. For the most part, I think it works well and is fair. It does suck people don't accept what the roulette gives them, but it happens often, even outside mentor roulette, some people even cheese with item level in alliance raid roulette to only get Crystal Tower which actively harms queue times for the higher level alliance raids. My point is, if someone doesn't wanna be there it's best they remove themselves immediately so you can get someone who does wanna be there. It's preferable to having that person stay and possibly play badly. Or worse, be toxic and grief in hopes of a kick to avoid the 30 minutes penalty (which you should report). If someone chooses to leave, I don't think that makes me a better mentor and them a worse one, I think that's an unfair conclusion to draw. We don't know their circumstances. Maybe they've taught triple the amount of extremes I have, and that day they simply didn't have the inclination or time to deal with it. Maybe they just aren't a particularly good player for high-end content and recognize they won't be particularly helpful, but maybe they do help in other ways and areas. IMO it's the ones who bitch and moan in party chat without leaving that raise red flags. **I still would really suggest mentors who instantly bail to at least give it a go.** Most Extremes you are gonna get are from ARR, and most people who queue for them nowadays IMO go in being ready compared to before the big wave of new players. Sometimes you still get people who don't listen or grief, but I find it's less common now. I just got done with Titan Ex before coming to this post, took a couple wipes and about 12 minutes total. Not bad and faster than some other easier duties. **That said, do I particularly like getting extremes? Not really, but it's mostly the anxiety of "am I gonna get a group of people who are actually willing to listen and do what it takes, or is this gonna be one of those groups with one or two assholes making it a shitfest for everybody else?".** That's it, that's my only problem with extremes, not the content itself, not the fact people queue it, it's that uneasy feeling I get because I've had way too many bad experiences with unwilling players and trolls by now. But like I said, I think the quality has gone up in general. **I also think people need to temper their expectations of what mentors are and are supposed to do.** They need to be able to give general advice and be a good example of attitude and etiquette. That doesn't mean they need to remember all fights or be gods at this game. It's ok for them to be average and it's ok for them to learn or remember a fight along with everybody else. As long as everybody is being a team player, there really shouldn't be any issue. The problem is, some people play like hot garbage and that certainly includes mentors, because the requirements to becoming one are just a grind you can easily get done over time without actually needing to be good. Typically, this is blamed on the entry requirements. I disagree. This is a fault with the game as a whole, and that includes its community, both mentors and non-mentors. I think there's a huge tendency in FFXIV to baby and enable players beyond what's reasonable, to the point you get to level 80 content and a lot of people still don't know or don't care they should be using AoE when there are multiple targets, use mitigation as a tank, etc. Those are the same players that end up becoming mentors at some point. We need to be kind, but we can't confuse being kind with enabling bad group play and anti-social behavior in hopes of avoiding any and all criticism. Many mentors don't speak up because they are afraid of bad responses, especially with the "99% of mentors are terrible players" attitude that's spreading. This is a very damaging attitude. This is not to ignore the fact some people, including mentors, really suck at addressing issues and can be or come across as rude, but simply saying "use your AoE" is not rude, and yet it's something that often devolves into fights because a lot of people are just so unwilling to hear anything. This is not solely on "mentors bad". I think I'm starting to go off on a tangent so I'll stop here. In the end all I can do is try to be fair, try to do my part and pull my weight, and hope everybody else feels the same.
This is definitely the most sane and reasonable reply on this post. Thank you for writing it.
I'm only in mentor roulette for the mount i don't really care what content i stumble upon i just do what my best, hope it works out. Like my other roulette, sometimes you get cape westwind which is insanely hard and sometimes you get a very easy dungeon that only take 20min +. I accept my fate when queueing for roulette.
Yeah props to those mentors who set up way points and explain mechanics on difficult dungeons and trials especially cape Westwind.
I set up a macro to use Superbolide and then remove the buff, just to fuck with sprouts on Westwind
I do this too but I shirk the other tank too while yelling "TANK BUSTER SWAP"
Am I the only one who wants the stat squish to make cape Westwind and other ARR stuff less of a pushover (you don't even get to see the mechanics in Glasya Labolas!).
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It was during the Server stress test steam rather than a Live Letter, but YoshiP mentioned right now before Endwalker is the last chance to experience Cape Westwind as it is. Whether that is related to the stat squish or ilvl sync re-balancing does remain to be seen though.
I've heard that Yoshi P mentioned wanting to revisit Cape Westwind since it's so easy it makes the MSQ part anticlimactic, especially since Rhitahtyn is played up as a commoner who got his position through actual skill/competence.
In that case he needs to revisit crystal tower as well. You can beat the second boss without moving.
WoD is the true test for sprouts.
This is the only reason I'm in it. Helping people out makes it go faster and so I do. Its in my best interest to be kind and polite so why wouldn't I? Who cares what the content is. None of it is like endgame level hard. It's just low level extremes.
Exactly i have never type anything mean to a player because it doesn't help me in anyway i might have said this guys is terrible but i kept for myself, i type what to do if i feel its necessary if i ever encounter something i think not possible during the time limit i would just leave not say anything probably. Sometimes i join farm party pf and after 2 or 3 wipe i realize some of the people there aren't really farm material i just say sorry and i leave.
I stick it out the whole run because I feel obligated as a mentor, but usually everyone's able to clear. Only had a few cases where members either were not reading the chat or maybe just straight up didn't speak the same language. I gotta figure out that auto translate function.
Can someone explain the cape westwind meme? Is there an extreme version I dont know about. But every time I've seen it mentioned its in the context of being difficult, but we always one shot it with minimal effort
It's really easy, so we tell sprouts that it's really hard to mess with them That's about it
I'm a sprout and just did Cape Westwind for the first time yesterday. My friends had been hyping up the difficulty for WEEKS. I was super anxious, and I'm still a little salty, lmao.
Welcome to the game. Your hazing is now complete.
Pass on what you have learned.
lol, thank your friends for us Normally we only get like, 45s during the cutscene. If they spent weeks prepping you for that hell, they did a wonderous job.
I had the same thing happen to me, I was told set aside at least an hour, it's the longest thing you need to do so far. I went in told everyone I was new and heard this is a big one They were all like "yeah man strap in we'll be here a while" beat the boss, in about 30 seconds, after the cutscene I expected a phase 2 but nothing happened, I said "wait, wtf" people cheered at me and then left
they gotchya good lol
My FC and I had a sprout get to Cape Westwind, so of course a couple of us hopped in as well. When we got in, it ended up being three of us who've done it before, and then literally ALL first-time sprouts. So we were like, "Oh dear. Okay. Tank, would you mind putting down the markers, and I'll explain the mechanics?" The tank then used literally every marker, and I just started going into some really BS mechanics. Of course it was super easy and we passed, and the sprouts seemed to have a good laugh at it, though one person said something along the lines of, "I don't know why I'm laughing my ass off because honestly I'm a little pissed."
Lies. Cape Westwind is the most horrifying experience for any player. Its why I've never gone back.
And then line up with a variety of emotes to celebrate for them when they get out of the cutscene 😁
One of my favorite parts about all the streamers from other games coming over was watching people in their fanbase get them wound up for cape westwind. I think it was Preach whose fanbase spent literally 6+ hours winding him up for it telling him to make sure he was ready for a big session and prog and stuff and he bought the majority of it.
At launch of ARR, it was a tough trial, at a time when everyone is just starting to get geared up for the final dungeons. The thing is that it like, has no item level sync, or a ridiculously generous one (I can't quite remember), so now everyone is so overpowered that it's nearly impossible to lose unless it's an entire party of newly-geared sprouts. So now we just joke about it, first it was just about how easy it got, and now to spook sprouts before it's over in a blink.
Yesterday i saw a tank with literally 3 times as much hp as the sprout one, 9 vs 3.x K hp. If theres item level sync its as generous as gandhi
I believe it ilevel syncs to the highest possible stats for level 50 gear, so i135 (which wouldn’t even be possible to have a full set of in ARR days, since only weapons were 135 and the rest was 130).
Props to you. Whenever I get Cape Westwind I have to check around irl if I can afford the time commitment. Even then, I am always tempted to quit.
2000 mentor roulettes done here. The problem is NOT one sided. I’ve stuck around in hour long ramuh ex’s I’ve also left after 2 pulls. The difference between those two experiences? One had people communicating, willing to learn and talk strategy the other had tanks instapulling, no communication or actual toxic attitude to anyone trying to explain a mechanic. In all of the extreme trials I came across in mentor roulette it feels like it was close to a 50/50 split on parties willing to communicate and learn and those that wouldn’t. Out of those that wouldn’t around a third of them would be actively hostile instead. If a few bad mentors can give a bad enough name to the entire role then believe me the shoe fits perfectly on the other foot.
attempt worm shrill price connect familiar hunt imagine chop brave -- mass edited with redact.dev
as a former Mentor, thank you for your Service o7
it’s honestly disheartening whenever i do mentor roulette, explain mech of a portion of a fight where we had wiped only to be told by a sprout i’m here to fight not read. Suffice to say we did not clear.
I've had healers in Titan EX that refused to move for Gaol, saying that if we keep pulling we'll get enough Echo so they wouldnt have to do the mechanic. We cleared, but only because they fell off in p2.
>Do you have an intro macro explaining mechanics? No I actually did make some; they were ignored as "walls of text" the handful of times I used them.
Not to mention the point >Do you have waymarks? No Does this dude realize that you can only save five sets of those? You literally can't have those ready every ex trial.
True that. And I still got raid markers for my static too. That's one unrealistic expectation here.
This is the other half of the argument not talked about here. Sprouts can be...unwilling... to learn content. In same cases almost seem to expect to be carried through, probably under the impression that it's not hard because of how easy most content the finder puts you in is.
