Big fishing is poorly designed and isn't very fun

[UkcsAlias]

1) A 29 day downtime has only ever happened 4 times in the history of FFXIV. Of the three fish that have had 29+ day downtimes in those 4 years, two (Bobgoblin Bass and Duskfish) of them can be mitigated by Fish Eyes, which greatly increases the chance of a fish being available. The last one (Ruby Dragon) has really only ever had massive downtimes like that maybe... twice since it was add in 4.56, 5 years ago. If you want to bump it down to 25+ day dowtimes, you bring in Cinder which has only broken that once, maybe twice. So a grand total of 4 fish out of 289. 4 out of 289 don't define a problem, even if half of those 4 are legendary fish.

the max downtime thing is completely irrelevant though, we have to talk about averages.

For an average person with average workday, of the 24h per day, 70% is gone (work/sleep/travel). Any argument about planning is NOT an option here as i already considered the entire 30% of free time as plannable. And since it can be done days ahead, its reliable on that end at least

Its still just a game, so pushing it in front of IRL stuff is generaly bad. Now ofc, there is a social aspect that can demand more specific online times as well, and special events etc that can motivate you to plan the game in front of IRL, but doing this for something RNG oriented is a very bad and unhealthy choise. So for this, we must assume only free time is available here.

Since only 30% of the day has an option, and the moments are equaly spread. This makes an average of once per 2 days in opportunities turn out closer to 16 days. While long, for opportunities and a dedicated person, its still well managable as long as its only for a very limited number of fish.

The more fish with such condition, the more opportunities will be spread upon the free space. Sure, a certain one might have a 20 day gap for you, but 3 other fish might have 3x the number of attempts instead. Its truly only anoying when its your last fish, but still well managable.

The 29day case for someone with just 3h a day might have only resulted in 30 or 31 days of a gap. Everyone suffered equal here, and hence its fair.

[ShadowNyx3]

In my opinion OP, you are devaluing your critique of big fishing by making a majority of your post a complaint against your recent luck and displeasure in seeing others have better luck than you. You made the effort to provide some examples of additions to fishing to help improve RNG which is great, that's the kind of feedback people can debate and can give a dev ideas by reading; but so much of your post is just complaints about bad RNG.

In regards to your displeasure with the RNG...I have to point out a few things. 1) If seeing other people get fish annoys you, I can't recommend enough that you treat big fishing as a solo activity. Turn off "Others Gathering Messages" in your chat log, make a tab where Shout and Yell are turned off, and just get in your own little zone until you catch that fish. 2) You mention raiding being an example of a fair system. As a hypothetical, let's say you are a healer and your static clears a final boss and your co-healer has their weapon drop and it takes weeks of weapon coffers going to DPS then tanks before you finally get yours because your weapon never drops. And even if you don't go as high as Savage, what about all the extra time some players spend needing 99 totems for an extreme trial mount when others can just get it on their first clear? It sounds to me like what you want with big fishing is a totem system so you know that each failed attempt is getting you closer to the end goal, which in my opinion completely defeats the exhilaration of finally beating the RNG and reeling in your catch.

It's just really odd to me to see many of your suggestions talk about how much you like the communal aspects of fishing and yet it is so obvious that you are mad about other people getting this latest title before you.

[Choco_Breeder_Twirly]

As someone who constantly 100% the fish all your points are totally valid. However heres something even more infuriating that you didn't consider. I am Over Melded specifically for fishing with Ilevel 585... so why is it when I just went to catch the Nepto Dragon, for something I had planned, I couldn't. I have at minimum 10 Heavy pulls all in the range of Nepto and every time i reeled in, no patience on, he got away every.. single.. time... This is a fish from patch 2.4 with an ilevel of 80 putting me OVER 7 times it's Ilevel. Yet it got away every time...

Anyone who thinks Fishing doesn't still need some serious over hauling is full on ignorant to what fishing in FFXIV entails. They know fishing needs reworking which is why they added Ocean Fishing b/c without Ocean fishing you can be guaranteed 90% of the players would still NOT have fishing leveled.

[PotatoTree]

In my opinion OP, you are devaluing your critique of big fishing by making a majority of your post a complaint against your recent luck and displeasure in seeing others have better luck than you...

It's just really odd to me to see many of your suggestions talk about how much you like the communal aspects of fishing and yet it is so obvious that you are mad about other people getting this latest title before you.

