UO Second Age

Duke Jones wrote:

sirrayiv wrote: I also noticed that Sea Serpents continue to harass fishermen reguardless of their skill level, although back in the day, the higher a fisherman's skill level, the fewer times he would fail, thus once he hit GM fishing, he would NEVER pull up Sea Serpents.

That's an interesting point... Perhaps this is still a holdover of when you needed to kill serpents for MiBs before it was changed back to fishing up MiBs.

On the Fishing update, GM fishermen needed to be able to fish up serpents to get the MiBs. So a NEVER or RARE fail would not pull up a serpent and get their bottles.

Currently, there's no need to fail for serpents at GM.

This is actually part of the difference between the late T2A system and the system that existed for most of T2A. During the bulk T2A, players were discouraged from macroing their fisherman to GM by creating a system where players would be met with challenges to their survival during the macroing process, once they reached a skill of 80. At that time, skill gains beyond a fairly limited point (65 or thereabouts - this was true even during UOR), required a fisherman to head out to deep sea. By forcing a player into a somewhat isolated area, where it was just them and the serpent, players were required to be more attentive of their fisherman because of both PKS (recall that fishing would reveal your character) and the sea serpents. For the most part, this system helped with the fisherman problem until a sizable portion of the population began reaching GM. The reason for it was the fact that there was a very linear relationship between your skill and the number of serpents you pulled up (much like the linear design of provoking before the difficulty system was implemented on OSI). At GM skill, a player could macro fishing and be free of any threat to their success beyond that created by PK's, because at that point, they never failed to fish up something. That problem led to the re-design of the system during the last months of T2A as a part of the broader effort to make macroing less effective through the anti-macro system (aka 8x8). With fishing, the design flipped the idea of sea serpents upside down. Instead of sea serpents becoming less common as the fisher got closer to GM, the sea serpents would become more common as the fisher got closer to GM skill. As an added side bonus of that system, even at GM skill, players would still be required to defend themselves from sea serpents, making macroing much more difficult if not impossible.

Ultimately, the main point is that during T2A, the closer your skill was to GM, the smaller your chance of pulling up a sea serpent, whereas the system implemented at the end of T2A created a system that was nearly the opposite. If we currently have an issue with fisherman pulling sea serpents up at GM skill, Derrick will need to take a look at it.

Well my fisherman is GM skill, and he pulls up more Sea Serpents than Fish!!!
Its so annoying, I was under the impression that once I hit GM, the serpents would cease, since I would not fail anymore...but that just isn't the case here at all.

I did some digging and found this just to prove my point about fishing.


PUBLISH - March 28, 1999
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Fishing
Fishing has received a major overhaul. There are yet more changes planned for fishing in future updates.
Based on your skill level, you now have a chance of pulling up the following (listed in increasing difficulty order)
One of any of several types of boots
Fish, as always
Magical fish, which can boost stamina, strength, intelligence, or dexterity.
Treasure maps
Messages in bottles
Sea serpents (on failure)
Deep sea serpents (on failure, and if deep in the ocean)

Notice the (on failure) - GM fishermen NEVER FAILED, thus NEVER pulled up Sea Serpents!

I'm not sure why GM's are failing, that will be looked into; but pulling up sea serpents at GM will be fixed in the next publish, until we can get to the root of the failure.

Thankyou for looking into and addressing this matter!!!

*grumbles* must we repeat ALL of OSI's Failures?

Fishing needs to be made more Challenging!

There are other approaches that could be taken, like more water elementals and random sea serps for instance, while keeping fishing itself mechanically accurate

Derrick wrote:There are other approaches that could be taken, like more water elementals and random sea serps for instance, while keeping fishing itself mechanically accurate

I would love to see more spawn at sea!

as it is i can fish for hours and never see anything but annoying lil dolphins,

is there anyway to keep serpent and dolphin corpses from hanging up the boat?
been stuck at sea a few times waiting for bodies to decay!

is there anyway to keep serpent and dolphin corpses from hanging up the boat?
been stuck at sea a few times waiting for bodies to decay!

Yes. Agreed.

It starts to boarder that fine line between "severely annoying" and "my character is physically stuck."

If a player has no magery, (which is unlikely but it shouldn't be mandatory or expected). You simply can't move or go anywhere until the body(ies) in question decay.

This will be looked into. it used to be that corpses and sea life were "collected" by the boat as it moved, much like the issue of the original post in this topic. I'll see if i can fix this.

I am starting to feel all Warm and Fuzzy inside!!

These sound like good changes, more monster spawn at sea, less dolphins LOL.
Corpses being dragged by the boat, might I also suggest this be done for all items at sea. I know after killing elements I normally leave the random potion they drop and that will hang the boat up as well (of course i could just quit being lazy and pick the potion up too)

Krats wrote:These sound like good changes, more monster spawn at sea, less dolphins LOL.
Corpses being dragged by the boat, might I also suggest this be done for all items at sea. I know after killing elements I normally leave the random potion they drop and that will hang the boat up as well (of course i could just quit being lazy and pick the potion up too)

not to mention the Arrows my archer leaves behind

Fail Rates seem to be really high not just for GM. I'm at ~95 fishing and seem to fail over 50% of the time. I just fished up 3 serps in a matter of 45 seconds, literally.