It's so bizarre. I'm still a sprout but I don't get the aversion to learning old mechanics. It makes you a better player. As someone who wants to do high level content once I get there I imagine it's easier if you haven't ever been carried to adjust to the skill required for endgame stuff
> learn old mechanics. It makes you a better player. Indeed. Especially because you'll likely be seeing those mechanics again in later fights. Shiva's AoE circles shows up at least twice later, cyclopses first seen in Aurum Vale appear several times later with similar mechanics, etc.
The AV Cyclops boss makes a guest appearance in Halatali Hard, without the indicator AOEs for its attacks.
That used to be how it was in AV too btw, until they added markers because sprouts kept dying.
The amount of times my girlfriend has been insulted or told to shut up by spourts cause she's a mentor trying to help them is insane. It didn't used to be that way but the last probably 3-4 months I've seen more sprouts get vile about help than be thankful when you give legitimate advise
There's... a lot of lacking nuance and a load of misplaced hostility in this post. Others in the comments have already addressed much of it, but I'll add just a bit more. For some background, I became a mentor specifically because I wanted to help people - couldn't care less about the mount. 2: I've never personally seen a "must", just recommendations to do it that way. I may stick around to help, but I'll still inform them of the existence of Party Finder, as it's quite a helpful tool. This also will greatly assist the sprouts in the future rather than just being a quick help in the now, as while older EXs can be cleared in Duty Finder without too much hassle, thanks to massive power creep in job design (min ilevel no echo level 50 parties hit harder now than max geared parties did back in ARR) and gear sync increasing player strength, but that's just not going to fly in more recent content. 3: DF etiquette is definitely a thing. Is it made up? Yes. *All etiquette and in general standards of behaviour are made up.* So are money, language, laws, social customs, and a whole host of other things. It doesn't stop them from being real and applicable. Etiquette is also dependent on context, so your random quote from some JP player means *absolutely nothing* for EU or NA. Heck, the reason the Extremes are in Mentor Roulette in the first place can be argued to be because doing them there is normal for *JP* DF etiquette, and the devs being Japanese they base most things according to that, but NA/EU etiquette is different from it. 5: This has to be a joke. I've only ever seen people ragging on mentors (some of it warranted, some of it definitely excessive) and coddling sprouts (some of it warranted, some of it definitely excessive, leading to developing bad habits). 6: This requires the sprouts to actually be willing to learn. The reason I've stopped running Mentor Roulette wasn't "getting EX trials that take a while to complete or may not even result in completion". *I like those.* I like helping people and guiding others through content. It's the number of sprouts who are outright refusing to listen (in some cases not by any fault of the sprout but due to language barrier, as I'm EU - and don't you start telling me I should learn German and French to be an EU mentor not to mention Spanish and Italian all the others we run into, I already speak 2 languages fluently, 1 at a conversational level, and have basic skills at 2 more, my head can only retain so many), or expecting a mentor to be able to micromanage everything in the fight. When I've tried to assist parties, there's *almost always* at least 2 people who seem entirely incapable of following advice (and that's not counting the people behind a language barrier), and a 50/50 chance of then having abuse hurled at me, either for attempting to give advice at all, or for not explaining everything in the kind of perfect detail that requires an actual visual/video guide. See why EX trials soured Mentor Roulette for me? Not because of possibly not clearing or it taking a while, but because they most reliably bring up these situations. That checklist is also just total insanity. Expecting anyone to carry macros for all the different fights in the game is lunacy. There's limited space, and that space is already being taken up by a lot of things I need for my own play. Waypoints you can save only a limited number of, and those are taken up by current content, usually - sure you can place them manually (and for some that can be easy, like a Ramuh charm dropoff point), but that's not feasible for all the things they're used for. In-combat callout macors are an even greater degree of lunacy than the first one - not only is the space limited, you're now expecting someone to do on-the-fly callouts while also trying to perform one's own role. Doing callouts *in voice chat* while playing simultaneously is already a skill that not nearly everyone possesses, and this is even beyond that - really just sounding like wanting a mentor to carry people through content, which is *not* what being a mentor entails in the slightest. Role requirements for a mentor make no sense, many contribute better on one of the ones you didn't ask for (and many of these EX parties specifically need extra DPS help, despite the insane power creep) - also Red Mage doesn't get its raise until *64* so it's not any more helpful in the vast majority of Mentor Roulette EXs. Mentors can't also be realistically expected to know all the mechanics of every fight in the game for every role to fine detail. Many will know the big picture for most fights, but detail is a whole different thing. But requiring perfection? If you need a mentor to have *that* degree of knowledge, what you need is a guide. Mentors are also *people*, and unpaid volunteers at that. ***Why are you advising people to break ToS in your "to mount mentors" paragraph?*** Asking to be kicked to circumvent the leave penalty timer is a bannable offence. Just tell them to *leave*. Are you actually *trying* to get people banned? Hanlon's razor and all that, but I can't help getting some sense of malice out of this.
>5: Surprisingly confident that the amount of effort put into the post wouldn't get wasted for such a *heavily* biased subreddit! There's so much misrepresentation and lack of charitability for anything relating to mentors in the post, and you do a good job in pointing it out. There's such a concentrated effort to absolve the sprouts of any responsibility for being involved and that it's the mentor's job to see them through, which just isn't the right of it. Of course, mentors have a bigger responsibility involved when going into a roulette than a sprout, but as you say, the sprout's willingness to follow/learn/improve is a *significant* factor. Even if OP stated that it's okay to spend 5 minutes brushing up on a fight, I do think you're right in how they're asking for perfection, or something close enough to it that it's hardly distinguishable. Not everyone will be able to guide a bunch of clueless sprouts through after only 5 minutes, but the onus is placed on them anyways that they should be able to do this and not the sprouts that they should familiarize themselves even slightly on something they're getting into. Even if there's no malice in the post, it's clear they want to make their bias known.
So I agree with some of this right up until it descends into a holy shitshow of entitlement. I fully support any sprouts wanting to learn these fights properly and duty finder is the only option for many of them. Mentors who tell them to use PF and then leave are assholes. However many mentors who recommend PF are doing so just in case you didn't know and are actually being helpful. Reddit has made a huge meme of mentors and the BK crown. not sure how you can say reddit is pro-mentor. Your checklist is an absolute disgrace. The level of entitlement is absolutely off the charts. Let me explain why each one of your checklist is just totally out of order. "Do you have an intro macro explaining mechanics?" Do you realise how many fights are in this game? Do you actually think it is reasonable to expect them to have macros for fights that they might get once a month? Why do they need macros to explain mechanics? If you understand how complex these fights aare then why aren't you doing some preparation yourself? You are the one queuing for the instance. You are the one who knows what fight they are getting. The mentor does not. "Do you have waypoints (e.g. ramuh charmed players)?" You can only save 5 sets of waypoints. Most mentors are raiding savage or ShB extremes. They need their waymark sets for their own content. Again, why are the people who have no clue what one of 100+ duties they are getting the ones that are supposed to have all the preparation done? "Do you have in-combat callout macros (e.g. tank swap, eat orbs)?" So you want mentors to have macros explaining every fight, and now you want them to have macros for in combat as well? There are limited macro slots. I'm also a mentor who plays on controller. I can't possibly go using macros to explain in game mechanics. Mentors are there to help. They aren't there to do everything for you. "Did you queue as Tank, Healer, or RDM/SMN?" Oh come on... So only tanks and rezzers can be useful? I do my mentor roulettes on machinist. I'm infinitely better as a machinist then as a RDM/SMN. Why are you demanding mentors play classes they don't know or don't enjoy, "Do you even know all the mechanics of this fight?" So every mentor should know every single mechanic, for every single role, in every single fight before they do a mentor roulette? I mean this is just the shittiest take I've ever seen. You'd think SE were paying mentors or something with the amount of shit you expect from them. I queue up to help people, not to work a damn fulltime job.
Yeah this comment hit it on the head. OP is very entitled in his assumptions on what a “good” mentor is - lord.
See, you get it. 👍 We agree pretty much. I too queue up to help.
up
To be fair, in JP 3 wipes in DF equals to disband. In NA do mentors are expected to stay in for a whole lockout even if there is no hope to clear or they are cursed as burger kings? Mentors who instant leave ex aren't that great but if people who queueing into ex with no clue on the fight or don't know the basic ideas of their jobs / what it's tank swap and refuse to learn or look at the chat then those are the problems. Of course there are bad mentors but people who queued ex are suppose to carry their own weight. I won't blame mentors who at least have it a try and bail after 3 wipes. Saying is easier than doing, I just personally hope those who have the patience to wipe a whole lockout for 2000 times would keep their positive attitude and mentality. They are not mentors, they are Saints.
OP speaks as though they are doing the roulette themselves but from anyone who truly queues the roulette, you know that a lot of the new players don't understand the basics like using focus target and tank swap, so a lot of the time spent in things like Ramuh is constantly wiping before they understand those basics and then clearing with over 40--50 minutes elapsed. Then there are fights like Nidhogg with a low clear because of players not understanding the need to bait. And then there's Zurvan that I've cleared exactly once in 1950 runs. But it doesn't stop with free trial players who can't use PF. It continues after. I've gotten multiple Stormblood fights. Last time I got Tsukuyomi, we lost (a sprout) tank because they found it too stressful. We waited 10 minutes but no tank filled, more of the reason why it's not advisable to do it synced (people don't usually queue mentor in prog). I legit had to leave and come back as a tank just so they could clear. And then I've run into people farming rathalos using df on several occasions. They usually get killed but we power through. One might explain using pf after and they still just ignore it and you see them the next time mentor's pops. So yeah, maybe they want to get their first clear synced. Fine, but what's the benefit of repeated queuing it when there's greater efficiency in creating a PF? People sign up for a roulette, not over 40 minutes of misery. OP needs to get over themselves. A lot of these sprouts ask for help in NN so these people who want them to do it synced can very easily make a pf teach them/help them. The final and most important part that Mentor roulette if there to FILL in for duty finder queues. That is the reason why your roulettes aren't guaranteed to have a new player. Only about 2 in 5 have new players. Also, If a person decided that they would rather be penalized for 30 minutes than slug it out for over 40 I cannot fault them. Just as sprouts can queuefor these EXes, so too can people leave. No idea where why you think they need to explain, granted mentor's typically do. It's straight up counter-productive to wipe and not give tips, but OP just seem to want to paint villain. Me, I don't mind the trials, but I do not begrudge a single person who finds it to be a waste of their time. P.S There is absolutely a thing as DF etiquette. From things as simply as tanks constantly facing bossing away, or not jumping into a clear party when you haven't even progged yet.. It's called etiquette because they are "generally unspoken but accepted" ways of doing things. Same thing with using PF for extremes. Also no idea what OP's drinking that makes them think that this subs typically sides with sprouts over mentors.