I think you are making some unfair assumptions about my motivations here. I mean I'm going to 100% complete the achievement no matter what since progress is always cumulative (as in I can't lose any fish prog and go backwards), so whether or not other people have the title or not has no bearing to me. I didn't even start fishing day 1, I only recently did this so I have no expectations to get the title before or after people. This is not a skill based achievement like ranked pvp or something, seeing someone else with the title does not indicate to me anyone has more skill here, just more time was spent. It is literally impossible to "lose" on this achievement.

I'm more concerned with wasting time and the fun aspect of that. And I know video games are a waste of time yadda yadda, no I don't mean it like that. What I care about is the excess time I wasted compared to someone else to get the exact same thing, which I don't think is fun.

And no I'm not expecting to 1-tap a fish, I'm don't even care about the expected value of hook attempts, I'm saying being 3+ standard deviations from norm for failure from no fault of your own is not at all fun.

"but RNG is RNG". No that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the fun aspect of the long-tail in the rng. There is no universe in where if you are 3 standard deviations on the unlucky side without any way to control your chances would be fun. If I lose 99/100 pvp games because of skill issues I am completely fine with that. If I lose 99/100 fishing sessions when the expected average is 10 sessions that is not fun. And on top of that the whole thing doesn't even respect your time. "but don't wake up at 4am to fish, just do it when you feel like it" I will predict that someone only limiting fishing time to a couple hours after work, between raids, and casually will never complete the achievement before more fish get released or even the end of the game as a whole.

[ShadowNyx3]

What I care about is the excess time I wasted compared to someone else to get the exact same thing, which I don't think is fun.

Why do you harp on comparing one person's big fishing experience to another's if the achievement doesn't mean anything to you? I don't have to assume anything when you repeat the same things over and over again.

Congratulations on saying that horrifically bad luck is not fun. Pretty certain exactly zero people are going to deny that fact of life. But what are you aiming to get from responses here if all you do is repeat this arbitrary "3 standard deviations" talking point? Without providing any kind of data or evidence to support that big fishing is empirically worse than bad luck in other areas, you literally just sound like someone who's angry their luck is shit.

To your point about it not respecting the player's time, there is nothing more fair than the ffxiv weather algorithm. It does not care where you live, it simply cycles through and creates fishing windows whenever the code allows. If you want to catch all the fish then you find the time to make it happen. I don't believe anyone who complains about an indiscriminate system like fishing windows has any respect for the fishing journey, they just want the rewards.

[Toukichiful]

I just want them to stop making big fish where we have to jail in the zone for hours before hand or log off to get intuition. Two massive offenders of this right now in the game Lancetfish, which required me to jail for hours in the Tempest in the pond of despair as people call it back in ShB. Then they added Sidereal Whale which is similar requiring major jailing due to trying to catch Phallaina for the intuition. It can be highly frustrating to go to 5 to 10 hours of Phallaina windows and not get it to even get the intuition for the Sidereal Whale window. Overall Big fishing isn't to bad but I think a lot of us can be critical of fish like this that they add into 0.55 patches. Of course I am aware jailing is a choice, but increasing the chances to get the chance to catch them, will be the choice of most people if they can. You can of course get these in a single window if you are lucky. But i would still like the development team to consider not making fish like this.

[PotatoTree]

Why do you harp on comparing one person's big fishing experience to another's if the achievement doesn't mean anything to you? I don't have to assume anything when you repeat the same things over and over again.

Congratulations on saying that horrifically bad luck is not fun. Pretty certain exactly zero people are going to deny that fact of life. But what are you aiming to get from responses here if all you do is repeat this arbitrary "3 standard deviations" talking point? Without providing any kind of data or evidence to support that big fishing is empirically worse than bad luck in other areas, you literally just sound like someone who's angry their luck is shit.

To your point about it not respecting the player's time, there is nothing more fair than the ffxiv weather algorithm. It does not care where you live, it simply cycles through and creates fishing windows whenever the code allows. If you want to catch all the fish then you find the time to make it happen. I don't believe anyone who complains about an indiscriminate system like fishing windows has any respect for the fishing journey, they just want the rewards.

