Fishing

Nyboe

So as a new player I am trying to make some gold so I can buy credits and get lessons. I tried ratting, doing quests and bashing. Its still taking an awful lot of my time to get a lot of gold. So I tried fishing out and I did it for about 30 minutes. I caught like 4 eels. I sold them to the fishermen for 70 gold for all 4 fish. But it cost me 60 gold to pay for the 4 worm baits.

So in the end I spent 30 minutes making 11 gold profit. I am adept in survival.

Now I know fishing is better when you get the survival skill trans but thats what I am trying to do by fishing to make gold so I can buy credits. I mean survival is like a 4th skill that people trans after they get all their 3 class skills trans. So after I get the survival skill trans I probably won't even care too much about getting gold.

So I suggest that fish be more profitable and easier to catch even at lower survival skill.

Sancero

Yeah, I find the profit margins on fishing pretty abysmal, but it's such a mindless, stationary exercise that I can't imagine the admin wanting to make it more appealing. That is to say, it doesn't add anything to the game environment, so the fewer people doing it, the better. Bait could certainly stand to be cheaper, maybe.

Sylvance

Great idea. When I was starting this character up again after a ten-year absence, I begged up a rapier, ratted for a couple hours, then blew all the gold on bait, then headed down to Lake Muurn with a piece of straw in my mouth and a wide-brimmed hat. Lets just say the returns had me screaming at my monitor. Haven't fished since. +1 OP

Kyrra

There are a few people around with bait buckets that don't fish. I can think if at least one that hands a full bait bucket off to random folk just to get the bait used.

Might be worth asking about!

Nakari

I can't think of a single reason not to raise the return rates on it, at least, and especially, at lower levels of survival. I mean, even at trans survival it is an abysmally slow way to make money, but at least after an hour I get to feel like I've done something. Is there any reason that at low levels it couldn't be at least competitive with ratting and butterfly collecting?

(also, I'm not sure how it adds any less to the game environment then, say, bashing for gold does. 

Hyraeth

I enjoy fishing, I find it very soothing. Having said that, one could probably earn as much gold within a shorter timeframe by bashing.

Xith

Let me think... yeah, I don't believe I've ever freshwater fished on any character.

I was actually convinced by some silly person than deepseafishing would be so profitable I'd make my money back from buying a windcutter in no time. Granted, I don't do it much, but the return seems small for such a tedious time-consuming and potentially dangerous exercise. Can go to Arcadia/Creville (my hunting grounds about 5-10 levels ago) and make that much gold with the additional bonus of gaining experience and not requiring bait to do so.

It's partly the bait-to-reward cost, for deepsea at least. If I had a mhun diving team to bob for fish like cormorants, then by mass production standards the bait cost might be worth it.

I say audit of fishing and of deepsea by comparison. You lose your catch half the time, while hunting's straightforward, the time passes quicker, etc.

Santar

It takes approximately 125 hours of deep sea fishing to return the 2.5 million gold investment of a windcutter. This assumes that you are a dragon and are fishing optimally.  This uses a conservative figure of 20k an hour.

Sena

Santar said:

It takes approximately 125 hours of deep sea fishing to return the 2.5 million gold investment of a windcutter. This assumes that you are a dragon and are fishing optimally.  This uses a conservative figure of 20k an hour.

Does strength really make that big of a difference? It seemed like just a slight bonus to me. With 12 or 14 strength, I averaged around 10k profit per hour (the +2 strength didn't make any significant difference), it would take a lot for dragon strength to double that.

Kazu

Xith said:

Let me think... yeah, I don't believe I've ever freshwater fished on any character.

I was actually convinced by some silly person than deepseafishing would be so profitable I'd make my money back from buying a windcutter in no time. Granted, I don't do it much, but the return seems small for such a tedious time-consuming and potentially dangerous exercise. Can go to Arcadia/Creville (my hunting grounds about 5-10 levels ago) and make that much gold with the additional bonus of gaining experience and not requiring bait to do so.

It's partly the bait-to-reward cost, for deepsea at least. If I had a mhun diving team to bob for fish like cormorants, then by mass production standards the bait cost might be worth it.

I say audit of fishing and of deepsea by comparison. You lose your catch half the time, while hunting's straightforward, the time passes quicker, etc.

You probably would have when deepsea fishing was just introduced. People were making massive amounts of gold before it got nerfed, iirc.

Rispok

When you have 22+ strength (and now can also use angler trait in dform), you do not lose any fish when you cast line long. The difference in strength, in my experience, is that you can cast line long instead of medium or short, which I feel leads to more money. 20k an hour is a reasonable estimate.

Xith

The strength bias might be an outdated setting in fishing.

