Ocean Fishing QoL

[Espritduo]

Ocean Fishing is a good idea, but it's got a lot of wonky things going on that often make it a more frustrating experience than it needs to be. Now that I am getting back into it after finishing the Ishgardian Restoration stuff, I thought this would be a good opportunity to list some of the relatively simple QoL changes that I think would really improve on a lot of the more annoying aspects of the content.

In no particular order:

1. Spectral Currents are too rare and many trips are a waste of time due to lack of currents, despite everyone's best efforts. Spectral fish should never get away, or at least should not get away nearly as often. Maybe have a Perception cutoff that ensures they never get away, like how the Diadem fish work. They should also bite more often, and should have higher current trigger rate in general. Catching 20+ spectral fish and not popping a current should never be a thing.

2. Bait, weather, and time should have more impact on what fish can be caught. Outside of a few very specific fish, bait has an almost non-existent effect on what fish bite (literally about 1-2% difference), weather has no effect on almost every fish, and time of day only effects certain spectral current fish. Using different bait should dramatically alter the kind of fish that bite often or rarely, weather should completely remove or add a much larger variety of fish, and time of day should have *some* impact on regular fishing. Spectral fish should still bite on every bait with only slight % differences like they do now, just to prevent the inevitable "you're using the wrong bait and screwing the rest of the team over" toxicity that would be sure to ensue from these changes.

3. Fish should have more use than just cluttering up inventory after a trip. A daily fish hunter NPC at the docks that is looking for specific fish from each spot would be a nice addition. The list would change daily, with regular wanted fish giving yellow scrips, spectral current wanted fish giving white scrips, and random fish being marked with a star for bonus scrips, just like GC turnins. All turnins would offer bonus exp for fishers below 80.

4. Big Blues should be much easier to get. Much much higher bite rate, should never get away, and longer intuition buff. Right now, the layers of bad RNG for these is easily the worst thing I've ever had to deal with in this game, and I've caught every other fish in the game. I'm keeping track of the time I'm spending on these and so far I have spend a ridiculous amount of time on them and not gotten a single one. Without any exaggeration, it is looking like it will take me longer to get these fish than it did to grind out the Pteranodon mount. That is just plain wrong.

5. Achievement rewards need adjusted. Right now, it is way too easy to get the minion and mount, the 16k title Ocean Fisher is too tame a title for the task, and the cumulative 500k achievement gives nothing at all. The 5k in one trip achievement should be the Ocean Fisher title, 10k should be the minion, and the 16k should be some actually impressive-sounding title, like Ocean Master, Master of Oceans, Master Ocean Fisher...something like that. The 500k achievement should be the mount achievement. I am aware that changing these after the fact is basically impossible now, but thinking about the future, this is the way it should work for future rewards. At the very least *something* needs to be added to the 500k achievement, since it gives nothing at all and yet is the true measure of how dedicated a person is to the content, not the RNG-fest that is points per trip.

6. Points in general should have more purpose beyond achievements. A point shop where you can spend points, but doesn't affect cumulative point total would be nice. Maybe make it so that you need to turn in the fish to the shop for a separate, consumable point tally to help with the inventory clutter from ocean fishing? The shop could reward all sorts of things, obviously. It's own minion and mount, glamours, scrip bait, materia, etc. Basically take a page out of the skybuilders' scrip shop.

7. The specific fish hunter achievements (the What did x Fish do to You? ones) should be solo-based, not group based. Or adjust them so people going for those titles aren't a detriment to the rest of the group and vice versa. Right now, these achievements are super aggravating to get because you need to find a group of like-minded people and you need to basically sabotage the rest of the boat's spectral current chances to have any real chance of getting them. Either make them lenient enough that the current rigging strategies are not necessary, make currents easy enough to trigger so that one group working against the others isn't such a huge problem, or just reduce the number needed to catch and make them solo. I prefer the solo one since fishing is a solo activity anyways, and adding these "fishing raid group only" type titles is totally unwanted.

8. Only the intuition and spectral fish for each regular current should have the !!! bite. Things like Momora Mora and Tarnished Shark should not be !!! bites. I think this little comic on the matter says all that needs to be said on that. You know the feeling if you've done any amount of ocean fishing.

9. Bite times in general for non-current fish should not be so ridiculously long unless it's a big fish. There are too many plain old garbage fish that have bite times that just stretch on and on and really eat up time for nothing. Special fish and some high-point regular fish should of course have long bite times but not junk fish.

10. The 30 second warning should not cancel out your cast when the timer runs out. Obviously, reducing bite times so that this never happens anyways would work. Nor should a spectral current be ended prematurely because of the remaining time. If a spectral pops, there should be bonus time allotted to finish the current, sort of like how the Emergency Mission in the old Diadem added extra time onto the timer to ensure people had enough time to complete it.

11. Trips should be hourly, not every other hour. No real reason to limit these like this. For people that only have a limited amount of time to play per day it makes it very difficult to get trips in. If this means slightly reducing the exp or scrip payouts, so be it, although I don't think that would be necessary.

12. More fish should give white scrips. Right now you can get decent yellow scrips from ocean fishing but the only thing that gives white scrips (and a pittance at that), are the extremely rare intuition fish. Spectral trigger fish should give white scrips as well as yellow scrips, and the time-dependent spectral current fish should also give white scrips along with yellow scrips.

