Animal Crossing: New Horizons

[Ronnie]

6 minutes ago, BowserBasher said:

I got to about 200 and had about 50 minutes left so gave up as I didn’t think I’d do it. I’ll just make sure I have enough bait next time ready. 

50 minutes would be cutting it close but doable. I think the trick is to not bother with bait, the crafting eats up more time than it's worth. You can get 8 or 9 fish on a good run each time and that's 10 points every 4 minutes.

[Julius]

Took part in a few rounds of the Tourney today, but got pretty tired of it very quickly. Would much rather be catching bugs, or doing just about anything else on my island. 

A few things I think they should think about doing to improve the Fishing Tourney moving forwards:

- have points be based not just purely on the number of fish that you catch, but also the rarity of the fish. We already know that they have a scale for this from Nook's Cranny, just use that for each fish. 

- yeah, as everyone else has mentioned: put a hold on water eggs for Bunny Day, at least until 6 PM. It seems like they reduced the spawn rate, but still, I think it would have been better to just not have them turn up at all during the event. Weird decision to have the Tourney even take place at the same time, though. 

- drastically increase the spawn rate of fish during the competition. Do the same for clams. Speaking of which, why are only Manila clams used for bait? The game has giant clams too, why not have that be used for 3 or even 5 portions of fish bait?

- not just for the Tourney, but for outside of it too: maybe slightly change how the number of nibbles to get a bite works. Perhaps have it correlate more directly to the rarity of a fish? 

- and, of course, as has been mentioned plenty of times before: mass crafting for items so we don't need to hammer 'A' for minutes at a time just to get a few bags of fish bait. 

I don't typically mind a grind, but I just wasn't having any kind of fun with this one. Hope they can change some stuff moving up and are open to that, as they seem to be!

[Ashley]

1 hour ago, Ronnie said:

The egg thing isn't an issue. Two hours of fishing I must have caught about 2 eggs. 3 at most.

I went to a different island and caught 3 fish and 9 eggs. 

I'll be glad when Monday comes around!

[punio75]

Much preferred the fishing on earlier games. 
this was a chore but I felt compelled to keep going 

[Ronnie]

It's probably fine for casual gamers who just want to get a few extra items, but they need to take the hardcore like people on message board into account. Having to listen to Chip say the same 15 quotes every single time was just utterly ridiculous.

At least they lowered the egg spawn rate

Edited April 11, 2020 by Ronnie

[RedShell]

Yeah, whoever came up with this fishing tourney format wants a slap.  

What was wrong with the system of having it based on size? Hell, even the tournaments in Pocket Camp are better, as you can easily keep track of your progress and the rewards get distributed so that you don’t receive any duplicates before collecting the entire set. 

I blame Chip’s good for nothing son!  I just knew he was going to be annoying. Worst new AC character by far.

On the plus side, I only encountered 2 eggs throughout the entire tourney (made it to 300 points too) and I finally got the Cast Master Nook Miles achievement! Something which I had already completely given up on.  

[Ronnie]

1 minute ago, RedShell said:

On the plus side, I only encountered 2 eggs throughout the entire tourney (made it to 300 points too) and I finally got the Cast Master Nook Miles achievement! Something which I had already completely given up on.  

Yeah if nothing else you make a fair few bells and plenty of Miles

[Sheikah]

My main problem with this is that it needs 300 points in a day to get gold. It's just too many. If they made 100 points the gold that would have been perfect.

And the excessive amount of text, which is total bullshit.

[Ike]

1 minute ago, Sheikah said:

My main problem with this is that it needs 300 points in a day to get gold. It's just too many. If they made 100 points the gold that would have been perfect.

And the excessive amount of text, which is total bullshit.

Agreed on both. I started just before 2PM and I had no where enough time to get 300. Think I just about made half of that. Think I got all the items at least, plus C.J paid off the rest of my mortgage and an incline, so it was worth it I guess.

[Ronnie]

You can easily get 100 points in 45ish minutes, so approx 2 hours to get all 300, maybe a tad more. It's not that excessive. The annoyance is just the text boxes and having to sit through a dozen of them each time.

If you catch an average of 7 fish in 3 minutes + 1 minute for speaking to the bloke, that's 9 points every 4 mins. Which means 2 hours 10 mins to get 300.

Edited April 11, 2020 by Ronnie

[Eddage]

I didn't find it too bad all. Just been fishing whilst The Simpsons is on Disney+

I had about 100 fish bait already crafted so that helped - the runs I did with bait I was getting 9/10/11 fish (so 11/12/13 points) in the three minutes. Then once the bait had run out it went down to 5 or 6 fish each time.