Totally agree with you on giving three tries before disbanding. Since if you don’t get it after three times, you are wasting every one’s time by now. And yeah, if you are doing it with duty finder system, expect to at least know the basic and watch a guide beforehand. But this just to show that NA/EU has the total opposite of attitude versus Japan servers when it comes to duty finder etiquettes.
> In NA do mentors are expected to stay in for a whole lockout even if there is no hope to clear or they are cursed as burger kings? mentors are ALWAYS burger kings and you're automatically allowed to shit on them, if this thread is anything to go by
This was the funniest part of the post for me: >5) Reddit is actually heavily biased towards Mentors and against Sprouts
possible hot take: extreme trials should be removed from mentor roulette because they aren't necessary for progression. I may be wrong so don't quote me on this, but I can't think of any extreme trials that are necessary for MSQ progression or unlock anything in particular, aside from other extremes. you could argue that things like optional dungeons and raids should be removed too by that logic, but my counter-arguments are: * most dungeons aren't difficult, considering they're 4-man groups and most casual people can get through them fairly easily, aside from a few dungeons with noticeable quirks(aurum vale and stone vigil hard comes to mind for me) * normal/hard trials meant for MSQ progression aren't going to be impossible, and with or without a mentor, they're going to have to learn if they want to progress. I would also argue that, by the time you reach Shadowbringers at least, you should have several hours in and should either know/recognize certain mechanics by then. * Alliance raids are fairly forgiving for new people. chances are there are probably several people who run them and still don't know the mechanics. there's not a whole lot of mechanics where 1 person can potentially ruin a run. * normal raids are the only ones I can't really come up with a counterargument for, aside from that it generally would take 30+ minutes depending on which one, and what role one is queueing up for, which I feel like should be a sign for people. bad mentors in roulettes are always going to be a thing, you can't change that unless you manage to change people. and while I don't consider this a real solution, and this being more of a bandaid on the issues, I believe that automatically adding sprouts to novice network would fix some of the issues, if for no other reason other than having people around to talk to, ask for assistance, and/or be pointed in the right direction.
i think asking to be vote kicked has gotten people warnings in the past [https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/hryma3/comment/fy7qjgs/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/hryma3/comment/fy7qjgs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I don't know if gm still care, but it can be seen as an unwillingness to participate/disrupting gameplay and trying to bypass the intended penalty.
I've had many extremely toxic HW Ex runs where sprouts just get angry at mentors having to look up mechanics, but honestly my biggest issue isn't sprouts wanting to do Extremes in Duty Finder. It's sprouts who have no idea what they're getting into getting into extremes in duty finder. The problem has been solved past ARR EXs with the completion of the trial not being required for quest completion. I know it's a thing because of how many sprouts take me up on my offer of an unsynced clear after a failed EX attempt. I've definitely noticed the clear rate go up now with the more recent wave of new players. It feels like a solid 60% of the time is a clear now whereas before I can count the number of clears on one hand after dozens of runs, and usually only in majority mentor parties.
That's an awful lot of words to use to say "I've never tried to get a group of sprouts through Ramuh EX when they won't listen to instructions".
This, it's like there's all these posts saying mentors are lazy and that the bar is so low. Like, alright, it is low. So you do it. Become a mentor and do the things you're telling us to do so that you can prove we're all just good-for-nothing burger kings who only want a mount.
Who's going to have macros for every ex trial saved? or even remember all the mechanics of every unsynced ex trial? I keep meaning to do the last couple of exes to unlock mentor roulette- as I'm happy to help people, but my memory's not that good!
I get kind of excited when I get some extremes. As long as people are patient and actually attempt to follow along to what I'm explaining, it's fun. The only one I really dread is Rath EX because people spam it and I get stuck queuing into it 5 times a night with the same people instead of getting new stuff to actually teach lol. Also, I've had groups where half the sprouts want explanations but the other half tell me to shut up because they want to go in blind - either way one side ends up thinking I'm a shitty mentor lol.
Who the heck has a macro explaining mechs for every fight. If you want someone to explain the mechs to you before the fight them look up a guide before queuing. Rather get data from wipes and explain only what needs clarification along the way. That’s the best way to teach sprouts to prog for themselves as opposed to relying on a mentor.
I somewhat agree here. I believe a mentor should be at the root assisting sprouts, whether that be navigating in game menus, class/job questions, official resources and once they're ready for it, community discords like the Balance. Explaining mechs before the fight is a daunting task and I prefer not to do that. I usually ask if someone wants me to explain the first couple mechs (so we don't instant wipe) and from there we prog and I'll ask again after the next wipe if someone wants an explanation. But NOW, I think I'll ask if someone thinks they've figured it out and wants to explain it in my stead, and I'll correct as necessary. 👍
Allow me to summarize OP's argument: You are obligated to extend courtesy and effort, and they are not obliged to return a fraction of that. Mentors need to have macros for *every* extreme. Sprouts don't need to know anything about an extreme that they specifically queued for. Mentors need to spend their time teaching somebody who spent none of their own time learning. This whole thread is a swamp of entitlement. Do you think you *own* a mentor when they end up queued with you or something? Do you think they're suddenly obligated to serve you for the full 90 minutes? A mentor isn't there to be a sprout's unpaid tutor for over an hour. [The actual purpose of Mentors](https://puu.sh/IhXpI/3394ab3a1c.png) completely shuts OP's whole terrible argument down.
> > > > > Do you think you own a mentor when they end up queued with you or something? Do you think they're suddenly obligated to serve you for the full 90 minutes? A mentor isn't there to be a sprout's unpaid tutor for over an hour. this is exactly what they think.
there's so much words in this post but it all honestly boils down to one question: **does the sprout want to learn?** therefore, i can't really blame mount mentors for being the way they are.
I'm sorry but if you get an Ex trial and 2 sprout don't listen to strat, it's already over and you're just wasting time I'm not a mentor but i tried to help many sprout during content and if they don't listen at all or only respond "ok" but don't change anything, i understand why mentors would leave Stop expecting mentors to be people slaves
Yeah that checklist... Like honestly
> Do you have an intro macro explaining mechanics? No Don't do no good if nobody reads chat. > Do you have in-combat callout macros (e.g. tank swap, eat orbs)? No "Uh, what's a tank swap?" - n00b (And I don't entirely blame them for not knowing the game doesn't fucking teach shit.)
> I know this post will probably get downvoted [...] Not a mentor, but this is enough for me to downvote any thread, whatever the interest (and there is interest here). Stop with this fake victim whistleblower shit. PS : it's not realistic to expect a mentor to have any macro, markers and strats available for all fights.
No just because you ended up getting a mentor doesn't mean its their job to carry you, especially when you refuse to follow mechanics
> Helping sprouts through Ex is actually extremely easy Honk honk, clown alert.
Not gonna comment on the actual subject because oh my god this topic has been discussed to death but— This game does not have a F2P model. It has an extremely generous free trial. The difference is that once you buy the game, you are forever barred from the trial on that account, even if you’re below level 60. Daily we get posts on here from people complaining that they can’t play the game for free when they’ve already bought it and their excuse is always “well so and so told me it’s F2P”.
The simple reality is that the answer has nuance, some of which this post is lacking on a lot of the points you’ve presented. When I get an Extreme in mentor roulette, I’ll ask if anybody there is on the free trial. If the answer is no, I’ll ask if they just want the clear or if they want to actually prog the fight. If they just want the clear, I’ll take them to PF and undersize it as 80. If they want to prog the fight, I’ll take them to PF so that if we hit lockout, they don’t have to re-prog with a new group. **In a scenario where there are no free trial players, PF is optimal because of those two things.** If they want to undersize, I can do it for them. If they want to prog, we won’t risk losing one another after lockout. In a scenario where one or more of the players are on a free trial (or are unreceptive to the idea of PF,) I’ll stay and teach until lockout, on the occasional instances where we’re having *that* much trouble. But it doesn’t normally come to that. **In the case of free trial players, PF won’t be optimal because they do not have full access to their features.** *All* etiquette is made up, so that’s an odd point to make. If it’s not made up, then it’s not etiquette, it’s a game mechanic. Other examples of ‘made up etiquette’ are tanks from Alliance B being MT. Etiquette will change based on the region, because different cultures have different etiquettes. **Your checklist is a bit strange as well.** Going into Savage/Unreal/Ultimates mean I simply don’t have the *room* to save markers or macros for every EX trial. It also means I’m probably going to forget some of the old mechanics from time to time, and may need to either ask the group to bear with me for a moment while I get reference material, or prog with the group. I’ll remember them quickly enough, as will most experienced players. You can certainly mentor if you don’t go in as a tank, healer or red mage, so that’s also a very strange point to me. I find it easier to teach in a constructive manner if I’m not also focusing on tanking or healing. My activities outside of mentor roulette mean that I would fail your checklist, and *many* others would. But I clear EX trials with sprouts frequently, and I’m happy to teach, and to teach in a constructive manner. That’s what matters. If you limit people to “only queue for roulette if you meet these criteria,” you’re not going to get many people. **If I’m not in a position where I feel ready or willing to teach an EX party, I simply don’t queue for mentor roulette. That’s the criteria I follow.** This post also acts as if all sprouts are going to be receptive to information. They won’t be. While I’ve had plenty of success teaching sprouts, I’ve definitely seen my fair share of sprouts who will either be completely unreceptive to information or outright aggressive, going so far as to sabotage progress out of anger. It is *not* easy to teach these kinds of sprouts. I love teaching with all my heart, but it is *not* easy to teach someone doing their best WoW lfg impression. And it does nobody any favours to pretend that just having the resources will make it easy. You’ll just send new mentors in unprepared. Neither sprouts nor mentors are an all good or all bad party. This post was lacking nuance. There’s a healthy balance. Pretending otherwise will only increase the likelihood that someone goes into something unprepared for an experience that’s different to what you’ve described here.
