Master Angler desperately needs changes

[Sunnyside]

This post is a little late to the party because I wanted to give fishing some time to grow on me. Sadly it did not. I've completed every event since launch and always found something to enjoy. It's exciting whenever those notifications pop up. Sure there's been occasional missteps but things seem to be corrected fairly quickly.

This is quite possibly the most unfun event OJ has ever had. Which is weird, because reading about the mode certainly made it sound enjoyable. Unfortunately the problem became apparent as soon as I started playing. My friends and I hit our first minigame and I remember catching quite a few fish, then thinking "Wait... we're still fishing? Is the game bugged?" I wasn't the only one; my friends were just as puzzled.

The problem is that 90 seconds is a lot longer than you'd think. It just drags and drags. Because of this the novelty wears off almost immediately. OJ events haven't ever been this big of a chore. As for balancing it, even 60 seconds might be too much. Maybe 30 seconds? Anything to make it stop taking up such a large chunk of each game's time. Of course you'd also have to tweak the milestones to compensate for people not having as much time to build combos. Either way an adjustment is sorely needed.

I don't think the idea is bad. In fact I think the mode would be a fun twist if the numbers were balanced a little better. As it stands though there's just too much tedium. Two weeks in and I've barely played 10 matches. It's disappointing to realize that this is the first event I'll skip.

Edit: spelling

[winter wave]

in the language files there appear to be unique abilities for master anglers but they haven't made those public yet

[CarThief]

Yeah, it's lenght is a real problem. You fish every 5 chapters, those chapters fly by in like, a minute or two, then you spend litterally ONE and a HALF minute fishing, and this occurs EVERY 5 chapters.
Can't catch a break. Throw like 5 dice, spend what feels a eternity fishing, 5 dice, fishing, dice, fishing... Gaaahh!! That's just too much...

So yeah, lowering it to 30< seconds is one way to make it tolerable. Though that doesn't fix how it turns the game into a skill-based game where being good at fishing means you'll win no matter how smartly your opponent plays.
But atleast then the event wouldn't be so painful to do.

Alternatively for 90 friggin' seconds it could've been every 10-15 chapters. Or perhaps per 10 chapters, for 30 to 60 seconds long. The less often it occurs, the less it will affect balance since there's less physical skill-based oppertunities to get ahead.

(Though it really shouldn't be showering the victor in so many stars/wins anyway. Maybe like 30/20/10/5 stars respectively based on 1st/4th and no wins.)
Of course if it gets reduced in lenght, the milestones will need to shrink accordingly as the maximum score also naturally shrinks.

[UnLuckyCat]

The best part is getting KO'd and staying down for two full fishing minigames before you can move again.

I like the fishing, but it lasts too long each time it pops up, and pops up too frequently. To add to that, since you only get credit towards the event milestone for your highest score, the match is effectively spent after the 5th or 10th chapter and players are hoping for it to end ASAP. It's such a relief for someone to hit their final norma right on chapter 20 because it means you don't have to fish again. That should not be the case.

Then again, if it weren't as prevalent, it'd suffer from being "just normal mode with the Playground event on." How well you fish should impact the overall results or it wouldn't be a fishing mode, after all. Perhaps there could be more lasting effects beyond stars/wins you could gain from fishing, like unique cards or stat boosts depending what or how many of a kind of fish you caught?

Still, I'd at least like for more than one minigame to count per game. Doesn't have to be full credit, either, something like 100% of your highest score, 66% of your second highest, 33% of your third, and the rest get tossed out. Or each successive one gives half as much as the last, indefinitely (until like the 8th or 9th giving less than 1 point, but that'd be reaching star decay anyway). Something like that so there's a reason to keep at it instead of go AFK for 0 points and throw the game on purpose so it'll end faster.

[Intra]

This mode makes me want to bot or cheat, I want the cosmetics but the event is trash...

[Red-Rain]

Simply letting your totals for every fishing event count would have made this much better seeing 300 something vs the 200 max. Otherwise it's a chore more than fun honestly.

[Sunnyside]

There's an update out but I feel this misses the point. Having the minigame appear less often is all well and good but it still halts the game for 90 seconds of boredom. I understand that cutting the time it takes would require an overhaul to the scoring mechanics. In the interest of fun, I say it's worth the effort.

And that's another good point: the amount of points shouldn't only be your best score. This makes actually reaching milestones much more of a grind than it should be. I average a little over 100 points every game. This means I'd need to play 40 matches to see the ending. Maybe 40 games wouldn't be so bad if the mode itself were less of a chore, but as it stands this is too much to ask of players.