Ruth

Rispok said:

When you have 22+ strength (and now can also use angler trait in dform), you do not lose any fish when you cast line long. The difference in strength, in my experience, is that you can cast line long instead of medium or short, which I feel leads to more money. 20k an hour is a reasonable estimate.

Really? Master Angler works for deepseafishing?

Tahquil

Opinion:

Maybe make freshwater fishing more profitable with lower survival while keep the same return for those trans'd. (What the Original poster said)

Reasoning:

I don't think fishing should ever be even close to the viability of bashing due to the risk and skill involved. Fishing is just one of those activities which is extremely easy to script with no real risk involved. Bashing you gamble xp for gold/essence and should get bigger returns. However, it is something that a lot of newbies seem to rely on, true newbies, and we should be a bit kinder to them.

Santar

Sena said:

Santar said:

It takes approximately 125 hours of deep sea fishing to return the 2.5 million gold investment of a windcutter. This assumes that you are a dragon and are fishing optimally.  This uses a conservative figure of 20k an hour.

Does strength really make that big of a difference? It seemed like just a slight bonus to me. With 12 or 14 strength, I averaged around 10k profit per hour (the +2 strength didn't make any significant difference), it would take a lot for dragon strength to double that.

You're mistakenly trying to define the strength increase as a linear increase in profit.  The few points of strength are the difference between losing fish and catching fish. Once you pass a certain threshold, you catch almost every fish, even while casting long to increase catch frequency. The percentage of fish that you lose with low strength is what causes the drastic decrease in profit.

Jonathin

Strength makes a difference only in your reeling. You have a higher chance of reeling in more length of line per reel. However, strength really only plays a major role with trophy fish or the big river/lake fish. If you stick to shrimp or the medium bait on rivers, (and stick to casting short on the ocean), you'll come out with a decent enough profit. I had 12 strength when I was ocean fishing and I spent a few hours fishing and came out with a decent sized profit.

As for the OP:

I'm fine making smaller fish easier to catch when you're low survival. Scaling fish size to survival would be fine with me (meaning that at inept survival, tiny fish are like the medium fish and the medium fish are like a trophy fish). Trans survival would keep it the same way it is now so as to not break fishing.

Sena

Santar said:

You're mistakenly trying to define the strength increase as a linear increase in profit.  The few points of strength are the difference between losing fish and catching fish.

I didn't just mean the +2 strength (also, checking again, it was actually 11 and 13, not 12 and 14) didn't significantly increase the profits, I meant +2 strength didn't have a significant effect period. I tracked tens of thousands of reels, the average reel distance with 11 strength was 28 and the maximum was 91, with 13 strength the average was 29 and the maximum was 91.

Tanaar

I deep sea fish pretty avidly and make a ton of gold at it with only 12 strength.

You can't compare bashing and fishing directly, as they're completely different activities. Bashing requires most of your attention, with a TV or something going in the background at most.

Fishing, on the other hand, is a nearly-idle activity. I can be doing it in the background of another major activity, rather than the other way around. 90% of the time I'm fishing is with my attention occupied with a book, homework, a writing project, or even a completely different game going. I recently beat Zelda: Skyward Sword, and I had fishing going on the whole time. I made like 1.5 million gold that way.

The trick is to have that 10% attention on Achaea, so you can reel in the fish, bait and cast again, and not get ganked by Ruth or tritons.

I defy anyone to play a Wii game while bashing

ETA: Meandered away from topical relevance. Freshwater fishing is a joke. It's really really bad as a money-making mechanic. If it can't keep up with ratting, it should be fixed. Remove the need for trans Survival for freshwater, keep it for deep sea.

Hyraeth

The 10% required so one won't get shrubbed

Yes, freshwater fishing really needs to be reconsidered. I have no knowledge of deep sea fishing, don't even have the time/money to invest that kind of capital into it.

Some more numbers (I dunno how the rest of you guys earn 5 figures till the millions, don't laugh at me) for purposes of comparison:

Earnings from bashing for 40 mins = 1k gold apprx.

I took that gold, bought bait. After 3-4 hours of fishing with intervals of burrowing when I had to go AFK = that 1k gold became 3.4k gold.

It's decent, I think. Could it be better? Goodness, yes.

I also agree re the trans survival thing for freshwater fishing, make it easier for the little ones, eh?

Aerek

I'm on board with removing the dependency on Survival. Requiring Trans Survival for the meager profit that is freshwater fishing is harsh, especially when you get the ability to fish so early. Almost feels like a cruel joke on newbies. Definitely don't think fishing's payout should be increased at all, though. It's already pretty good reward for doing essentially nothing.

Tanaar

@Hyraeth it's not that it's 10% attention to avoid scrubbing, that's just all fishing needs. Worry about where the line is when you're writing your fishing triggers, dont cross it, never think about it again. I'm more concerned about pirates and especially tritons, because I'm the cheeky bastard that fishes in their war zones. That's why I can't take my eye off it for more than 20 seconds or so.