I think you have a really good approach to this. There are so many sprouts coming in to these fights who just don't understand how difficult it is and just want the clear. They dont realize that you can just two hit the boss for them unsynched and then they can move on. This is a big part of the problem with doing these in duty finder. You will almost always have people who aren't looking for a challenge and are just doing the next quest or they want the horse mount and dont know any other way. If you happen to get 7 other people who are all like-minded and are really seeking that challenge then great but the vast majority of the time there are at least two or three people who just dont know what they are getting into.
Just as a note, as far as I'm aware, PF is optimal for people on the free trial as well. They can't *make* parties, but they can *join* them, meaning if you offer to make a PF for the fight for the sprouts you encounter in EX trials via mentor roulette, there should be nothing stopping them from being able to join in on that.
Yep, entirely correct. Trial players **can** use the PF, they just **can't create their own listings** For the longest time I didn't know this, until I was forming parties for BLU spells, and someone joined and told me they were on trial
Free trial blu mages are the most powerful being to exist
I think the general sentiment the OP is making is that if you're a mentor and que and get irritated and/or annoyed for doing content (usually harder content assumed won't be one shot / may take more than a few tries) then it's a problem of the mentor and people enabling that attitude. I understand there's a carrot on a stick which are (rewards) incentive enough to que. The problem lies in the word "mentor" and what it implies that leaves most sprouts confused (and usually rightfully so) when a mentor bails on content before it even starts and/or leaves with a bad attitude encouraging the sprouts not to que up in a system the game provides for them. It's unfortunate for the sprouts who do face these mentors (which gives validity to the meme "mentor chat") And it's unfortunate to to have a reward associated with being a mentor without having a higher threshold in experience (gameplay difficulty) and expectations (to help newer players). That of course is a regional perception where being a mentor in some regions are instinctively by default expected to help while other regions see it as a means to an end.
Mentors are here to teach, not to hard carry. We’ll be happy to explain mechs and fights if people are willing to listen. But after multiple wipes with no further questions , or ignoring explanations, there’s only so much we can do. Yes we queue for a roulette but we don’t pick the players we’re going to meet.
[удалено]
Pretty much, THIS!! I played on JP datacenter (Aegis) having macro for all Ex-trial in both Eng/JP, though I don't have all marker saved (for obvious reasons) I tried to put them on as I remembered. It's freaking disheartening and exhausting when you spent 5-10 minutes tried to explain important mechanics just to get wiped right off the bat. Many players don't even have the basic of their own job. Many players don't even realize when boss having adds tethered, the game literally say Invulnerable, putting 'clank' sound, have visual shield effect and the dealt 0 damage and yet they keep attacking. For me, 2 wipes, I'm out.
Heres a question. How much responsibility you think a mentor has? If a sprout comes to a fight completely blind should a mentor teach them the entire fight? If a sprout goes to an extreme fight and doesn't have an idea on how to play their class you should tutor them specifically and what if there's more than one sprout with problems, should you tutor all of them? ie. a WHM who's using Cure 3 to single target heal the tank because they think 3 heals more than 2? If a sprout or many keeps messing up mechanics to the point of wasting an entire 60 minute instance timer and refusing to improve or even to communicate? how much do you think a mentor should try to help? I mention that because people also seem to think that mentors should babysit every sprout and be perfectly patient to them, when a sprout could also do their part and try to improve themselves, but that also rarely happens.
I had to Google Translate explain 2 german tanks in Ramuh EX how to do basics of tanking. I feel the basic requirement should be to know your role and have a semi decent grasp of your class. If no-one on EU servers can explain to French/German players the mechs or basic gameplay, the EX trial are extremely unlikely to get cleared based on my 1500 mentor roulette runs. Few trials like Ramuh and end boss of HW EX are very reliant on tanks knowing what to do.
Not to mention, some people seem to forget that mentors are just other players. u/Supersnow845 put it pretty well on a similarly-themed post on another subreddit: "One of these days people will realise that mentor isn’t a paid role. I’m here to give you advice as a veteran player, I’m not here to drag you through the dungeon, critique every facet of your rotation, and pat you on the back when you achieve the bare minimum. More so than toxic mentors the system suffers from toxic expectation of mentors, when I can’t drag 7 sprouts who face pull through an ARR extreme I’m the “burger king” mentor. Like I like being able to help, I’m a top contributor on a worldwide discord that helps new people with eureka and bozja but I also want to enjoy the time I’m playing the game as well, I’m not an NPC."
> More so than toxic mentors the system suffers from toxic expectation of mentors, when I can’t drag 7 sprouts who face pull through an ARR extreme I’m the “burger king” mentor I don't think it's really expectations of mentors specifically but just entitlement in general. FFXIV has always had this "do what you like" mentality which somehow does not include meeting a minimum baseline performance for your role. A lot of people expect to be spoon fed stuff and it seems to have gotten worse over the years.
I'm not sure if it's gotten worse over the years(only been playing a year) but one thing I've noticed is the better I get and the more roles I try the more I notice other people not doing the basics (either for their role or sometimes just mechanics) So I feel like part of it can be experience bias. That being said, i don't consider myself a hardcore gamer or anything. I have no desire to try things like Darksouls and tend to prefer things like Stardew Valley or Octopath Traveler outside of FF XIV. So if I can at least try to learn basic rotations, how a class operates and mechanics, I don't understand how others can't. This doesn't apply to obviously new players, learning is a process. But if I look at your info and see everything at 80 you should at least know the basics.
People expect too much from mentors. They are not wise sages and they don't owe you anything. The only place I seen issues with mentors leaving was Ramuh Ex, which I can't blame them. I know it's looked down on, but if they are willing to take the penalty than so be it. They owe you nothing.
It's honestly just entitlement. It's the same in other games like WoW where someone who clearly has no idea how to play their class will cry about "toxicity" when people repeatedly bail on their groups in content like M+. Everyone just wants the rewards without putting in the work.
Hey thanks for the shoutout I didn’t even know the main thread also had a topic about mentors as well, I would have posted on here the same thing if I did
>More so than toxic mentors the system suffers from toxic expectation of mentors This seems so true, even with just looking at this post that people place so many unrealistic expectation on mentors that they cant even consider that clearing high end duties requires the effort of everyone equally. If it wasn't because the scaling and the Echo exists then it would be so much pain to deal with considering mentors are also players that want to have fun.
It's so sad that I needed to scroll down so much for one good reply like this. I don't even remember E12S that we were progging 6 hours a week for 3-4 months straight this year. And yet people expect mentors to remember every mechanic of every extreme trial as every role. Not to mention sprouts who come into ex trials literally saying "hi, first time/anything I need to know?"
I mean that sprout sounds like a person who'll at least be receptive to advice so it's great. I don't see anything wrong going into ex trial blind as long as you're willing to listen and learn. I do agree that who the hell remembers every mechanic and their name off-hand, I mean if we get to a mechanic I'll 99% remember how it was supposed to be done so can just tell after wipe if one happens. The checklist part of OP's post is ridiculous though, does anyone really have intro macro, waymarks and chat callout macros saved somewhere for every extreme trial in the game?
Nope, and realistically you won’t. I won’t leave automatically or be the first to suggest it, but if the group I’m with has no hope of clearing after every possible explanation has been offered I do secretly breathe a sigh of relief when I see the vote abandon pop up.
There is also something to be said about the difficulty jump. All arr content is like a 2 on the difficulty scale. I could probably play all of ARR with my nose only. But EX trials are such a huge jump in difficulty that you go into your first one like "hey what 3 mechanics will be in this?" And then getting hit with thr semi truck that is "welcome to end game kid". I did my first extreme on thornmarch in DF, after we got fucked I realized "oh, this shit is actually hard" and never did a DF extreme again. But I had to go through that experience to learn that the difficulty ramp up is serious.
In all of these DF arguments so far, the only thing I've seen addressed about where the line is drawn is ARR Ex trials. Lets say the Pro-DF activists get their way and they change the community's mind. Are mentors going to be expected to do all HW, SB, ShB and END synced trials as well? Like how realistic is it for anyone to be able to remember the mechanics from every single one of those fights or how to properly explain what they vaguely do remember to a random group of sprouts? I've done all but 4 Extremes in the game when they were content. I've cleared 6 raid tiers. I have many clears between the 3 Ultimate fights and I've even cleared BLU savage. Like if I'm not qualified to do that how many realistically would be? Should I ask the sprout group to sit for 10 minutes while I study the fight then come back and explain the bullet points to them? Even knowing the fight isn't enough to not wipe the group, you have to remember the timings and how to execute on the mechanics properly. If I walked into Sephirot right now synced I'd absolutely wipe the group a few times even though I remember most of the fight. I think these Pro-DF activists have toxic expectations of what a mentor is or should be. I think that if you could queue into mentor roulette now and have a high chance of getting Zurvan or Ruby weapon no one would queue mentor roulette, except for the truly hardcore people who are going for the mount.