[UnLuckyCat]

Is it much of an overhaul if they cut the minigame time in half to 45 seconds but double all the points? That still sounds a bit too long to me, but much more reasonable. About the biggest impact it'd have is on players who can manage to maintain a single combo throughout the entire duration, but I don't think that's too common, or even the best way to score high without a lot of luck as well. Though that could still balance itself out by both being easier to maintain a shorter combo, and harder since waiting for more of that fish to spawn eats up proportionally more of the remaining time.

If anything, changing the chapter interval is more delicate since that directly impacts the outcome of the game with the Stars and Wins payouts. Less frequent minigames means the whole match can take longer, so it's possible nothing actually changed.

[Patrizl001]

I still wish they up the amount of points you gain. I'm only at 1.5k/4k and the change from per 5 turns to per 7 turns is really gonna slow matches down, which really hurts me...

[Backstabba]

I feel like the current changes are too little too late as anyone who hasn't done the event for being too grindy STILL won't do it as its still too grindy.

I am personally looking forward to buying this event's items from the shop as I fully expect this event to be retired and have everything put in there.

[CarThief]

I dunno, 4K fish is reasonably doable i think. Though this event definitely tests your patience moreso then any other event ever did, but there's been grindier events, technically...
(Not that i'd say no to a score-increase, making all fishing attempts count, or a reduction in milestone requirements though.)

Personally, i wouldn't count on this event getting scrapped/retired immediately afterwards, barring some lore-ish stuff like Mio i don't think that ever happened to OJ, not with seasonal events anyway. They did put a lot of work into the Fishing minigame, so its likely to be rerun once or twice with 1-2 year cooldowns.

And who knows how long it'd take before they'll rerun it? School Crashers had a cooldown of TWO YEARS, so if i where you i'd get em ASAP, if you care about the costumes (or are a bit of a collector), anyway. Thank God you can get the rest from drops on co-op/versus.

[[FAUCᴇT] Psychopath]

Originally posted by Patrizl001:

I still wish they up the amount of points you gain. I'm only at 1.5k/4k and the change from per 5 turns to per 7 turns is really gonna slow matches down, which really hurts me...

Frequency doesnt matter, only your highest score for that game will grant progress.

[Aurora Solaris]

Agree, IMO event is just too long and too frequent, especially considering only the highest score matters so if you score like 180-190 first fishing then you can literally go afk. Also best way to play event is just mindlessly press mouse button in one place. I will say this might have been one of the most interesting events , but at the end its probably most boring and poorly designed one to date.

[White Rice]

Fishing is fun though, still trying to break my highest score of 335.

[mkjioz]

At this point, I think some people just don't accept alternative minigames at all and will always complain no matter how much easier the grind is made since to them it's always a grind. 4k points is 20 games if you can hit 200 average once per game which isn't difficult at all. Especially in a lobby where other players aren't even trying to fish. However, there are people that seem to get sick of fishing after just 1 game. I find it a bit strange how people who have the patience to play hundreds of games of OJ have absolutely none when something like Snowball fights, Castle building, or now Fishing comes around, but ultimately it's a matter of like vs dislike. If they don't like the core gameplay of the fishing minigame, then it doesn't matter how much the grind is reduced, they just refuse to fish at this point. If they abjectly find it awful to play and refuse to do it, then that's their personal issue at this point, but it is their right to do so.

I feel like 100% OJ would probably be better served by having all events just be milestone events from the general playerbase with any actual forced participation limited to a few games. There's always some portion that gets pissed off when they have to play the new game mode because there's always a portion that seems to hate it from the outset no matter what.

[Jackling]

It's honestly rare I hate an event, I actually personally liked xmas mode aside from star stealing and generation being less useful overall. I think a reason why I hate this mode may be because I was expecting something cooler, which isn't really a legit reason to hate it. Another reason I dislike this mode due to how long the fishing goes on for and how frequent it is. That and the game mode itself isn't terribly interesting. I love fishing in games but this is one fishing thing I dislike. I feel like if you want to make a mini-game that lasts for 90 seconds which comes in the middle of another bigger game, you need to make it more interesting. If they did lower the time to 30 seconds, I think the mode would be fine since I feel like the mini-game can work in shorter bursts. Until then I think this event will be cursed as one of the worst events ever and even if fixed it will still be tainted. Only other event I remember hating was the 2018 halloween event, but that was due to the candy stealing being forced. Thank god they didn't put the fishing into the regular versus I think that would of shut down OJ entirely until the event ended. I also disliked the original beach party event since beta co-op was kind of bad in my eyes. I also remember disliking the most recent poppo event but that was due to forced Poppo AI, which they fixed so I don't think I actually hate that event itself just that side effect but anyway I digress. I think something also needs to be done about the wins you get from the fishing, but overall I think 30 second fishing is the only change that's needed. Overall this event will probably be regarded was the worst event to date. Let's hope it never gets any worse than this.