Fishing Feedback: Identifying pain-points and suggesting improvements

[Pittcrew.6592]

Introduction:

I’ve been fishing quite a lot since End of Dragons came out and, overall, I’ve really enjoyed it and the various levels of strategy that there are for trying to optimize what you will catch. However, I’ve continually come across a few pain-points with the system that make it somewhat tedious to use, and I have some suggestions that I think could improve the experience somewhat.

The suggestions are at the end of the post. You can skip to them if you'd like, but I think the sections that I have earlier are useful for understanding the nature and scope of the issues I'm trying to address.

Some pain-points I’ve come across:

1. I am often swapping between the Achievements>Fishing panel, where I’m trying to see what Baits I should be using and what Fishing Spots I should be at for the current time of day, and the Hero>Fishing panel, where I am either changing my current Bait or making sure that I don’t run out of what I’m using. Since these are not separate windows, navigating to one means I have to spend a few steps getting back to the other. 
2. I have needed to look at an out-of-game resource to reliably know when the Times of Day are going to change so I can plan where I’m going to go fishing to make progress on collections. This is not ideal; I’d much rather be able to rely on the game itself being able to tell me. 
3. It’s fairly annoying to have to Anchor the Skiff and then draw your Fishing Rod. It would be preferable if you could press your Mastery Skill keybind (if Fishing is the Active mastery skill) while driving the Skiff, or while seated in an anchored Skiff, and both Anchor/stand up from the Skiff and draw your Fishing Rod in one action.
4. Sometimes I will run out of a Bait (or Lure), but not both, and that will result in me being able to continue fishing, despite not necessarily being under the conditions I really want to be fishing under. I usually want to optimize my chances of catching certain fish or keeping my Fishing Power high enough to have an easier time fighting the fish. Shifting to a higher difficulty level is jarring and disruptive, and losing Fishing Power, although sometimes not noticed, does seem to reduce the rates of getting higher-tier catches, which I’d rather not have happen without being alerted. Running out of Bait specifically can be very bad if I’m trying to catch a specific fish that needs it. Better communication of what I currently have equipped and being able to see what my Fishing Power currently is, at a glance, would improve the experience.
5. As it stands, there aren’t many reasons to actually fish as a party, and there are a good number of reasons for an average player to explicitly not do so. A major part of the conflict here is to do with conflicting fishing goals; for the average player, they are going to be fishing on a specific map in order to try to catch a specific thing, based on what they need for their achievements. Therefore, it generally benefits a player to not feel tied-down to one place. If a party member gets what they were there for, they’ll likely want to move on to somewhere else; however, the rest of the party may still have things to catch here, and shouldn’t have to experience any difficulty in continuing what they were doing should a member of their party leave. However, as things are, this has the potential to be quite disruptive when the person whose Skiff is being used wants to leave, as that can fairly easily lead to the rest of the party losing all of their stacks of the Fishing Party buff. (I have lost the buff after the original Skiff owner left the party/map; if you’re meant to be able to keep them, it seems to be finicky.) Right now, the main aspect of parties that feel easy enough and useful enough for an average player to engage with is being able to quickly leech off of the stacks of the Fishing Party buff that have already been built up and to then go off on your own. It isn’t the case that people, other than a group of friends, usually stick around to fish together; this behavior just feels odd, and the idea of copying the Fishing Party buff and leaving feels unintended. These issues make me very hesitant to casually start up (or join) a public fishing party, despite thinking it would be a fun thing to do. It’s a little too much of a commitment to do with the intent of anything other than letting people copy your buff, and poses a little too much risk for passenger players, who can lose the buff if the driver wants to leave. I think that’s a shame, because it does feel like fishing has the potential to be one of the best avenues for players to connect casually and naturally, in a way that gives people the chance to exist together for a longer time and in a less action-packed way than events or instanced content does. I think that steps should be taken to allow fishing as a party to be more casual by allowing the formation of a party to involve much less implicit commitment and the disbanding of a party to be much less disruptive to the experience. It should also be rewarding in that it will let you accelerate how quickly you can build up the stacks of the Fishing Party buff; however, it should only do so if you stick around and help to fish, even if you only want to stick around long enough for a few catches.
6. The Fishing Party buff, as it currently works, feels almost oppressive to engage with and appreciate. Its current implementation feels dissonant -almost antithetical- to some of the major design tenets used throughout much of the rest of the game, as well as some of the goals that it’s seemingly supposed to encourage. Since all stacks of the buff are lost on changing maps, or even after being removed from your Skiff for a short time, it makes you feel like you can’t stop fishing or change to another map if you’ve built up a decent number of stacks, especially if the map has a high base difficulty or if you still have rare fish to catch there. It makes a forced map closure feel terrible. It makes you feel bad about logging out, which can make you play for longer than you want or ought to. It makes you feel bad about ending a fishing party, because all members of the party can easily lose that shared progress, even if some members still do want to continue fishing on the map they are on. It also adds stress when your skiff is being attacked, with the potential of being destroyed and causing you to lose all of your progress with the buff (if you get in combat and can’t summon it again in time). It prevents you from being able to enjoy the living game and react to it in the spur of the moment, as is so often encouraged in the game: you can’t leave your skiff to revive someone downed nearby or join an event that is going on, even if you really want to, without losing your Fishing Party buff. It discourages you from changing to another instance of a map when a meta is going on to allow more people who are participating in the meta to join it, despite you potentially being completely willing to do so otherwise. I think that the Fishing Party buff does have a few really solid aspects to it that should be kept and elevated, such as how it gives the sense of gradually building to a “flow state” and how it accumulates faster when fishing as a group, but I think a pretty large rework is in order to help achieve an unambiguously satisfying experience. 
7. Trying to catch specific fish during Dawn or Dusk, especially when you only need a few more to finish an achievement, can be quite tedious and frustrating given how short of a time span you have to cast a few lines. This is made even worse when the area you’re going to has a high base difficulty; this often requires you to spend extra time there before Dawn/Dusk to build up the Fishing Party buff to be able to pull off a reasonable number of catches. It’s easy to feel resentful about having to have “waste” that extra time building up that buff, especially if you didn’t catch what you wanted to by the end, compounded by the fact that you’ll have to give up those stacks of the buff when you leave the map to fish elsewhere, which is often what people will do. Usually, I’m not interested in or able to stay on that map for nearly an hour just to try again for another 5 minutes–I can and will work on other things in the meantime. I think there are a handful of changes that could be made to what fish can be caught during Dusk/Dawn and to the Fishing Party and Tips on Fishing buffs that would generally reduce the burden of catching Dusk/Dawn fish.

