Old, old Fishing Bug

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Balthozzar, Oct 19, 2019.

  1. Balthozzar Elder

    As a long time player (though also with long breaks), I remember the original, pre-Kunark game, including practicing swimming and fishing in the moat that separates Halas from the zoneline to Everfrost. At that time, fishing and foraging were mainly just extra little ways for beginning characters to get something interesting and slightly useful. Like, “free” food and drink items and some cheap vendor-bait to earn a few silver. I didn’t forage, as a barbarian warrior and soon as a human wizard, but I did fish. And my memory is fallible, but I’m almost certain that a bug in fishing was introduced at some point over the first few expansions. I think it will take a bit to explain and to convince people that it really is a bug. I did bring this up in the EQ forums many years ago (pre-DBG), but it got little attention and the few that did read it mostly didn’t agree that it was a bug or didn’t understand what I was trying to say. I’ll be methodical, so this will not be a short post.

    First, a definition: I will refer to “fishing” as hitting the fishing skill button, not to making tradeskill combines using a tradeskill container (tacklebox, fishing table).

    The Basics:

    “You cast your line.”

    Fishing first checks to see if you can use the skill – Do you have a fishing pole equipped in primary? Do you have bait? Are you in a place where you can fish, close enough to the water, and facing the water? (“Trying to catch land sharks, perhaps?”) Are you holding something on your cursor?

    Then, like everything else skill-based in the game, fishing goes to see if you succeed or fail, and that depends only on your skill level (as far as I can tell), which can be modified by items.

    Success:

    You see the message: “You have caught <item>!” and one bait is deducted from your inventory.
    The devs refer to foraging and loot “tables” when talking about how rewards are determined, so I assume that fishing works exactly the same way. Like foraging, fishing has different tables for different zones or groups of zones. I haven’t fished everywhere (yet), but Fresh Fish seem to be in every zone as an option, and then most zones have one or more special items that can be fished, usually used in various tradeskills. (Most of this was added with each expansion. I don’t know how many of the special fish in the original zones were there with the launch of the game.)

    With the introduction of “luck” with TBL, you can now “luckily” catch an additional item to the main one you caught, but the lucky one doesn’t use bait. It’s like something else happened to get snagged on your line after catching the first one.

    That’s it. That’s what happens on a successful fishing roll. It is with failures that things get complicated as there are several possibilities.

    Failures:

    1. “You didn’t catch anything.” – You don’t get anything, but you also don’t lose any bait.
    2. “You spill your beer while bringing in your line.” – flavor text followed by the above message with no bait loss.
    3. “You caught something…” – No bait is used, but you get one of three catches I will refer to as “garbage”: Tattered Cloth Sandal, Rusty Dagger, or Fish Scales.
    4. “You lost your bait!” – self-explanatory + “You didn’t catch anything.” Fairly uncommon.
    5. “Your pole broke!” – If your fishing pole is marked “Expendable” (which is almost all of them), then this is a rare possibility. I wasn’t watching my bait use the few times that this has happened to me, but I would assume that you also lose your bait. I’m also not sure if you get the “You didn’t catch anything.” message or not.
    The Bug:

    So far, everything makes perfect sense. You use 1 bait on all successes or if you have a ‘critical’ failure. You succeed more often if you have higher skill (As obsessive as I can be, I haven’t collected enough data to formulate an actual success rate model, so this is based on subjective experience.)
    Here’s the problem though. Remember that successes tell you, “You have caught <item>!” The exclamation point is a sign that you should be excited. The Bug is that you get garbage that says “You have caught Rusty Dagger!” that uses bait just like all successes in addition to getting them with the “You caught something…” result, which does not use bait. Now the fishing results no longer make sense.

    Based on all of this, my hypothesis is that the three garbage catches got copied into the success fishing tables for all zones. (I’ve seen this in every zone I’ve fished since I first noticed it.) Then, with each new zone created for each expansion or other addition, the zone starts from a template that includes the bugged version of the fishing table. Perhaps this happened when some major revamp to fishing was made at some point in the distant past, as it has been this way for probably 10-15 years or more.

    Okay, but why is it a big deal?

    Bait is super cheap, so using extra isn’t a big deal, but you end up getting at least as many garbage catches as what you are really after. The ratio of garbage to useful fish does not change as you gain skill. As I was typing this up, I was using my wizard (222 raw + 6 bonus from Brell’s Fishing Pole = 228 skill) in PoK. After about an hour of fishing and other multitasking, I caught 26 Fresh Fish, 17 Fish Scales, 14 Rusty Daggers, 5 Tattered Cloth Sandals from successes, and an additional 14 of the 3 garbage items from failures (all of the garbage clutters up your inventory that much more). This basically cuts everyone’s real success rate in half, which means that it takes twice as much time to get a certain number of what you are fishing for than it should. I have no idea how this went so unnoticed and uncorrected for so many years.

