Fishing: Yoji Fujito talks about fishing adjustments being considered

[Kalilla]

Translated by: Slycer

Note: My translation. This is an official DEVELOPER post from Fujito on the JP side; not a community team post. Tried to convey the guy's tone in the translation, it was markedly more informal than the normal community team posts.

Fishing!

Hello! I'm really sorry to have kept you waiting for so long for an update about fishing adjustments. As an explanation, we've had a really heavy workload recently and the situation has really been out of the programmers' hands. Since all this stuff has been going on, we haven't been able to give you any updates about this and I'm sorry for that.

Anyway, regarding the fixes that we are thinking about now, I'll post about what we have discussed up to this point.

As a side note, we are still getting our ideas together here so nothing here is set in stone. Also, as mentioned previously, we haven't yet decided when we will be introducing any of this.

Old man Fujito...give us your thoughts! Heh...

Please check out my ideas below. Rough ideas... very rough.

Basic Policy

1. Regarding the fighting element of fishing, we plan to correct this by renovating rather than removing it. As mentioned in a previous post by Oriole, we're going to leave the fighting elements in to compensate for when fishing skill isn't high enough.
   
2. Give fishing skill a greater impact to the extent possible to simplify operation of the rod during fighting. If you have enough fishing skill, the pole operation will be brought to a state like goldfish scooping. As far as operating the pole, we will compensate for client specification differences as much as possible to bring them all in line.

Big Changes

Input Operations after Casting the Line
Up until now, you had to continuously input directions opposite the fish to reduce their HP to the point where you could catch them. A lot of people have already pointed out to us that different performance of different machines has a significant impact on this, so I'm planning to change this to a single successful input.

In this case, upon successfully performing the input, the HP of the prey will be significantly reduced depending on the fishing rod and the fishing skill of the player. If you fail to perform the input, some HP will be restored to the prey. At this time, we're also thinking that higher fishing skill will also reduce the amount of HP restored in this situation. After performing an entry (whether a success or a failure), the rod will return to the neutral state. In other words, if you're just pounding inputs, it's not gonna work.

Movement of the Rod
Since we're changing the fishing system, we also have to adjust the movement of the rod. Right now, the rod does not stay on either the right or left for very long, and kind of swings back and forth violently, which means that you have to perform extremely short inputs and frequently press buttons as the rod changes directions.

Some of the ideas to change this would be (with continued input success) to have some kind of combo bonus (more significant HP reduction, some kind of DoT effect, make the fish unable to escape, etc.), and I'm also thinking about some other ideas (nothing final yet!).

Regen/DoT to Fish HP Based on Fishing Skill
By comparing the skill values of the fish ("resistance") and the fishing skill value of the player, the HP of the prey will either recover slowly, decrease, or remain the same. The changes will be as shown in the following table:

I'm not sure how to make a table on this forum, or if you're even able to, so I appoligize for the format.

Skill Value Comparison   Prey > Player   Prey = Player    Prey < Player
Current Spec           Regen        Stay the Same    DoT
New Spec              Regen        DoT             Strong DoT

Basically, if the fishing skill is greater than or equal to the prey's skill level (resistance), the HP of the prey will diminish over time. This will be more noticeable than it is right now after the adjustments. With a high enough skill level, the DoT effect alone should be enough to catch a fish easily.

For example, if a person with fishing skill 100 tries to catch a carp (low resistance), due to the strong DoT effect, the HP will run out quickly without moving the rod at all. This will be very similar to the old school fishing system. On the other hand, if someone with 0 skill tries to catch Bastore Bream or Black Sole, prey that require relatively high skills, the HP of the prey will be significantly restored by regen.

We haven't yet decided exactly how much this effect will be, but we will of course let everyone check it out on the test server once we have it in place.

Other Changes

Fishing Critical
Although this mechanism is already in the game, it is not currently based on skill. So, we plan on changing this so that it's more likely to occur if the fishing skill of the player is higher than the skill (resistance) of the prey. We may also add an effect that fishing fatigue is not generated on a critical.

Fishing Fatigue
This condition is the one that prevents you from catching more than a certain amount of fish per day. This was originally put into place as a counter-RMT measure. We aren't just going to remove this because we believe then we might get even more RMT fishing than we have now. That said, we may allow more prey to be caught as a "bonus" in the following ways:
1) Successful Critical
2) Use certain items to recover fatigue
3) Catch certain prey to recover fatigue
..and so on.

These are just some ideas. We want to implement it so that it's useful but only occurs once in a while.

Fishing Rings with Various Effects

With regard to these, it's possible that they may be computed differently when the mechanism is changes. The effects will still be similar, though. Once we get further along with implementation, we may change the specifications so that they give more time to successfully input during fighting. We also want to consider weather, time, and age to provide potential bonuses.

One Last Thing...

...and this is also true for other posts here. Please don't just think "we don't want this!" or "give us something else!" If you have specific comments on certain points here, then I can respond more effectively.

Please be aware that it may be difficult to introduce all these changes at the same time. With respect to fishing in particular, please be patient.

I'll post more when we have an announcement to make.

Translated by: Slycer

[Dragoy]

Looks pretty much like what I was expecting from what they have mentioned before.

I'm interested, a lot, but I'm a little bit worried how much the rod movement changes will skew the ability to identify what has been hooked.

Will definitely check it out on the test-server as soon as possible, if I can. ^^


(As a side-note, I think only 'higher-ups' are allowed to create those tables.)

[Kalilla]

I figured as much, it doesn't look that bad I guess