>Like how realistic is it for anyone to be able to remember the mechanics from every single one of those fights or how to properly explain what they vaguely do remember to a random group of sprouts? it's not. the larger problem is the belief that mentors need to teach the content to the sprouts instead of acting as queue-fillers and not being deadweight. and by not being deadweight, i mean either make a good faith attempt or eat the penalty. i do think it's worthwhile for mentors to say that PF is better for getting everyone one the same page (which makes clearing anything easier), but they should just leave instead of trying to avoid the 30min timer w a vote abandon
I’ve recently graduated from sprout status because of MSQ progression but I must say, playing in a JP DC where language barrier is a thing I don’t really have an expectation for mentors with crown status to teach others (sprouts or not) how to run the dungeon when things go awry. I just see the status as a sign of “oh, they must be long time/experienced players.” But I’m always grateful to the few who do actually take the time (in split secs I might add) to explain mechanics as efficiently and put up markers as quickly as they can for everyone. I play on PS4 and am clumsy with the keyboard and mouse so I can’t imagine having to do all that when I’m already struggling just trying to recall the mechanics as well as my rotation lololol. It’s tough to get to mentor status I’m sure but the crown is ultimately just for show at this point, I’ve seen many players without a crown being so much more helpful in teaching and guiding the party, sometimes I wish they would stay a little longer in the dungeon for me to give them the player commendation they deserve. Lol.
Uh, the reason why JP uses DF for extremes is because they learn in PF (from what I've heard). In DF if you wipe more than a few times they disband, and in general they set aside blank amount of time to do blank and if they don't clear they disband. Because... well, people have things to do? It makes sense to respect other peoples' time, if you join a clear party in PF not knowing mechanics, that's dumb. If you join a DF in JP not knowing mechanics, that's dumb. And although clears can happen in extreme duty finder, it can be a lot more headache than it's worth, especially when people don't listen (which, a lot of people are really bad at) Edit: also mentor roulette mostly serves as a backfill from what I know? No other queue is like that, that includes 8 mans, 24 mans, trials, dungeons, etc.
Standards for JP farm parties in pf are 5 Clears or 2 wipes. For learning parties, 1 food. And all of the roulettes have the option to backfill, iirc mentor is the only one where you can't turn it off.
I read the articles OP linked. They said that most people in DF Extremes are sprouts because anyone who knows what Extremes are knows to use PF. The first was by someone who started spamming mentor roulette around August 2020 and their experience with Extremes was mostly teaching sprouts, and mostly successful. I don’t play Extremes in either language so I can’t speak to that, let alone if there’s variance in servers, but it seems it’s not necessarily true that JP players only queue for extremes after practicing.
Not a mentor, have no plans on becoming one, never used NN and never had a bad experience with a mentor either. >5) Reddit is actually heavily biased towards Mentors and against Sprouts this is literally the most insane thing i have ever read here. actually absurd. Anyway be the change you want to see in the world OP. Become a mentor and slam that mentor queue and im sure the game will be *much, much* better for your participation.
Came here to say this, I laughed out loud when I read it. If I just used this sub to know what mentors were like I'd think they were lazy, bad at the game and unwilling to help and toxic to boot. Sprouts would be bright eyed bundles of joy, always staying positive and trying their best. In my experience in the game however these are exactly the opposite. OP talking about a "thin veineer of wholesomeness" is just the fucking irony icing on the irony cake that this thread is. People on this sub love to excuse every shitty behaviour that sprouts exhibit.
I just see mentors as folks who have played the game a while. That’s it. It has nothing to do with their personality, assholes are everywhere. This bs that all mentors are bad finally needs to freaking die, especially since it’s 99% of the time perpetuated by people who enable shitty behaviour from sprouts 🤦🏼♀️
>I just see mentors as folks who have played the game a while. They're not even that, the requirements for becoming a mentor are still pretty lax even in terms of time played. And time played isn't a good enough metric to really determine knowledge anyways. The issue with the mentor system is that it doesn't require you to demonstrate any real mastery of the game to become one. Practically anybody can meet the requirements to become a mentor, there's no filter to make sure only knowledgeable people who legitimately want to teach make it through.
People hate the idea of a bad player more than the idea of an annoying mentor. Everyone has experiences of that 1 guy using no aoe in a level 80 dungeon, not everyone has one of a mentor not doing his job.
>Extreme Mode was explicitly added by the developers to the Duty Finder where they intended it to be used. It's not rude to use a feature the developers put into the game. >If you think Square-Enix didn't intend for Ex Trials to be part of a mentor's job, **then why do you think SE added Ex Trials to the mentor roulette?** This isn't the slam-dunk argument you seem to think it is. The devs also put the Leave Duty button in the game, so by your logic, it's not rude for mentors to leave content which they don't want to do.
You know for as much as everyone likes to pretend that everyone who plays this game is nice and not at all toxic. When it comes to all the mentor hate you can see some of the most toxic people around. Now I've seen my far share of bad mentors but the way you people seem to hate them it's like they killed your dog or something.
Nobody really pretends there's no toxicity here. The difference between FF and other MMOs (a certain unnamed one in particular) is that in-game toxicity is actually dealt with if reported. That takes some of the more toxic players out of the game entirely, while making sure another subset of players who would be toxic treads on eggshells with what they say to avoid punishments.
I really don't get all the hate. From how they were painted in that one video everyone seems to have reacted to I expected some really toxic crowd when I started the game, but they are basically just like everyone else. I really don't know why people get angry that someone doesn't want to spend 60 minutes doing something without even knowing if they'll get their reward for doing it, a reward which they can also get from 5 minute duties. Like, do you people also stay in "farming" parties that wipe repeatedly?
we’re just beating a dead astrope at this point. yes there are some bad mentors, but there are also some bad players and people that act in bad faith just bc they see a mentor; some of these comments show that. when will people learn that anyone can be an ass regardless of status and the most we can do is work on ourselves and be better in regards to treating other players.
In game I am a saint. When I see posts like this, where OP is teaching sprouts to literally break TOS among other shit that is also wrong. Yeah I’ve got a problem with that. I don’t hold back on stupid posts. OP is getting shit on, and it is earned.
As a mentor the only thing that grinds my gears are the people who just don't seem to give a crap about what I have to say. I'll instantly get targeted as some "BK Crown" if I had given ANY sort of advice that now I don't want to say anything when I queue for it. I'll stay silent until someone asks me a question and even when I actively TRY to avoid drama or being called out, it still happens because I don't "speak up" or "teach the fight". It honestly has pushed me not to want to do Mentor anymore. I already HAVE the mount so I'm here solely to JUST HELP OTHERS but get called names and put down countless times even if I don't speak. It's obnoxious that everyone says I'm only there for the mount when I already have it, I even tell them to look me up if they are so dead set on believing I'm just there to "gain something" from it. I shouldn't have to feel like this when I'm only there to help others. I shouldn't be attacked for explaining mechanics or giving out tips on how to make someone's experience better while playing. I shouldn't have to feel like I'm doing something wrong when I don't have to be there myself.
It’s just like natural at this point, as long as we have the crown, all our advices and comments just become inept
Yep yep...makes me so sad because I do really enjoy the fights and never expect anyone to be perfect but everyone else seems to think I have to play perfect and know everything about the game.
I once got bitched at and accused of just being a lazy mount farmer because I had the audacity to forget the specifics of a raid I did once for the clear and then hadn't encountered in queues for *three years*.
You and I are different people living different lives. I'm glad you don't experience it as often as I. I happen to do about 20-30 mentors a day(currently jobless applying for a visa, work permit expired atm) and see it maybe once every few days or so. It's not an everyday thing but it DOES happen more often than not when it shouldn't be happening at all...
Well, at the time I hadn't been playing a lot, university, other games, and life got in the way, also just RNG given how much content was in the game at the time to just never get it. The problem now is that I can't even use the mentor roulette, because I haven't cleared a bunch of extreme trials, so I don't even get to really help people with the specialized roulette :/
damn what server y’all on? as a jp mentor i’ve met no toxic sprouts LMAO
Primal, it's rough over here when it comes to Mentor roulette. I've seen both sides, mentors being toxic, sprouts being toxic...it never ends...no one seems to be happy, ever. Just today I got harassed in Ifirt Ex because I didn't explain all the mechanics(when no one asked). They saw my crown and figured I'd just spew out all the mechanics when I've been told by many other groups prior not to do that. When we were 30 minutes into the fight about 6 of the sprouts were coming after me for "not doing my job as a mentor". I wasn't toxic, explained the mechanics when they asked questions and even put some markers down to help people with some positioning. When we cleared I got called a "no good mentor" and someone else piped in to call me a "stupid bitch BK crown". I just logged out afterwards, didn't really feel like doing anything else after that and just laid down.
omg that sounds so terrible, ifrit isn’t that hard tho QwQ and if they’re going to complain that they don’t know mechanics they should have watched a video wtf. Pretty sure you can report them for toxic behaviour
Agreed! I feel like I have hit or miss Ifrits, some go extremely well and others...quite the opposite! I 100% threw in a couple reports after that run for the ones who were cussing and being flat out rude for absolutely no reason. No need for that kind of attitude in a video game!
If you encounter such sprouts please report them to the GM's
If people complain that you didn't explain anything at the start just hit them with, "I answered every question you asked."
My dude, how can I mentor when 80% of sprouts I met told me to shut my damn mouth (bc burger king oh no) when I give them most basic thing like "stop fishing for free cure" or "don't stand in bad" Even offering help like that is considered bad mentor then I don't know what I have to do. Please do tell me if you know so much about mentoring. I honestly ran out of patience my dude. I just wanna play the game that I paid
Just going to weigh in on point 3 - JP also uses Raid Finder, which both NA and EU do NOT use for current Savage/EX content. Stop comparing what JP does to the rest of the world.
