Ethic already posted about fishing in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. Its implementation smoothly and brilliantly slows advancement as you get further along, effectively creating a leveling curve from a system that looks like a simple 1-200 scale. The key is this: you never lose the ability to catch small fish.
When you start out, you have a half-dozen things that you can catch: weeds, rusty dagger, goldfish, giant goldfish, two-pound salmon, ball of gunk. On that list, three are trash, two are rare trophy fish, and one is the oh-so-common goldfish. I don’t know the real ratio, but let’s say early fishing without bait is 50-50 fish to trash. You get a point for each fish you catch, so 10 spins of the reel and you are at 6 (from your free 1).
You are now too experienced for goldfish to be worth anything. They are effectively gray. Conveniently, minnows are now available, along with trophy minnows, quickly followed by bitterlings, and so on. New fish become available every few points, and only the latest few fish (and their trophy versions) give you a new point of fishing. By the time you pass 100, you can catch two dozen different things. You cannot prevent this by seeking high-level ponds; every body of water is the same, from lakes to puddles. This is nice if you want to catch dace for the low-level cooking recipe, but it means that you want two empty packs when you pull out your reel for the fishing “late game.”
: Zubon
Is it really brilliant? I mean, if I wanted to be able to get every fish that a body of water has, I’d use a net. There’s a world of difference between a high level of skill meaning that you can catch the toughest fish in existence and a high level of skill meaning that you’re so good at using your fishing pole that you can pull any fish out of a lake, one at a time.
I can’t see it as being anything but a source of frustration for a high level fisher.
And I hope the trophy fish are never good for anything other than being a showpiece, since anything else runs into the major flaw of FFXI’s crafting system: only the rare result has any value.