The main things these suggestions are trying to improve:

1. Reduce the frequency that you need/want to access the Hero>Fishing panel by adding most of the information and functions in that window to the Fishing skill bar
2. Reduce the amount of actions you have to take to transition from riding a Skiff to Fishing
3. Make the Achievements>Fishing panel the main window that you’ll need/want to reference while fishing
4. Directly communicate the current time of day to the player, textually and graphically
5. Improve communication of when you do or will run out of a Bait or Lure that you’re using
6. Make Baits and Lures more easily accessible by characters across your account
7. Allow people to maintain their Fishing Power with more ease, to allow for a smoother experience when traveling to different maps
8. Allow players to engage in activities other than fishing, take a break, or log out of the game without losing all of the progress they’ve made with Fishing Party buff
9. Encourage fishing as a group by making it easier and more unquestionably rewarding to do so, while removing all of the points of tension that currently make doing so feel like you have to make tradeoffs and heavy commitments
10. Make fishing during Dawn/Dusk more predictable and painless to approach without requiring excessive preparation

The suggestions:

Each of these suggestions are elaborated upon with further details and mockup images, which can be found here (google doc) for those interested. I left out the details for the sake of brevity/accessibility.

Updates to the Fishing Panel

1. Convert Baits and Lures to account-wide consumable charges that can be accumulated and spent like single-use Finishers.

Updates to the Fishing Skill Bar

1. Allow the Fishing Rod to be equipped even without having a Bait or Lure equipped.
2. Let the player select which Bait and Lure to use from Skill slots on the skill bar.
3. Display the player’s current total Fishing Power on the skill bar.

Communicating the Time of Day

1. Update the output of the /time chat command to give more useful contextual information.
2. Add an option to have a System Message/Alert be broadcasted to the chat 2 minutes before and as the global Times of Day changes.
3. Add a skill or other display to the Fishing skill bar that swaps between different icons to match the current Time of Day. 

Updates to Fishing Power buffs

1. Update how the Fishing Party buff works and is shared to party members. Make it persist on characters, even while detached from Skiffs.
2. Add a more expensive, non-stacking Tips on Fishing buff that lasts until the daily reset.

Making Fishing Parties Easy

1. Add a Fishing Party tag that can be used to create easily-accessible public Fishing Parties.
2. Add a Fishing section to the LFG window.

Fishing Loot Table Updates

1. Fish that can be caught at Day or Night specifically should not be able to be caught during Dawn and Dusk.

Shortcuts

1. You can Anchor/dismount a Skiff and draw your Fishing Rod simultaneously by pressing the Mastery Skill button if Fishing is the Active skill.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Pittcrew.6592
added link to google doc

[Murelax.6398]

Congrats ! 🙂 Its a lot of work and time in this post.

Agree, i would love to see changes like this.

More user friendly , reliable and useful. 

[GolgoXIII.8536]

There is one more thing I myself would like to point out and that is as soon as the green bar moves out of the orange bar by even half a millimeter you should not be losing the fight with getting the fish so long as 50% of the green bar is in the orange bar you should be still realing in the fish even if it is a slower pace. If more than 50% is out of the orange bar you should be loosing the fish and depending on how much is out of the green bar is how fast you loose the fish. If people want to argue that you should be loosing the fish as soon as the green the bar is out, I would argue that as soon as the green bar is in  the orange bar be it a millionth of a millimeter you should be catching the fish. Myself I find it infuriating that as soon as the green bar is out even a fraction you start to lose the fish.

Edited March 23, 2022 by GolgoXIII.8536

[kiri.1467]

Brilliant. Thanks for writing.