Blujixapug

It's not really on topic, but the fishing mechanic completely baffles me, with the way you must wait precisely 2 seconds after a nibble to tease the line. It is not possible to manually fish with any consistency, compared to automating it, and if you're doing it inconsistently, it's not profitable (or remotely fun). It's like they were trying to prevent people from automating fishing, but in the process made it so automation is the only effective way to do it.

I'd love if they redesigned fishing without that stupid delay.

Fishing could be really fun and cool with stuff like regional fish, fishing up electric eels that zap you or killer carp that try to drown you, different bait shops setting occasional high bounties on exotic fish, fishing up old boots or chests or magic wishing fish, etc. Imagine a Fishing skill that you gained ranks in by fishing, and you could catch better fish and do special things at higher ranks. Also it would be cool if Cooking dishes could have particular types of meat specified in their recipe, and the only way to obtain certain meat/fish was as a rare catch when fishing.

Fishing's payouts understandably must be balanced against its low-input, risk-free nature, but at the moment I think it's much too unrewarding, considering how boring it already is. There are other rewards than gold that could be built into the activity.

Hyraeth

@Blujixapug I'd love it if there were fishing quests, or ways to level up via fishing (not bashing-equivalent XP, but for certain milestones). That is one of the things I enjoy about fishing in WoW, but I'll not open another can of worms by comparing fishing mechanics in two different games.

@Tanaar Heh. Fair enough. I tend to keep my eye on because of thieves, not that I carry gold or valuables on me. It's really not that hard to read a book at the keyboard. Well, not /too hard/

Pirates and tritons sound cool. Wish I was cool enough to be a deep sea fisher.

Tahquil

FISHING QUICKTIME E ... [press (x) to finish this sentence]

Rinzai

I think the deep sea profits are solid, I can go fish for a couple hours and make some decent coin 25k is a pretty good estimate for me at least, but I'm one of those folks that constantly try to refine my timing.

That said, fresh water fishing is something that anyone can do reasonable, and I recall only making 4-5k an hour doing that, which, I can make in 5 minutes questing/hunting. cheaper bait or a increased return might be nice for the newbies or so looking to make some gold.

And then what you can do is set an event up about it, with a famine/drought or something to justify the need for more fish.

Talonia

Fishing is being described as such an isolating activity here that I'm not sure we should be doing things to encourage it. In fact, I might almost be inclined to say the admins should make it worse, to deter it. From a game design perspective it's apparently a significant gold fountain at higher tiers (IMO not sufficiently offset by the gold sink of buying or upkeeping a ship) so it pushes the price of credits up, but involves incredibly minimal interaction with others. If Tanaar is making 1.5M gold by playing Skyward Sword and not speaking to or interacting with a soul in-game, something is broken. The game should incentivize people to produce rituals and books, run contests and games, craft and design, explore and fight, or even bash (better than fishing, because it demands more attention and thus creates players who are active on channels and can at least partially participate in discussions). It shouldn't be incentivizing AFKing. Kill fishing, boost gold-payouts from quests and create more interesting/expensive sinks if you have to (itinerant bazaar sells out of everything near-immediately every time, and most of their goods could be intelligently designed to be both non-rivalrous with other sinks - i.e. no mounts because they discourage buying mounts from other sources - and decay, encouraging more buying of tchotchkes during the next bazaar). 

 This doesn't directly address the idea to make fishing better at the low end, but it's still worth thinking about when we're considering fishing system design.

Eld

"Higher tier" fishing, by which I assume you mean efficient deepsea fishing, is not nearly as profitable as a lot of people seem to think (compared to questing and high-end bashing).

Penwize

Eld said:

"Higher tier" fishing, by which I assume you mean efficient deepsea fishing, is not nearly as profitable as a lot of people seem to think (compared to questing and high-end bashing).

If it was, Penwize would be ruining the game with it.

Idelisa

I almost always fish socially. And lots if house fund raisers are group fishing related.

Wysteria

Go Sylvan/Druid, harvest hive for two rl years, lessons from bees pays off (nearly trans everything now from that).

On fishing, I don't really have the patience for it and every time I get a load of fish to sell, someone requires my attention anyway. I'm yet to figure how mainland fishing can be profitable — I stay in Viridian to keep the STR balanced out. I'm more into bashing, at least you can level up while being on the move.

Tanaar

@Talonia I do all of those things too, except crafting and designing. I fish to make gold specifically because there isn't a gold incentive to any of the others except bashing/questing.

Fishing is pretty far from the only thing I do. Also, Skyward Sword is like a 50 hour game when you obsessively find all the secrets. It's not even remotely efficient.