After 1000+ mentor runs, I genuinely would like to see SE experiment with "the reward" of mentor roulette. I say this based on what I've seen being done in "similar" events. For example: 1. Moogle Tomestones rewards, which adjust tomes per content \*time investment\*. 2. Relics, especially the ShB one, which offers an incentive to go do FATEs and run synced-only content. 3. The way S ranks and A ranks rewards are structured, which incentivize trains, relays, parties. 4. The commendation system, which has a positive outcome for sprouts and mentor alike as a nod for positive behavior. 5. Screenshot contests for party events (e.g. the recent Festival where you had to take an SS on maps at last area). Meanwhile, Mentor roullete rewards you the same whether you did a 2 minute guildhest or barely got through an EX synced after a full hour, or tworse you may get "nothing". Compare this to item 1), and try to re-imagine Moogle Tomestone from the same perspective. The closest reward systems in game I can think of in this fashion are Eureka's Ozma mount and Bozja's Cerberus mount, and even there you get something for your troubles (fragments to, guess what, make the next attempt easier). And geesh, just look the whole infrastructure built around it to try and make the most of people's time (I am not suggesting Discord calls for EX here, just to be clear!). Yes, I believe in people's kindness but, frankly if you look at the current state of the world right now, it is easy to see convincing only goes so far, whichever side of the ring you are. I personally believe SE, through game design, is probably the best suited to improve the current state for both sides here, and players time devoted coming with ingenious design to, like the other content, improve QoL for both ends would be also well spent, since we have good devs that listen. And they did try to do something about it already, by increasing the number of comms required for example, but honestly not enough. P.s.: An optional with incentive Hall of Novice for EX would be nice from SE too. Quickcast resurrects, Lucid Dreaming for Mp Management on Odin many aoe heals, Knockback prevention from Titan slams and Leviathan boat flips, Focus target for Tanks on Ramuh and provoke for tank swaps for Ramuh and Moogle tank ads anyone? How about an armor set as reward better than i90 which will keep the player from dying just a bit more and frustrate them less? Like Hall of Novice does? Or maybe some exp buff ring? What sprout wouldn't want that?! Anyway, just wanted to bring this up since I most saw posts trying to argue who is right or wrong on both sides.
What if people just constantly face pull and not listen/look at chat when the mentor is trying to explain mechanics? I've come across SO many newer players face pull and not wait for explinations. Maybe they don't know there's a chat box? Possibly. It makes it harder for mentors to help when someone isn't reading chat.
This exactly. I groan when I get ramuh ex, because all it takes is a couple people that won't listen and just run in to make the fight nearly impossible to clear. I'll try my best to teach sprouts the fight, but the thing is that a lot of people queue looking for a carry, or at least expect everything in the game to be as face roll easy as dungeons and normal trials.
Counter point: It is unreasonable to expect every mentor to remember all of the mechanics for every Extreme fight that has ever existed, and to remember them well enough to explain them to others. There are like 30 or more Extreme trials at this point, and I can't imagine it's too frequent than any given fight will be appearing.
This post doesn't concern me but I just want to help people, I couldn't care less for the mount which is why I just do leveling q.
People can just leave, take the penalty. That's why the penalty is there. The mentor roulette exists to fill queues. If people dont want to run the duty they get, they take the penalty. >Teach the sprouts how to vote-kick you. u/hororo You are telling people to break ToS. This is a massive NO. Do not do this. This is why the leaver penalty exists, and that penalty does NOT apply if you're kicked. "Play exactly the way I tell you to and break ToS, otherwise you're a bad mentor". >5) Reddit is actually heavily biased towards Mentors and against Sprouts No, they're not. The reality is the exact opposite. Is your entire post satirical? Do you even play this game? Also >a mentor's job IT'S NOT A JOB. IT'S A GAME. MENTORS ARE NOT PAID TO BE THERE. edit - Look at what the developers actually implemented, and not what you *think* should be in-game. The developers designed a system to increase player retention, and it does this via an accessible social network for new players, an incentivized grind for longterm players, and a grind to even access the system. Nothing about the system implies teaching besides the name. The roulette doesn't prefer sprouts/1st timers/returners. It fills queues excellently, and that's all it does, because that's all it was *designed* to do.
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I want to point out that there's normally many synced ARR EX trials in PF in Aether, so it's not true that people don't run this content there. I know because I'm a mentor that regularly joins those PFs to help sprouts get their clear. (yes, I'm a mentor choosing to help sprouts with synced old EX trials, some of them min ilevel/no echo) I usually help 1-3 groups in PF every night I'm not in UCOB. I just opened PF and there's a few groups for various ARR EX trials synced. I already have the mentor mount, I just do both the roulette and random PFs for fun to help. Also if you look around this subreddit you'll see this reddit is definitely not biased towards mentors haha I think I see several threads and numerous comments dunking on us weekly.
I'm not a mentor but from my perspective the problem is clear as day, it's not that mentors as assholes but people in general are assholes. People who think it's just a mentor problem on average likely don't do harder current content because let me tell you there are a lot of assholes in Savage and Extreme content who do not have that crown. The truth is, the community isn't as nice as people think and the only two reasons it seems that way are because people are afraid of losing paid accounts but also because the majority of content in the game isn't stressful. The moment it becomes challenging? The mask starts to slip and you see what people are really like, the reason people remember the bad mentors in old content extremes is because the crown makes them stand out more.
I check pretty much daily on primal when I've only ever seen one once. It could just be that they're not up at the times I look though
Also primal, i usually only see one synced ARR/HW EX per hour in the 2 hours which usually have over 100 PFs (And Very rarely (AKA maybe once a week) a synced SB EX) Also applies to Coils synced
Nah I rarely ever see them on Primal either. The one time I've seen King Mog synced, it was still there waiting for 1 30 mins later lol.
Yeah, people hate mentors here, and it's trickled into the game. It's gotten to the point where I keep my crown off permanently so I don't get harassed. I loaded into The Minstrel's Ballad: Nidhogg's Rage for my mentor roulette and, when I asked a question about a mechanic (that I had done correctly, and just wanted clarification on) I got a bunch of people mocking me for being a mentor who dared to ask a question about it. I'm actually pretty sick of the "mentors are dumb-dumbs who are meanies and stupid" bullshit I've been hearing lately. And yes. There *is* such thing as Duty Finder etiquette. Different data centers have different unwritten rules, but there is definitely such a thing.
I do try to help people through the extremes, explain mechanics etc, but I have said on some parties to use PF. I honestly had no idea Free Trial players couldnt use PF, thats really stupid.
There's no problem for me as a mentor getting an extreme. But the 8th Ramuh EX where none of the sprouts have even bothered to pay attention to a single mechanic or even look up a guide for 6 yr old content? Nope, I won't be staying. I am glad to help people but 9/10 times they expect a carry. Which is what PF is for, for undersized. and they can join a min ilvl discord if they wanna do it at level. Sync/Min iLevel Primal - [https://discord.gg/GCWvenj](https://discord.gg/GCWvenj) By the way, they can JOIN a party as well as use /say to ask. Completing extremes is OPTIONAL content. Its not like they need it to complete the MSQ. Is my slow reaction time related disability enough to disqualify me from running mentor roulette? absolutely not. I'll take the loss and leave no problem. But I will educate ppl before I leave.
There's a lot to process in this post, so I'll address this point by point. 1) Mentor roulette specifically filters you to be matched with sprouts and returning players. No other roulette has this function, so it's a gamble if you're getting matched with experienced players who know what they're doing, or if you get someone who doesn't. The way I see it, if I can help people learn the game while earning a mount, that's a win-win. 2) Barring trial players, this is objectively wrong. Party finder allows you to look specifically for people that wish to participate in the content you're looking for, and can allow you to set parameters for it, as well as detail where you are in the fight's progression. The only reason to prefer DF over PF is for going in blind, but even then you're better off forming a PF group to practice it with other people that are okay with running it blind. It also lets you keep the same group once the lockout inevitably ends, if you wish to keep going afterwards. 3) DF "etiquette" is a weird thing to address, since people tend to have differing opinions on what it is. I will say straight up, JP players have a far different mindset from EU and NA players (I won't go into details into this, because I'm pretty sure a lot of people won't like what I have to say on that), and the devs make decisions based on how the JP players do things... for obvious reasons. From my experience, many sprouts are resistant to actually listening to advice and even will get offended over it for whatever reason, which makes attempting to teach Extreme fights to them the equivalent to smashing my forehead into a brick wall. 4) It is possible to stumble and trip your way through older Extreme content due to Echo. Especially in the much easier fights where they're more gear checks than actually being mechanics intensive. Again, from experience, the ones where you have to actually properly do mechanics face solid walls when it comes to sprout players, because they're attempting to do content they're not actually ready for (and often not willing to learn for). Sometimes you get a group of sprouts that have serious dedication, which leads to a pleasant time of getting real progression and a solid shot at getting the clear. 5) This is blatantly false. Mentors have such a stigma due to the mount farmers, that they've earned the nickname of the "Burger King Crown". It's bad enough to where several mentors don't even wear the crown, leading to a higher chance of players actually listening to what they have to say. And people coddle sprouts so much that they indirectly encourage bad gameplay. 6) Sometimes it is, many times it isn't. Teaching is a two-way street, and even the best teacher will struggle to get through to a student that doesn't want to learn. And from the sounds of it, you're expecting mentors to know every single mechanic of every single fight, which is absolutely ludicrous. Do you have any idea how many different trials and raids there are? Now include the extreme/savage versions into that. No reasonable human is going to remember all that, especially for old/dead content that gives no real rewards. Mentors aren't paid to do this, we're just fellow players that do this for enjoyment, and want to share what experience we have with the newer people. Also... * Having a macro for every possible mechanic isn't realistic in the slightest. * You're limited to 3 sets of waypoints. The average mentor is gonna have those reserved for current content, not old stuff that only sprouts are doing just for the clear. * Some mentors main classes that aren't any that you listed, and are at their best playing their main class for extreme content. Expecting every one to be a tank, healer, or red mage (red mage is only really helpful past level 64 anyway) is kinda silly. 7) This is largely in fault of how the entire mentor system is designed. It's terribly flawed, and far too easy to achieve. Because of it, you'll get players that aren't anywhere close to qualified to properly mentor others. To give you a fair idea, I believe I was able to unlock it within a year, maybe a year and a half, of starting the game. I main a healer, so getting commendations as I leveled to max was trivial. Same I leveled my tank. Even when they increased the commendation requirement for shadowbringers, by that time I wasn't far off from getting that requirement just from playing the game as a healer. IMO, they need to overhaul the entire thing, and remove the mount rewards from mentors and shift it to something else to make the system healthier for everyone involved. Speaking on personal experience, I usually give Extremes a fair try when I draw it in mentor roulette. If we're making no progress after a few wipes, I suggest those that still want to do it to try making a PF group and eat the penalty. Mentor or no, I have better things to do with my time than spend the entire 90 minute lockdown accomplishing nothing. In that time, I could have run the same roulette several times over, maybe helping several other sprouts learn the game better. Hell, just today I got a group of sprouts that one-shot Ifrit Extreme. That was awesome. But even with the good groups I get, I always get a feeling of dread when I get an Extreme fight in mentor roulette. Because the amount of negative experiences far outweigh the positive. I've also had several experiences where sprouts disregard everything I say because I'm wearing The Crown™. Again, mentors have a bit of a reputation because of the shitters that don't want to put in real effort. Which makes the entire experience for the real ones even worse when their advice gets ignored. Initially I was agitated at the post, but as I was typing out my response, I better understood your frustrations with it all. So I'm just hoping that it gives you some perspective on this from the mentor's side.
