Fishing Woes

[bolverk]

Okay so I have been working up fishing for days now and I've finally reached GM after hours of mindless watching my screen and I'm having serious issues pulling MIBs and Tmaps. I started to worry when after reaching 90 fishing I retrieved 2 Tmaps within 30 min but proceeded to retrieve ZERO Tmaps over the next 2 days with approx 8-9 hours invested macroing each day and casting approx every 9 seconds (~350-400 casts per hour with moving and killing occasional serps which is well above the recommended 280/hr in the wiki).

I finally started getting maps again one random hour yesterday (day 3 after hitting 90, approx. 97 skill at the time) during which time I pulled 5 maps. My assumption at this point was that simply being over 90 skill was not enough to succeed at retrieving maps frequently so I figured that my now higher skill accounted for a greater success rate...until 5 more hours had passed and I didn't fish up a single other map.

Today I hit GM at about 9:30am PST and I have been fishing non-stop since and monitoring my macro while I work (work from home so I literally have a monitor devoted to my fisherman right now hoping and crossing my fingers things will get better). Since I hit GM today (approx 4 hrs macroing) I have pulled only ONE Tmap and zero MIBs. I see people averaging 1-3 Tmaps and 0-2 MIBs an hour as standard on tests that have been done here on the forums but I'm getting nowhere near those type of results. I'm realistic, too, and even if I were getting close to these results across a two hour period I would just assume I'm unlucky.

- I've been eating food to stay 'full' for the last two days thinking that this had something to do with my success rate or lack thereof. Doesn't help.
- I've been fishing from a boat in deep sea in the middle of nowhere and have crossed the entire map probably 20 times. I've even tried tracking where I successfully retrieved the maps and can't find any sort of pattern at all.
- I've been killing the sea serpents that I see in the superstitious belief that it would help my success rate which, of course, it did not.
- I've tried recalling every hour for a day to see if that helped. Doesn't help.
- I've tried moving out of the cross-world ship lanes thinking these were nerfed to discourage unattended macroing and went in circles near Britain, Bucs Den, and Cove for 6 hours. Doesn't help (and actually I didn't even pull a single map then).

Is there a bug with fishing currently? Is anyone else having trouble pulling maps and MIBs? I'm trying to use this as a means to obtain items and gold as I am relatively new to the server (like 15 days played total) but at this rate it seems like I have wasted time fishing when I should have been doing something else. There are plenty of other ways and I'm not poor so this isn't going to break my playing experience or anything, but in my past experience (and in others' current experience it seems) fishing was reliable and gave good results.

I'm doing something wrong, there is a bug, or I am literally the unluckiest person on the entire server. I know that I've only been GM for about 4 hours now so I've only recently been capable of fishing up MIBs but I've gotten zero MIB and ONE Tmap in that 4 hours which is a wasted 4 hours as a GM fisherman IMO. HELP!

[mrbojangles]

Sounds like you're just an unlucky bastard. Your sample size is just too low, keep fishing. I know I've been in similar circumstances where I've pulled up nothing but shoes for hours, and just as I'm cursing the fishing skill I'll pull up 3 mibs in ten minutes. The 1 mib per hour is an average over many many hours, you cant expect it to be accurate over a sample in the single digits.

Fishing really isn't a full-time money-making profession here, I think of it more as a way to make money when you don't want to dedicate 100% attention to the game. I'll load up my fisherman on my laptop while watching the news or whatever, I'm not gonna sit down at my desktop for some hardcore fishing action. Expect to make around 7k an hour versus the 30k an hour a noob can make farming liches. But don't get me wrong though, a fisherman can be a very rewarding character to play. A really good magic wep in a mib chest can boost you from 7k an hour to 100k in five minutes.

also,
eating doesn't matter
killing serps is a waste of time in my opinion,
deep sea lanes are like any othner deep sea tile in game

[Koden]

You are using the wrong bait. LOL Sorry, I think I posted this same thing about 3 months ago, I don't run all over the map, just fish the four corners of the boat till there empty then move up about 2 screens & that seems to work. That said fishing for a living (RL or in game) is all about the good days & the bad times (times are often longer then days).