[Feedback] Players skipping Studium because of Studium quest fish - suggested fix

[RareBirdAlert]

The Studium, like the Crystalline Mean in ShB, is our EW DoH/DoL quest hub. The quest lines give an intro to collectables and deliveries, exp rewards, and a title at the end. They also have pretty great stories!

Unfortunately, they’ve created a problem specific to fishing. Starting these quests introduce fish to certain fishing holes that remain there even after the quests are complete. Most of the time it’s a minor annoyance, until patch content adds the higher-difficulty Big Fish. Then attempts to catch the Big Fish are hooking these quest fish. Fishers who learn that this happens are choosing not to take the Studium quests in order to have one less fish in those pools when they try to catch the Big Fish.

I feel this is an unintended consequence of the quest design. “Avoid content made for your class until after you’ve caught the hardest fish of the expansion added in the x.55 patch” is not the takeaway I feel the devs want us to have.

Some of us have been testing the impact of the quests on the bite pools, by comparing sample sets of fish caught before and after starting the quests. For the fish in the potential bite pool at the Eblan Thaw, the data we’ve gathered (5000+ casts before Studium and after Studium) suggests that when the quest fish is added, it also rebalances the bite pool, with important fish (Cerule Core, needed for Fisher’s Intuition for 6.55's Snowy Parexus) having roughly the same bite chance with or without the quests started, while fish without uses (Animulus) have their bite times reduced to compensate. (This is a summary using the Eblan Thaw as an example, and similar data-crunching is happening for Lethe; I’ve invited some of those doing this testing to reply here with the data for the curious.)

Which sounds great! If the devs planned for fishers to have the Studium unlocked when they balanced the difficulty of the Big Fish, that means there is no benefit to avoiding the Studium quests, because the quest fish is not making it harder to catch the Big FIsh.

The thing is, even if the data backs it up, the data is not emotionally convincing or widely accessible to other players. It feels bad to catch a Studium fish when you’re going after a Big Fish, and this is frustrating enough that players avoid the content. That can’t be what the devs want us to take away from this.

Chatting with other fishers, we've come up with potential solutions:
- Follow the example of Custom Deliveries, and make quest fish bite only on Metal Spinner.
- Make quest fish always present, meaning everyone will have the same experience. This is how it works for ARR and HW fisher quests, and the Beasts of Brewer's Beacon quest chain.

Before we even know what the FSH quests in Dawntrail will look like, players are already planning to avoid them. I hope that this feedback can give the devs some insight into why players are making that choice, and take our suggestions into consideration for fishing content in the future. Thank you!

[Raenra]

It's a shame they went to all the trouble of rebalancing the pools as a band-aid approach, rather than simply not having the fish be caught once the quest is complete.
They clearly have some kind of 'technology' to allow it, since it's utilized with the relic fish.
The quest fish have no value outside the quest, no use beyond perhaps its canvas image. Can't be sold or desythsised.

Honestly if I'd known ahead of time the fish would continue to be caught, I wouldn't have done the quest simply because it's so irritating. Which is a shame since it impacts into the Tataru final quest.