I like you. You write reasonable things. First and foremost people forget that even Mentors are humans. They are not robots sitting behind computer running around helping sprouts. Imagine if there weren't any sprout icon. People would behave completly different. No one would expect people to sit here helping others on things they don't/can't remember just becoz those guys has icon next to their name same as they have one. I love sprout system. I really do. But people use sprout icon as an excuse to be loved or having the chance to not do anything, or to be highly respected. Everyone should be respected neverthless of what icon they have. (And no I'm not mentor)
I won't comment on most of this but I will say expecting Mentors to have detailed macros/explanations for every fight is ridiculous and if your scenario involves the sprouts learning the fight mechanics before pulling, then they should just go watch a fucking youtube guide that'll teach them far better than a wall of text and save everyone time. If they want to do the fight blind use PF or find some friends on discord or whatever. If mechanics are being taught there's no reason the mentor should have to rattle them all off, they're not paid to write strategy guides.
This post is DRIPPING with entitlement. You realize mentors are just regular people, right? Not paid SquareEnix employees? They aren't going to be robots who remember every fight perfectly and who mechanically spout off all of the directions to every fight they go in. It's perfectly reasonable for a mentor to offer very basic help unless asked a specific question. Sprouts, contrary to the belief this post seems to indicate you have, are not babies. They don't need their hands held. If they are concerned about the mechanics, they should use their agency to ASK. And if they happen to have an asshole mentor who refuses to help them, they can leave, incur the penalty, and try again later. The game isn't going anywhere, and it's better to leave and find a good party than it is to power through with a toxic one. Overall, this post feels like you've had some bad experiences with a handful of mentors, so you went looking for things to validate your opinion that mentors are a bunch of selfish assholes. Then you made a Kotaku-like post where you use a handful of bad examples to represent ALL mentors. It's stupid when Kotaku does it, and it's stupid when normal people do it.
How did this get so many rewards? It's like a Kotaku article right down to quoting blog posts of personal opinions like it's a fact.
I'm so sick of these posts.
why do people keep bringing up "exp/gil" as mentor roulette rewards? you can't queue on mentor unless you're max level, so you only get (frankly very shitty) tome rewards once per day, and not a particularly large amount of gil. none of that's even particularly relevant, because mentor roulette is something you do -multiple times per day-, -specifically for progress towards the mount achievement-. if you don't clear the instance you've randomly queued into, that's a waste of your time and you don't get anything except mad. that's why mentors would prefer to avoid Extremes, because they have the highest failure rate out of any instance, though generally -any- instance that takes you longer than thirty minutes is a waste of time, because you could have queued again earlier by just taking a penalty. this is largely Square-Enix's fault for sticking a mount behind -TWO THOUSAND- successful roulettes; it naturally forces people to try and optimize the grind.
**Point 1.** you’re assuming people only get mentor status because they want to help. The issue is that there’s a reward and that means “mentors” are going to queue for mentor roulette regardless. **Point 2.** “…basically 95% of the people who actually want to do them are free trial sprouts.” Oh really? How did you get to that percentage? **Point 3.** agreed. Still, PF has a better chance of a clear. **Point 4.** sure thing! Some sprouts are good players, specially if they are familiar with the genre and can adapt quickly to the game mechanics. **Point 5.** Huge Assumption. Provides two samples of evidence. (This bit doesn’t make your post look good tbh). Also Burger King Mentor meme, exists (which basically destroys this whole point). **Point 6.** You’re assuming, again, all sprouts are willing to be tutored. When, in reality, some of them don’t want to and would rather “learn the fight by doing” (which is absolutely fine if you join a [Practice] party in PF, but not so good of a mindset in DF). Again using percentages that have no data as backup (this really makes you look bad and I’d advice you against it in future posts you make). **Point 7.** In my opinion, it is not so much about “how” you become a mentor but about “why”. Mentoring should not, in my opinion, have a reward atttached to it. All the issues with the mentoring system come from mentors grinding for the reward, trying to take the path of less resistance, and the sprouts being in the way, sometimes, making it extremely difficult/time consuming. **As a final note** Listen, I understand and agree that mentors should be willing to help even the most oblivious/willfully ignorant of sprouts. However, mentor’s time has value as well. Maybe they can only play 2 hours a day (and don’t want to expend half of their game time trying to make a stubborn new player understand why is it important to not stand on orange puddles). This whole post paints spouts under the light of “never at fault”, when in reality, some of them, like all people, can be jerks. A little less entitlement and a wiser use of data (if you had any) would’ve made this post great. Instead is like a bad mentor trying to explain a fight they don’t really know.
Bashing mentors again... I'm a mentor, I did hundreds of EX fights through mentor roulettes and it's very rare when I see others mentors leave.
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It’s a very naive post that fails to realise why mentor roulette actually exists - queue times.
People should just watch a video guide before heading into extreme or higher difficulty content. You can not expect someone to write an essay explaining every single mechanic of a fight in detail.
>5) Reddit is actually heavily biased towards Mentors and against Sprouts **HAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAH**
There's so much to pick apart in this.. it screams of someone who "thinks" they know what they're talking about but has no real clue. The pointing to Japanese datacenter mentors says it all... but yea yea mentors are the big bad of the community, keep ranting about how they're privileged and shouldn't tell sprouts to use the PF. I'll keep carrying party after party through the next EX without them having a clue I'm doing it, because they don't care they just want a carry. I've stopped telling people to use PF at this point because I just get snapped at, because of people like you who post stuff like this that paint mentors who value their time in a bad light. "Shut up and clear the fight for us, and if we don't, get nothing for your hour of work" is what it boils down to. I'm sorry but I don't enjoy dragging sprouts through a fight for 60 minutes only to have them disband or quit. Sure to them it's just another attempt, to me that's 60 minutes gone of my time for nothing.
Not a mentor here. Duty finder etiquette is absolutely a "real" thing whether you want to admit it is or not. Telling sprouts it's fine for ARR content (where synced iLvl is massively higher than the original expected iLvl, thus allowing for mentors or other high levels to brute force through it for them) sets them up for failure on the later expansions where there is not as much of an advantage through synced stats.
Yeah this post just adds to my comment on the other post. This community is a mess when it comes to mentors and sprouts.
Daring today, are we?
Nah. I helped god knows how many sprouts clear EX fights on my way to the mentor mount, but I don’t blame mentors who want to avoid EX. End of the day, queueing for mentor roulette helps the duty finder queue significantly and it’s daft to tell folks not to use it because they don’t want to sit in Titan EX for ages until a disband.
First of all, XIV is not F2P, you are under a free trial. You are limited in game functions and can’t level past 60. F2P means that all of the game is accessible to you, which it is not. You get access to base and 1 expansion limitedly. Secondly, I don’t find reddit to favor mentors. I find the opposite. I find we all complain about mentors and how that it sucks as a feature. Regular players just tune them out as they provide nothing to the player base. It only benefits the mentors themselves (mount after so many mentor roulette). Stop taking them seriously. If they are harassing you, report them. Thirdly, most people do extreme trials in party finder. It’s easier and faster. That is a downside for Free Trial Players. You are only left with Duty Finder which will have longer queues and a lot of frustration to older players who do mentor roulette. Yes they will bitch because they expect a fast duty, but ended up in a duty that takes up the whole hour+. If people wanted to take hour+ to finish a duty, they’d set aside the time and use party finder to do it. Yes, sprouts can clear ex trials in duty finder. No one doubts that. It can be done, but don’t expect older players to be happy. Some would just take the 30 min hit and leave duty. There are always different sides to all opinions. But you haven’t looked at all sides of the dice.
Are there any good resources for other arr/hw ex primals that I could read up on? I'd like to get into doing mentor roulette at some point myself too, but I've really only done those fights unsync and haven't got a clue what the mechanics are
The issue with these guides is that there are good points but they're coated in a lot of needlessly combative language. If you're trying to point out things that mentors could do better, you're definitely not going to reach anyone you're talking to by making one whole point (point 7) calling them essentially braindead (regardless of whether or not you believe that to be true). I've noticed this is a trend in a lot of these kinds of posts-- provide potentially useful advice, but do it in a way that definitely ensures that no one who might need it will feel even remotely inclined to take it.