    I understand that dev time is precious, and fishing is very small part of the game, but this is one of those bugs that will slap you in the face with its existence every time you come across it, once you are aware of it. I don’t know how the internal tools work for editing things like the loot, forage, and fishing tables, but if it is a matter of opening that tool up and checking to see if the success table includes the 3 garbage items, and then deleting them if they are there, then it seems to me to be something worth adding to the list of bugs to fix relatively soon. Obviously, the game has a lot of zones after 20 years, so maybe it won’t be that quick to fix, but some kind of check to verify that it is a bug and that it is noted and added to some list to fix would be much appreciated. Thank you for reading to the end!
  2. Svann2 The Magnificent

    These are not the droids you are looking for
  3. Warpeace Augur

    Dev team likes time sinks?

    Advanced loot filter for fishing and foraging could partially solve the problem.
  4. Bigstomp Augur

    I almost never catch garbage when I fish.

    I also don't fish in the PoK.

    I don't think this is a bug.

    I think a bunch of newbie adventurers to the zone likely threw their garbage in the swimming pool you are fishing in.

    It's a swimming pool. You are lucky you are catching anything at all.
  5. Balthozzar Elder

    "(I’ve seen this in every zone I’ve fished since I first noticed it.)"

    I was clear enough that this isn't limited to any one zone.

    PoK does show how bad the problem can be at its worst, though. With only one actual good result (Fresh Fish), the garbage dominated my results, by a lot. The grand total was 26 Fresh Fish and 50 garbage in a relatively short session of fishing there. Fishing in Abysmal Sea, where you can catch a couple dozen different things with the many sizes of tuna and crab, the garbage will be a smaller percentage. Maybe I should have been more thorough in explaining that the ratio of good catch to garbage is dependent on how many different good catches there are in a zone. But nothing I've ever heard actually disputes my hypothesis, including your anecdotal report of "almost never" getting garbage. Of course, someone at DBG should be able to check this definitively quite easily, even if it is too time consuming to actually fix.
  6. Balthozzar Elder

    I can't believe that this was introduced intentionally. It simply doesn't make any sense to have the garbage catches use two different messages, where one actually matches what you see when you get what you want, happy exclamation point and all.

    I do agree that some sort of filter or advanced loot like feature for fishing (and forage) would be very welcome. But that would just limit what would actually go onto your cursor. You would still have the wasted time of using the skill and getting garbage you shouldn't be getting.
  7. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    1) Its called flavor, something this game originally focused on.

    2) Those "garbage" drops are not "garbage", they are CASH drops. You're supposed to sell them. In 1999 it was actually pretty lucrative for a level 5 or whatever.
    Corwyhn Lionheart and CatsPaws like this.
  8. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    Oh, and fish scales were used originally for spells like EB, so definitely not "garbage".
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  9. Flatchy Court Jester

    Now a days I just destroy the crap items I catch rather than save them to sell. It would be nice if every now and then you caught a RARE really good item. Put it on the same drop rate as your rare loot tables.
  10. Elyssanda Bardbrain

    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  11. Fian Augur

    I am not quite sure what the complaint is? That fishing up a shoe costs bait, or the fact that you fish up shoes at all? It seems to me that both are intentional to the design. Also, this sounds like more of an issue with an afk bot who doesn't want inventory to fill up with junk. Making life easier for afk bots is not something that dev team wants to do.
  12. Zish Elder

    Hi OP!

    I just wanted to let you know that I actually read your post, unlike almost everyone else who has posted in this thread.

    I understand the issue here, you're basically saying that the "Failed Catch" items are in the loot table for "Successful Catch" items. I don't know why people are having difficulty understanding this. It seems like a pretty cut and dry bug. Hopefully a dev can look into it a bit when they get some free time.
    Balthozzar likes this.
  13. Elyssanda Bardbrain

    actually we all read it, we just understand that IF you catch something like a shoe on a hook, you are going to lose your bait.. try it in RL sometime, it's an experience.. you lose bait for no reason at all too.
    Scila likes this.
  14. Zish Elder


    If you'd read it you would know this has nothing to do with bait.
  15. Ngreth Thergn Developer

    Its not a bug, its "Tradition". And, like some have said, simulates real happenings where bait is lost catching junk or nothing. Yes dagger, scales, and sandals are in the tables, and will likely stay that way.

    There are 3 tables, novice, medium, and advanced. The chance to get those off catches reduces on medium, and reduces again on advanced.
  16. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh

    Did you just say?:


    :cool:
    Zamiam, KarmaKitty, Elyssanda and 2 others like this.
  17. Gherig Addicted since Aug 1st, 1998

    I am just astonished the OP was able to actually come up with a 1200 word write up about Fishing in EQ.
    Zamiam and FubarEQ like this.
  18. lancelove Augur

    To quote one of my favorite old lines from npc's back in the day..."how novel, a talking lump of refuse" ;)
    Elyssanda likes this.
  19. Scila Augur

    Ely is correct ... fish irl much?
  20. Kaldaien New Member

    Ahem... catching daggers with a fishing pole does not scream "everything makes perfect sense."