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.Duke Jones wrote: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.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.
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.
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.