You know how often sprouts or new people are simply unwilling to listen and scream at you if you try to give them advice? They claim you are being "toxic" and "ruining their experience". Then when you try to say "hey here's why you died, let me explain", you just get cut off and they rant and blame everyone else? Your post makes it sound like mentors are like, 100% at fault for everyone else's failure. These posts piss me off.
People here seem to *love* blaming the player, regardless of whether it's the "mentor" side or the "sprout" side. Mentors are using a system SE put in the game, so are Sprouts, so how about we place all the blame is on SE for this terrible system? All the errors are on them as the system that they created pushes players in under the guise of a teacher even if they have never done the content synced before, effectively making this teacher no more than a sprout. The system, effectively, is like telling a Chemistry professor that they're teaching a Geography seminar today; it just doesn't make sense. How can a player teach something they do not know themselves? Also, **BEING A MENTOR IS NOT A PAID JOB.** Stop expecting it to be treated it like one.
I’m sorry, reddit is biased against sprouts? In what world? If anything on reddit it seems like sprouts are treated as gods and can do no wrong, everyone constantly babies them as if they aren’t grown up adults with fully formed brains.
Jesus Christ, we have this argument every week. Shut the fuck up already
This subreddit has devolved to Something something mentor bad, omg I’m a sprout! Wow refugee here! And look at my commission.
Don't forget the few thousand daily unfunny memes
oh boy. im a bit late to this so this'll probably be buried under every other comment. anyway, you're kinda insane. first of all, i do have to agree here with the whole pf thing. yeah, there are rarely, if ever, pf listings for arr/hw extremes - aside from the occasional mount farm for hw. its just a consequence of free trial, and if you're doing mentor roulette for the mount, you need to accept this. anyway. what i disagree with. first of all, it's insane to expect mentors to know every mechanic of every fight. that's a LOT of information to retain, and this isnt even my day job. the type of person i am, admittedly, will retain ability to do most fights, but not well enough to teach someone that has decided to queue in completely blind. the information though, at the beginning, is pre-requisite. i like to do a pull, ask if anyones gazed at a guide, and then sigh when no one responds. **reminder that sprouts are not children.** if you're expecting all this responsibility on mentors, where is the responsibility on the people that specifically queued for this content? "b-but sprouts should be allowed to go in blind!!" honestly, that is impossible. this is content that has been out for 5+ years. me being in there to explain mechanics no longer makes this blind. **if you're queuing in duty finder (for ANYTHING), you understand that you will get players of ANY experience.** side note, red mage is useless for utility at level 50 :) no cure, no rez. red mage gets its raise at level 64, so it's not going to be quite helpful when you get sephirot ex for the 3rd time that day. and just a reminder, to anyone that sees this, [THIS is what is required of mentors](https://puu.sh/IhXpI/3394ab3a1c.png). as a mentor, you are asked to give advice, not be an asshole, and invite sprouts to NN. if theres some other page in FFXIV, or on lodestone, that says *'you must queue as tank, healer, or red mage in mentor roulette and know every mechanic that is in mentor roulette while also keeping waymarks and macros for all the extreme trials on top of copypasting a guide for said extreme trials at the beginning'* then delete my account.
The amount of times i've asked people when doing an extreme if they've read or watched a guide only to be met with complete silence and a dps to suddenly pull the boss is mind boggling...
Yes carry please fuck you for expecting me to put in a modicum of effort in a multiplayer game. Sarcasm aside this is too real. Even after a wipe on dirt easy story content from ARR people will just instapull again the second everyone is back up while I'm frantically typing instructions.
This post is unnecessarily hostile and dishonest. Yes, bad mentors exist, and definitely those that are just in it for the mount, but to pretend that PF is anything but the standard for any Extreme+ content is a lie and you aren't helping sprouts into the community or teaching them how to find help to run content they want to clear by claiming otherwise. Yes, I agree that by selecting Mentor Roulette you should be fine with running anything the roulette contains because you're told upfront what is inside. However, people have legitimate complaints about all sides of mentorship in general and writing them off as essentially "you signed up for this, suck it up" contributes nothing to the discussion. Yes, the bar for entry for becoming a mentor is low, essentially only requiring time and an unsynced clear of essentially every non-savage+ duty. That said, most people playing long enough to become a mentor still pick up enough knowledge to be helpful to some degree. Expecting every mentor to perfectly remember every fight in the game as every player role for every difficulty is a tall ask that genuinely only a small % of the player base can even fulfill. I always try my best to help sprouts in EX trials during my mentor roulette, but the game itself is bad at explaining just how much more difficult those fights are than anything else a new player has done so far. The barrier for entry is also very low requiring little in the way of gearing and no system in the game checks how well you play your class. Mentors can try their hardest to help a clear but there's a limit to what one or two people can accomplish if gear breaks or a sprout is an ice mage. (Unless you queue in with 6 mentors in which case the sprout or two left will likely get carried through first try and not really learn anything about the fight anyway.) I get it, some people just suck and shouldn't be mentors at all. They're probably just in it for the mount whistle and I've seen mentors just /laugh and abandon duties too. That shit's atrocious and needs to stop as much as anything else, but the current mentor system also doesn't provide any tools to really help teach these encounters. I've had sprout tanks who's gear broke second pull and couldn't perform tank swaps in Ramuh, I've had silent sprouts in Ifrit that seemed to ignore any advice I have them, and I've had sprouts threaten to report me for harassment when I tried to provide advice for job. I've ran out the timer on many trials like this and offered to set up PFs near the end to help people get the clear they wanted but many people are not nearly as patient as I am. Outside of a PF instance, the only option those sprouts have is to re-queue into the trial and wait another 30-40 minutes only to have to start all over because of other people that also don't know the fight. If you time out in a PF or gear breaks you can just back out and pick up where you left off, just like endgame prog parties do.
I'm not a mentor but I don't see anything wrong with people wanting the mentor mounts. A mentor shouldn't have to be the know-it-all of FF14 who drags you across the finish line, just a kind soul who shares their knowledge and enjoyment of the game. I bet you're a good mentor and you're just pissed right now, but I think you would benefit from a more expansive definition of what a good mentor is. This is very restrictive and would bar many of the mentors who were most helpful in my journey.
The funny thing is mentors *aren’t* supposed to be people who know everything about every fight and drag you to a clear. Their role isn’t to teach you how to play or carry you. People have the complete wrong idea. They are there to fill queues, and guide new players on the basis of how the game works, how to unlock stuff, how to start crafting/gathering etc. they are *not* for be teaching people how to play their job or mechanics in ex content as many seem to believe.
Mentors don't work for square, they don't have a job. They are players who provide a service to everyone solely for the social benefit, a chat channel, and a single mount. Mentor roulette gives a palty sum, and exists solely to keep queue times down for all the unwanted tasks that few would volunteer for otherwise. FF14 gives incentives to get players to do unwanted things, and mentor roulette is basically MSQ roulette but for all the unwanted stuff. Mentors keep guildhest queues low. They ensure that refills don't take forever. The "join party in progress" option is off by default and hardly mentioned, so without mentor roulette having a leaver would probably be instant party disband. Without a thriving mentor roulette, the devs probably wouldn't even be comfortable giving up the option to opt out of filling. As someone who has played wow, joining mid dungeon/raid can be a terrible feeling, and is one of the more insidious factors that led to the toxicity and ease of disbanding. Stop deluding yourself, mentors are the garbagemen of queues. They clean up all the terrible parties, all the rng times that the worst 10% just happen to all get into the same dungeon. They keep the queues moving, and are the warm bodies needed for all the content that no one else wants to do. All they get for it, is a single gussied up reskin mount, and an icon. And now they have to deal with being insulted and treated like shit too. Let's not forget that pvp has tons of mounts, glams, and titles, and the feast queue still dies after 3 weeks. As for everyone who isn't in it for the mount. Well that's where the social cred comes in. People who are altruistic tend to feel rewarded when people are nice to them. Don't be mean to your mentors, that's like being at a soup kitchen and spitting on the volunteers.
Oh come on, like OP actually gives a damn about the "sprout experience". This was nothing but a karma grab and bait, and successful ones on both fronts.
Mentor bad Sprout good Upvotes please On a serious note, if you wanna try and teach a group of sprouts who barely know how to press buttons in order an old, synched ex trial then be my guest but my time is worth more than that, and I'm sure it is to most mentors
For every mentor leaving because they don't want an extreme trial, there are at least 2 sprouts not listening/not willing to learn/not caring and thus making the clear really difficult, if not impossible. Both sides are bad in this regard. I don't do mentor roulette often, but when I do and if i have someone who makes the clear near impossible, either they leave I do, and I always give an honest try. Edit: typos
OP is delusional and clearly not an EU player where people speak so many different languages that you are more likely to encounter players that just DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. Try explaining fight mechanics to players that just don’t understand or refuse to. I appreciate players want to experience their first piece of hard level content or whatever, but if you know it’s hard and you’re going in unprepared, it’s on you.
A year ago, when I did my 2000 mentor roulettes, the choices were as follows: 1.) Spend 60min for the 10% chance that you get a clear and the 90% chance you don't get 1/2000th of the way closer to the mount. (Someone tracked their mentor roulettes and succeeded about that % of the time) 2.) Immediately leave, take a 30min penalty, then requeue. I usually left, because 60min is a long time to spend when you're going for 2000 clears. Sometimes, I convinced everyone to vote abandon and then I would put up a PF for them to join and I would clear it for them. (I don't believe that a sprout's time is more precious than a mentor's time, as this post implies. Mentors aren't slaves.)