If your favorite thing to do is big fishing I am not attacking that or the content. In fact I enjoy the process of collecting stuff, whether it be pokemons or achievements or just fish. The rewards don't even matter, big fish could have 0 rewards but the fact that there is a checkmark that shows completion on a log makes me interested. In a similar vein I am not interested in collect all the the gear pieces or eating every piece of game food, but if they add glamor system that checks for previously obtained gear or add some "gourmet" achievement that logs all the food you've eaten I'd have fun completing that.

Lets lay out the points:

- bad rng is not fun (you and I both seem to agree, I have made suggestions that protect against long-tail distributions)
- the players time is not respected (we can disagree on this one, although I have made suggestions that improve the experience without affecting your experience, in my suggestions a 2 week long fish is still a 2 week long fish, just that the player can choose the play time)
- there is no player agency involved (you made no comment on this so I don't know your stance here. By player agency I mean a better skilled fisher should be able to improve their odds, like Snowy Paraxes is nice since you increase your chances by knowing timings, gp control, etc).

I don't think mentioning 3 standard deviations is arbitrary at all, especially since the entire fishing journey can be modeled a rng from simple coin flips.

[ShadowNyx3]

- there is no player agency involved (you made no comment on this so I don't know your stance here. By player agency I mean a better skilled fisher should be able to improve their odds, like Snowy Paraxes is nice since you increase your chances by knowing timings, gp control, etc).

You can optimize every fish in the game by doing these things, not just Snowy Paraxes. A "skilled" fisher is going to get way more casts per window than one who is inexperienced with the depth of using GP, but luck will always play a factor.

That being said, you only really feel that difference the more complex a fish's conditions are and unfortunately it feels as if a lot of non-legendary fish fall into the "slap something and spam chum" design, which is very worthy of criticism. It's important to have simple fish like these to balance the content but it would be nice to see some older designs come back into play that we rarely see these days. Double Mooches (mooch chain has taken over now) and intuition on non-legendaries would be nice to see revived, and there's so much room for new ideas and mechanics as well.

In conclusion, I think there's plenty of agency in improving your casts per window rate but a lot of room for expansion in fish design to really make that apparent.

[TaleraRistain]

I will agree I think we've gotten away from skill-based fishing for sure. It's all about reaching breakpoints, using the right bait, showing up for the 2 seconds the fish is up for the next 2 weeks, and getting lucky. It's not really a rewarding structure. Ironically, in my opinion the best fishing that rewards informed fishers who are also skilled is ocean fishing, where your knowledge, execution, and luck all come together to determine how many points you can get. I think fishing could definitely use a rework but at this point with 900,000 fish in the game the chances of a meaningful rework are slim to none ever, and the rng "get lucky" trend will simply continue endlessly until end of lifecycle.

This sums it up nicely. I do Big Fish now and I do get something out of it so I keep doing it. But I do think it can be better. It would be nice if we had more agency and were able to be more active participants in the process. A lot of the time it feels like we are just captive audiences to RNG.

[Lydia77]

As our fisher pro says: you just dont have to do this since its just side content and is not affecting the game.
I wonder what is main aspect for people who dont like unreals etc and want to fill those checkmarks like me and you.
I do find it unnoying for any stat but GP meaning nothing for any fish in the game (besides min requires of current content). But removing it will trivialize 99% of the fish and its not fun. Its like going through the game with unsync only.
I say it again: my only issue is VERY rare windows. Fish geting 1-3-12-30-100 days of CD only to appear when you cant go for it AND being one of the most annoying to get as well. Right now a freaking whale will be up in 3 days and then 12 days! Almost a whole sub and guess what? i cant participate in any of them due to work / IRL stuff. And if i follow this "famous" fisher i dont have to jail myself to get the only chance in a month i have. Just give up and ignore the thing you are dedicated to complete. Enjoy it as is for a year untill you get all the RNG meet your conditions.
You want full PVP achives - just go do pvp. You want ultimates - get a party and do it. You want last fish? Wait for 2 months till you can try it and hope for 0.5% chance of success. Or you can willingly chain yourself on a freaking space island listening to "Whispers...", get prefish done and go for 20% success. I wonder what i should choose... Ive had my share of annoyance with ruby dragon which i fished for 8 real life months. But at least it was more common to try. Its jsut unfair % fish and my general bad luck allign.
I love the idea of weather / time requirements for fish just like IRL. But when this condition is met once every week its not OK and definetly not fun. Make them more common. Leave the chances and requrements the same. just LET. ME. FISH!
Ps. Good luck with Levequest and expert craft achives.