I didn't come across a single egg doing this, I just assumed that they turned them off for the tourney but maybe not, based on what you guys are saying?!

[Mr-Paul]

The point is, it should be fun. Ultimately, the game should have achievable goals for children. Having to catch 200+ fish in one day is not. 

Yeah, I know there's so much about this game that is repetitive, but it's working towards long-term goals in small bits, which you can mix-up as you please. 

Agree that 100 points should have been a realistic top prize for a one day event. This format didn't respect your time at all, especially with the clunky text you have to go through to enter/sell/redeem prizes. 

[Sheikah]

You can easily get 100 points in 45ish minutes, so approx 2 hours to get all 300, maybe a tad more. It's not that excessive. The annoyance is just the text boxes and having to sit through a dozen of them each time.

If you catch an average of 7 fish in 3 minutes + 1 minute for speaking to the bloke, that's 9 points every 4 mins. Which means 2 hours 10 mins to get 300.

More like 3 hours. Without bait I'd say you're getting 6 fish on average because fish spawns are not great, plus you have to replace tools that break every so often.

 

The biggest question though, why would you even want to do this for more than an hour. It is dull, there's no variety to the game - the only quirk is that if you catch 3 you get a 2 point bonus, which is easy. No second bonus at higher amounts, and nothing else interesting about the game. No competing with villagers or anything.

 

They could have done so much more with this game. Could even be that you submit a fish to be scored and that the fish you caught also had weights (so landing a heavy, expensive fish nets you gold). Far more interesting than aimlessly catching any old fish and watching a points score trickle upwards.

 

I stand by that this would be more fun if gold needed just 100 points. If it's a pointless grind then a shorter pointless grind is better than a long one.

[Ronnie]

54 minutes ago, Mr-Paul said:

The point is, it should be fun. Ultimately, the game should have achievable goals for children. Having to catch 200+ fish in one day is not. 

Yeah, I know there's so much about this game that is repetitive, but it's working towards long-term goals in small bits, which you can mix-up as you please. 

Agree that 100 points should have been a realistic top prize for a one day event. This format didn't respect your time at all, especially with the clunky text you have to go through to enter/sell/redeem prizes. 

Nowhere did it spell out any kind of goal for you. The event was literally just hey, go catch some fish and turn them in for cool prizes. That's what the majority of people will do. Once you hit 100 points it tells you you get a special gift in the post but nowhere does it say "Your goal in this tournament is to get 300 points". It becomes even more obvious when if you do reach 300 it nets you doubles and triples of the same prizes over and over. 

Having a 100 point ceiling would take about 45 minutes, and that's with no bait. Not sure that's good enough for an all-day event. 

Now I totally agree that the actual gameplay being the same fishing that's in the base game was really lacklustre, and the speech boxes were idiotically long-winded, but no one should feel compelled to go for 300 points because it was never even hinted in the game that it was a thing.

Edited April 11, 2020 by Ronnie

[drahkon]

Nintendo have finally put good old "fomo" into one of their main games. It's blatantly obvious with the way the Bunny Day event is designed.

Kind of sad to see, to be honest.

[Ronnie]

19 minutes ago, drahkon said:

Nintendo have finally put good old "fomo" into one of their main games. It's blatantly obvious with the way the Bunny Day event is designed.

Kind of sad to see, to be honest.

You mean where they gave everyone more than enough Bunny Day DIY recipes and a literal tidal wave of eggs so that they could craft everything available in the first 2 days of a 12 day build up? 

Edited April 11, 2020 by Ronnie

[Ike]

I was only hitting 10 fish if I used bait, which I hadn't prepared for in advance due to not knowing how the fishing "tournament" involved so half my time was probably spent gathering clams and then crafting them one-by-one.

You're forgetting not everyone's town layouts are the same, I had to either go south east or south west-ish to get to the large stretches of beach thus wasting time. Then it dependent on how many fish spawned, and how many times they decide they wanted to nibble on the bait. Also depends how far the town square thing is to a prime fishing spot And I got eggs enough that it lowered my points enough. Also had to repair my fishing rod a number of times so I either had to gather the materials or buy replacements.

Also I was shooting down balloons and doing other stuff which is on me, but I wasn't expecting it take up an entire afternoon and still not get everything.

If it worked out for you then, good for you, but not everyone will have the exact same experience, there's still a factor of RNG and other stuff going on.

Not telling the player upfront there's a reward for getting 300 points is also bad because people who don't reach 100 points are going to miss out without realising. Also it was pretty boring. I did also get a couple of fish I needed though.

[Ronnie]

17 minutes ago, Ike said:

Not telling the player upfront there's a reward for getting 300 points is also bad because people who don't reach 100 points are going to miss out without realising.

