Final Fantasy XIV has a player-based mentor program and an automatic guidance network for new players. The idea is that certain players can volunteer to be listed as mentors, indicating that they are willing to guide others. New players and mentors alike are then allowed to join a special roulette just for these players, so newbies and mentors can work together to take on challenges. The idea is that players can work together and provide guidance above and beyond in-game tutorials and other guides.
It does not work. At all.
Now, FFXIV is renowned for having a helpful and positive community, and that is definitely true, but the general playerbase consensus is that mentors are usually unhelpful and not worth talking to, with many of them being actively bad at the game. That might seem weird under the circumstances of being a mentor, but it’s true. But FFXIV is hardly unique in this regard; a lot of MMORPGs have the ability for players to flag themselves as guides, and most if not all of them don’t really work out. Why is that, exactly? Let’s unpack it.
First and foremost, the idea behind having players as guides is a good one. For any MMO with a population exceeding maybe the triple digits, the scale needed to provide GMs for regular guidance is just unrealistic, and if you’re not passing the triple digits, you don’t have the budget in the first place. Players are the ideal guides for other players. Not only are they generally available and in the world, but some people genuinely like helping others.
However… herein lies a little bit of a problem. For starters, nearly all of these programs are automated to some degree, and they serve as something of a status symbol. And both of these elements are red flags.
For example, in World of Warcraft you can become a Guide by reaching level 70 and completing 3,000 quests. That’s all it takes. There is not an application process or an interview. This is not a failing on Blizzard’s part; do you want to sort through the people who would manually apply for this and interview all of them for a volunteer job? Do you? I sure as heck don’t. But it does mean that this process is automated, and perhaps more importantly, it becomes a status symbol.
In WoW’s case, there are no separate rewards associated with this system. You just get to be a guide and answer questions. But there is an associated level of prestige to that, and there’s also not really any way to strip you of that title for… being a bad guide. You can almost certainly log in on a decently played character, become a guide, and then immediately spam the newbie chat by saying that Warriors can’t look up. Or advertising your guild. Or typing horrible slurs!
My point here is not that most of the people who volunteer for this are in some sense likely to do that. Quite the opposite! My point is that there’s no actual way to put safeguards on the system and keep it automated, and the economy of scale kind of requires the automation. Sure, you can report people for abusing it, but that requires players to be willing to report and it also requires players to come back after the bad actors are purged.
After all, if you’re a new player and you open up the chat designed to help you, and the first thing you see is a slur, are you going to go back there? What if the first thing you see is just cruel and dismissive toward someone asking a question? Does that make you eager to jump back in or does it make you think that there’s no help to be found here?
The incentives are only compounded when there are separate rewards associated with the system. I actually think that WoW’s implementation has a benefit insofar as the reward is just offering help and (at most) an extra chat channel. When you get things for helping other players… it’s a good idea in the abstract, and it’s a chance to get people with added incentive, but it’s also a chance for players to just double or triple down on their worst impulses.
I have heard horror stories about would-be mentors using the mentor roulette – you know, the system specifically designed to help new players queue up with people willing to help them – and getting pissy at the new players making the run go slower because they’re new and don’t understand everything. And to be totally honest, there are times when this does actually make sense. You have some players who are going to just stand in the fire no matter how many times you say “don’t stand in the fire,” and when you try to explain it to those players, they fall back on “I’m new” and… if you have to explain “fire bad,” how many layers of concepts do you have to explain for this to make sense?
So the obvious thing to say is that we should just dismantle these systems altogether and let players find help in-game from random people. But, well…
I’m not saying that you can never expect help or grace from strangers; heck, it’s a big part of how I got my feet under me in the first games I played. But if it’s intimidating to ask an open chat for advice when it is literally there to provide it, it is orders of magnitude more intimidating to just ask strangers things when there’s no assurance that they know or even want to help you.
Herein lies the problem. You need options for providing help in-game. Yes, on PC you can theoretically just use Google for answers, but sometimes those answers are hard to find. It might not even be clear what you’re supposed to be searching for in the first place. And the more confused players you have, the more people are going to bounce off of your game. Heck, some of them might not even be new players, just people who never understood some system that isn’t explained terribly well. I’ve known players who, say, have played Star Trek Online for years without ever fully understanding how some of the mechanics work!
Wanting to provide a network where players can guide others is good, actually, unless you’re going to pay for GMs to be on-hand to answer every question. (No company is going to do that, realistically.) But there’s no real way to do that without some degree of automation, and there’s always going to be a degree of status associated with it that makes it attractive to people who may not really want to help others but do want to be seen as someone who has the answers. And so you have a system that’s meant to help guide but ultimately kind of… doesn’t work that way.
Normally it’s nice to have a solution here, but I don’t think there really is one and certainly not a one-size-fits-all fix. Sure, it’d be nice if you could just make people be helpful. It’d be nice if there could be some sort of organic movement to be more driven to be mentors and guides. But not everyone wants to be, not everyone is suited to it, and none of it can ever replace the in-game systems designed to support these ideas. It’s just a pickle all around.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
