Title: Significantly Reduce Bite Times in Hotspots
Family Name: Carp
Region (NA/EU): EU

Summary

Hotspots - intended as high-engagement, high-reward fishing areas - currently suffer from disproportionately long bite times, often 2–3x slower than normal fishing zones. This contradicts both the design intent and visual theming of hotspots, and discourages their use for active fishing.

Hotspots are clearly designed for active player engagement.

The visual metaphor of concentrated fish should correspond to faster catch initiation.

Current Problems

• Bite times in hotspots are excessively long, often longer than depleted regular fishing zones.
• Bite times affect both active and passive fishing, but they can especially undermine active engagement.
• Despite being visually framed as dense schools of fish (jumping, splashing), hotspots are much slower than regular waters. Casting inside a hotspot results in slower bites than just outside of them, which breaks immersion and gameplay logic.
• Bite Times are still affected by regional resources, which can feel especially punishing since the factor applied to bite times is multiplicative. The impact on the already longer bite times is worse than to the faster non-hotspot times.

Proposed Solutions

• Flat reduction of base bite time in hotspots (e.g., −50% to −80%).
• Bite Times in Hotspots are unaffected by Fishing Resources.
• This change should apply only while fishing directly inside a hotspot

I think another change that could be good would be the addition of red fish (prize fish) to the hotspots.

Whether that's a specific red fish based on the hotspot, or just the red fish one could catch in the region where the hotspot resides, it would be nice if our prize fishing % (mastery) *mattered* within hotspots.

You're dropping a lot of profit when you pursue active hotspot fishing b/c of the absence of these red fish; you're also giving up chances at titles & the enjoyable-ness of rare catches.