Fishing challenges in FF14 are a massive waste a player's time!
I know this may seem subjective, but in the entire scope of FF14 development, I think it's more objective than subjective... Here goes.
I'm sorry, but this job class has employed some of the most shameless and audacious systems of wasting time that I have ever experienced in a video game, even for the MMO space.
To be clear, I like the Fishing Job Class. Clearly someone put a lot of time and effort into creating a system that was intuitive and deeply intricate with lots of variation and interesting descriptions of everything. However, they've taken it WAY too far here. I'm sorry it's just overboard (no pun intended).
The only way someone can enjoy all of the insane time constraints required to progress or even attempt fishing challenges, especially the Ocean fishing schedules, is if they don't care if their life is extinguished in pursuit of it all, because that's what it takes to not notice how evil the time wasting of the experience of fishing in FF14 is. I'm currently RETIRED IRL, and I can't fathom how the development team expected working professionals or students to make a commitment on this front, while spending time on the rest of the FF14, which is the actual game. It's incredibly disingenuous of you all to have created it like this! Like, WHY?
To not be considerate of a player's actual life time, and their IRL OBLIGATIONS, their own REAL LIFE TIME SCHEDULES, subscription commitments notwithstanding, in favor of these damn ocean fishing schedules, or weather change conditions, or Time windows, OR ALL OF THE ABOVE - TOGETHER - to include farming gil needed to build equipment that meets the fishing requirements, so you're not wasting more time - and you reach a place where the red line as been cleared by a large margin. It's a damn video game and there are only 24 hours in a day! If it were not for the intrepid (dare I say insane?) players who compiled the requirements for these challenges, and even built a website to track Eorzea's weather conditions, in real time, which is crazy to even think about, since it's a game, I would have just done the fishing story and been done with it.
I'm already in the Fishing job pipeline, so naturally I feel compelled to progress and complete at least most of it. But all of this time window garbage is extremely shameless and stupid to do to players, especially when you know damn well none of it actually exists, you all just created this fictional burden for players which has managed to exceed the time obligations of even the ACTUAL PRIMARY STORY systems and extreme battles of FF14! I can scarcely believe it, to be honest!
It vastly needs to be improved in the time commitment area, it's just really insane as it is.
