This is going to be a similar sort of thread to my Manage Auto Feed QoL suggestion thread, but nowhere near as lengthy. Basically, I'm just throwing out the suggestion to make a few adjustments to the fishing profession. As it stands, fishing is one of the professions that rewards the least amount of XP, making it a slow and tedious grind for those who aren't able to use up every fishing trip every two hours. You can only amass four trips at a time, and each one takes thirty minutes to replenish. You can hire Koda to fish, of course, for half the experience per fish caught, and send him out hourly.
Having spoken with other users about the fishing profession, it seems a lot of users seem to favor the other professions and neglect fishing due to the lack of experience and time it takes versus the yield. The number of fish isn't the problem, of course. I feel like if you fish even a few times a day you can get a pretty good supply of fish and other items, but there are definitely some ways I feel that the minigame can be improved to make it more worthwhile to players:
1) XP Boost - The amount of experience rewarded from fishing, whether manual or from Koda, is . . . not favorable. Increasing the amount of experience gained from this profession would help keep fishing as "profitable" as the other professions, helping it to advance at about the same speed while ensuring players are able to unlock the high-level fishing zones a little quicker. We don't need a crazy high boost, of course, but maybe one of the two options below would make the job feel more rewarding:
a) Double all XP for fishing - All manually caught fish and items now reward 4XP as opposed to 2XP. Koda could remain at 1XP, but I would suggest doubling his XP yield as well to give users more incentive to spend their pebbles hiring him. (Example: fishing in the Open Ocean would award about 70XP per trip as opposed to 35XP, and Koda would award about 90XP as opposed to 45XP per hourly hire.)
b) Adjust XP based on catch rarity - The amount of XP rewarded could correlate to the rarity tier of the item caught. Gray items could remain at 2XP, green items could award 3XP, blue items 4XP, and purple items 5XP. Koda could remain at 1XP per item caught if the game went this route to keep things balanced, I feel, but others may wish to see him doubled regardless. (Example: fishing in the Open Ocean would reward . . . well, it would honestly depend on the number of items of different rarities, but it would be more. . .)
2) Introduce a pause function - It seems that other than the experience awarded, the number one complaint that I myself and others share is that things often come up during our fishing trips. Thirty minutes is a long time to wait only to have someone or something require your attention the moment you begin fishing. Introducing a pause button would help to preserve your fishing trip in the event that a distraction presents itself so your half hour of waiting on the cooldown and valuable fishing XP is not wasted! By extension, refreshing a page or accidentally clicking away while a fishing trip is active would automatically pause it. The cooldown meter would still amass up to four trips as normal if an active fishing trip was paused.
3) Lower-level requirement for Open Ocean and/or Frozen Fjord - While I myself don't mind the levels where they're at, I do know a lot of people find the grind to be a little too demanding to reach those higher-level zones. I'm not really pushing for this one, considering how little XP is required in the long run to unlock the higher-level areas, but I figured I'd toss that out there in case others wanted to support it.
As always, I want to clearly state that while I have put in a lot of grinding and fishing to get to my current level and have all the zones and rare items from the various zones, I would not mind adjustments being made to make things more forgiving or accessible to other players. Just because it was harder for the first of us, does not mean it has to stay hard for those that follow. QoL updates can benefit everyone.