13. Non-spectral fish in general should be worth more points. Getting any kind of decent score at all shouldn't be so heavily dependent on spectral currents. Obviously, spectral currents should still be the key to really high scores, but not getting them at all shouldn't be such a ballbuster. Right now, the regular fish give such insultingly low points I wonder why they even bothered at all. Maybe just a 50% increase in points for regular fish would make the regular currents more viable for getting at least average scores. Making bait/weather/time more applicable, and thus adding more of a selective and strategic process to fishing for points would justify increasing the point amounts as well.

14. Have two different queues - one for levelers that is basically the fish we have now, that is purely for experience, and one for level 80s with level 80 fish that is more about "endgame" rewards and currencies. This would allow those who just want to goof around and get easy exp to do that, while the max level fishers can have boat trips more focused on the high-end rewards for the content. Something for a future addition and more of an update than a simple QoL change, but it'd be nice. Right now since the fish are all level 1 and don't care about stats or higher level abilities at all, all my gear, melds, and abilities seem mostly pointless.

15. Allow people to solo queue if they want, instead of waiting out the timer when there is no one else queuing. It's really annoying sitting around for 15 minutes waiting for a boat when there is no reason to need the other people to get started. Also, if it isn't already the way it works, make the spectral trigger dynamically update according to how many people are on the boat, in real-time. It is known that the less people there are on the boat, the higher chance a spectral fish has of triggering a current. What is not known is when this is determined, and how often. It should determine it right at the start, and then adjust it the moment someone leaves the boat, so quitters don't impact the trip at all.



Welp, that is my rather lengthy list. I know not everyone is going to agree with every single thing I suggested exactly as I suggested it. I think most of them a pretty generally agreed upon annoyances with the content, though, and most people would agree than some adjustment is needed for these issues, going forward.

[Liam_Harper]

All very solid ideas.

In particular, both reducing the point discrepancy between regular fish and spectral fish and moving the mount to the 500k achievement would have fixed so much. It would both have given the content a longer lifespan since you'd have a long term goal to work towards and it would have significantly reduced the number of "leavers" when a spectral current didn't spawn, since even earning less than 10k would be progress. Once they get that 10k, most people simply stop doing it.

Adding a use to fish you catch instead of stuffing your bags with vendor junk would be great too. Overall you should feel your trip was worthwhile, rather than feeling like the dice rolled a "miss" because you got no currents.

[ItMe]

Adding a use to fish you catch instead of stuffing your bags with vendor junk would be great too.

I understand why they decided to make Fisher like that, but I agree, this is def something they get too much of.

[LegendWait]

I agress with all of this and most of all #4 and #11

[Commander_Justitia]

1. would mean the achievements that require certain fish to be caught x times are more difficult if spectral current can be triggered too easily, ik its probably best to just go as 8 alone but still. Would make it really impossible to try it while not in premade.
2. Well you also get a bonus if you get all fish of an area, if the party isn't using different baits they won't get that bonus. Easiest way to fix that is what we have now, you can get all fish almost by every bait. If you make certain baits only for certain fish, random parties will lose out of that buff more frequently (especially if somebody shouts USE X BAIT)
3. While I agree that some fish should give white scrips aswell, I don't think you want specific target fish for the normal fish because see point 2. You will reduce the chance to get the area bonus for people trying 10k for the mount.
4. Yeah they should be nerfed.
5. They do those kinda achievement systems sadly rather often, with the achievement that requires the most work giving the least or no reward. I'm not a fan of achievement points system either, it doesn't feel rewarding at all, if you compare it to other similar games. The certificate shop can never catch up with the current potential highscores.
6. Another currency tab just for fishing? While we have white and yellow scrips? I feel like devs wouldnt like that idea, while I get the idea that more points should actually reward you more.
7. I hate too that you basically need the right weather and daytime for some to even get a good shot at it. I would prefer a separate dutyqueue for those achievements that force the right weather (when the right routes are available that time) but make other objectives unobtainable. It is a serious timesink and annoying to setup, similar to eureka making a group for BA without discord organisation
8. While !!! superhard tugs exist in normal areas too for normal/grey fish or minions, it is not really nice ye.. If people use ocean fishing as first time experience as fisher, makes them wonder what is so special about !!! if you get some trash fish.
9. and 10. I managed to start an attempt at like 35-40s left in one duty. The fish started biting at around 3-5s left. I still caught it but the points didn't reflect it as loading screen started. So yeah it is bad.
Giving people a reason to stay in the duty and not leave when the timer is getting too low would be achieved by getting an "overtime" when triggering a spectral current.
11. Trips don't have to be hourly in my opinion. Idm the current system, it doesn't need to get spammed.
12. yeah see point 3. Should be easier way to get some white scrips if you done good. Mining and Botany are still way easier ways to get them anyway. It wouldn't hurt.
13. I think this is the mainproblem of the whole thing and probably should have been more at the top of your listing even though many already said it before. I can be a whole area afk but if I get 2 spectral currents could still mean I get over 10k if Im lucky. So I with 40-50 fishes caught get more points than the guy who caught 90 or more? There should be a way to make points without spectral currents. Maybe some kind of challenge log bonus during the duty idk.
14. yeah like I said in 7. It prevents whole grps leaving the duty when they got bad rng. It just being 8man would be enough.

I also don't like how you aren't allowed to change baits before it starts and it might become a problem if you accidentally sell an item to the merchant on the ship and want to buy it back but you only have 5s left. That item will be lost forever as the next ship has a new merchant with no sell history. I can't think of any other place where this is happening.

I think ocean fishing was a good attempt in general but it could be so much more if done properly. If dev team doesn't want to upgrade it, they should at least fix the rare fish catch rates and maybe remove !!! hooks and make spectral current triggering more obvious and consistent so it is less rng and more up to the fisher.