The reward is just a trophy though, gold, silver or bronze, it's like getting pointless achievements. "Oh hey you grinded some useless busywork that wasn't fun for a couple hours, have a gold trophy ping in the corner of your screen."

They probably didn't say there's a reward for 300 points because it's being reported that your total carries over to the next event in Summer. The rewards for this tournament were mainly the prizes, something they made very clear (over and over). 

[Sheikah]

Nowhere did it spell out any kind of goal for you. The event was literally just hey, go catch some fish and turn them in for cool prizes. That's what the majority of people will do. Once you hit 100 points it tells you you get a special gift in the post but nowhere does it say "Your goal in this tournament is to get 300 points". It becomes even more obvious when if you do reach 300 it nets you doubles and triples of the same prizes over and over. 
Having a 100 point ceiling would take about 45 minutes, and that's with no bait. Not sure that's good enough for an all-day event. 
Now I totally agree that the actual gameplay being the same fishing that's in the base game was really lacklustre, and the speech boxes were idiotically long-winded, but no one should feel compelled to go for 300 points because it was never even hinted in the game that it was a thing.

Actually it does spell out a goal, or at least a thing to do. While you're still getting all the new pieces of gear you will hit the bronze level (100 points), at which point he will tell you you have reached bronze. So you know that you need more points if you want to get a prize higher than bronze.

The event should have been only 45 minutes to top out in its current state. There's no point in taking up 3 hours of people's time if they're just repeating the same boring task over and over.

[Sheikah]

The reward is just a trophy though, gold, silver or bronze, it's like getting pointless achievements on PS4. "Oh hey you grinded some useless busywork that wasn't fun for a couple hours, have a gold trophy ping in the corner of your screen."

They probably didn't say there's a reward for 300 points because it's being reported that your total carries over to the next event in Summer. The rewards for this tournament were mainly the prizes, something they made very clear (over and over). 

This is why it can't be defended. Why even put prizes in for "useless busywork", as you say. Obviously people will try to get them as a gold trophy might look quite nice in the house, but it's a shame that you have to grind a boring, menial activity to achieve it.

[Ike]

5 minutes ago, Ronnie said:

The reward is just a trophy though, gold, silver or bronze, it's like getting pointless achievements on PS4. "Oh hey you grinded some useless busywork that wasn't fun for a couple hours, have a gold trophy ping in the corner of your screen."

They probably didn't say there's a reward for 300 points because it's being reported that your total carries over to the next event in Summer. The rewards for this tournament were mainly the prizes, something they made very clear (over and over). 

It's not pointless, it's something you can display in your house and for bragging rights. 

I hope it carries over, though it doesn't really make sense for the accumulated points to carry over.

[Sheikah]

It's not pointless, it's something you can display in your house and for bragging rights. 
I hope it carries over, though it doesn't really make sense for the accumulated points to carry over.

I don't think they'll carry over at all; it wouldn't make any sense for it to work that way given the way it's presented as a competition that's happening that day.

[Ronnie]

Time travelling reports online say that points carry over to future tournaments. 

The rewards for the tournaments are the fishing merch. Play as much, or as little as you want, they're not encouraging you to grind for 2 and a bit hours, they're just saying go fish and cash in for prizes.

Edited April 12, 2020 by Ronnie

[Sheikah]

 

 

 

Time travelling reports online say that points carry over to future tournaments. 

The rewards for the tournaments are the fishing merch. Play as much, or as little as you want, they're not encouraging you to grind for 2 and a bit hours, they're just saying go fish and cash in for prizes.

 

The rewards are also the trophies. Because you know, you get rewarded them.

 

Not sure how you can say they're not encouraging you to grind when there's literal trophies you can display in your house being given away as reward? Whether you personally want them or not is not the point here...

[Ronnie]

1 hour ago, Sheikah said:

Not sure how you can say they're not encouraging you to grind when there's literal trophies you can display in your house being given away as reward?

Because they're not advertising it as "100 points gets you a trophy" or "300 gets you another trophy". They're telling you that points = fishing items. Simple. In July when there's another tournament on they're not going to encourage you to grind for trophies either, they're just going to say go fish, win some new merch, sell fish for lots of bells. Points carry over anyway, so the trophies are more like achievements.

When you were playing in the tournament, did you honestly feel like the guy was pushing you to get 300 points? I certainly didn’t.

It's not that similar a circumstance but it reminds me of BOTW with the 900 Korok seeds. They put them there if people wanted to get them, but they weren't actively encouraging people to collect all of them it. The reward they gave for it was meant to be a comment on the silliness of grinding for open-world collectibles.

Edited April 12, 2020 by Ronnie