Some thought about fishing and similar skills

[bilbous]

After discovering that fishing has been implemented, I decided to give it a try with a newish character, st and end are ~150 and the other stats are ~50. I bought the skill and tackle and headed out to find a lake where there might be fish. It took me a while to get there from the trainer, one of many similarities to mining I observed. I tried fishing from the shoreline as that seemed a logical thing to do and tried a few different types of fish, finally settling on one I knew to be in the game as the person I bought from had previously given me one. Didn't have much luck until I waded out into the lake where I started to fish. Good enough, got to be in the correct spot, just like mining.

Well I fished for half an hour and caught all of three fish. Maybe I didn't find the hot spot that is analogous to the vein of ore for mining but this seemed a little excessive. I can train a couple levels of metallurgy from scratch in a half hour if I have enough ore and never stray from the trainer but for fishing I got practice points exactly three times and I was a long way from more training anyway. Perhaps I was fishing for a difficult fish and there are others that have better rates for new fishermen.

I understand that many things need balancing and appreciate having the new toy to play with. I would like to suggest that having some skills always generating practice -- magic, repair, even weapon skills and armor -- and others that frequently do not -- mining and now fishing -- is an area that needs work. I might suggest that the long duration skills that cannot be stacked ought to have intermediary programmatic steps to speed up training. so instead of fishing for a half our and getting virtually no practice I could get a little more. For example the fishing animation is currently seven or so casts over the duration of the usage so this could be seven checks  and if any succeed you get a practice point and you get a fish with the limit of one fish per skill usage. So up to 7 pp's but only one fish.  You could even terminate the skill usage prematurely upon the first success, award fish and a single pp and be ready to try again. This would make these skills more practical to train and be more in line with combat skills.

I guess I am asking for more automatic training progression in the harder to train skills.

[Akkaido Kivikar]

There are no 'hot spots' in ore mining, it is entirely random.

[Maisent]

 @ akkaido

i thin there is, i have experimented for a while with iron, when i go on to totaly different places they seem to be harder, but i have noticed that there are 2 places that actually gets you an ore almost any time, i have tried to do it in a small area, and all over, the small area one seems to work better, and thus less time moving around.

[Rigwyn]

I's say test it ans record the results. See how long it takes to get 20 in spot a vs spot b

[Akkaido Kivikar]

HaniX told me that there are no hotspots. Whether you get an ore or not is entirely random.

[bilbous]

I'd say it is entirely beside the point I was trying to make I believe it has been said here / bugtracker / somewhere by those who were supposed to be in the know that the edges of the mine location were less productive but it was a long time ago and it may have been changed. I do not propose to look it up now.

The point I was trying to make is that some skills are much harder to train than others and a little more consistency would be nice. Why should it take hours to train fishing to level one when it takes one combat to train armor to level 1 and only two or three to train a weapon? Sure it might just be that fishing is so new that finding a good place to fish or finding the right kind of fish to target is my problem. Certainly if you dig at the old gold mine just outside hydlaa for the mineral there now you can train mining faster than if you try to dig anything else in another location.

Repair, too, is a slow business and training it is greatly time consuming even if you have all the damaged goods to repair --20 seconds minimum per PP. I suppose it might be intended that some skills are so much easier to train but it doesn't seem fair for those people wishing to specialize in the more difficult ones. There doesn't seem to me to be anything inherently different in essence between training one thing and another.

[Akkaido Kivikar]

I must say, I think it's because lakes/rivers are a rarity in PlaneShift. So you need to move further to fish.

[weltall]

sorry there are hotspots.
but those don't mean that you get the ore for certain.
The system is done in this way (you can check the code yourself):
these values are taken in consideration:
1) the hotspot is the inner circle it has a range and the more you are near it (or inside it) increases the % of success. This is called by the engine range of the resource. While the space where you can actually dig or fish (and not get the error that you don't see a good place) is the visibility range from the border we can say the probability lowers as much as you are near the edge of this visibility range
2) quality of the tool. It's compared with a value in the database and then it gives an increase or decrease of the % of success.
3) a random value (yes randomness is calculated at the end is the randomness value to determine your possibilities. when the random value is lower than the value you got before you get the ore simple)
4) i think there was a forth value taken in consideration but now i don't remember it.

[Rigwyn]

Is skill the 4th value perhaps ? XD

Oddly enough I don't recall skill ever being a noticeable factor when mining.
Perhaps location and other factors drown out what little influence skill has ?

[bilbous]

Thank you for clarifying that Weltall, although it is still beside the point.

So how come weapons have a Practice Point (PP) possibility turnaround of 1-3 seconds and a pick or fishing rod is 10+ seconds and a repair is 20 seconds-15 minutes?
Smelting ore is something like 10 seconds but you can stack them up so that after the first one pops the next one comes just as quickly as you can put the ore in the slot. This means that after the obligatory wait for the first one the marginal time for the next however many can fit in the furnace is effectively 1 second or less apiece. Armor training is even faster because you can trigger a bunch of mobs to attack you and you get chances as fast as their cumulative attack speeds so that if you have 6 opponents with an attack speed of 1 second you get 6 chances for a PP per second. Of course you get nothing it the npcserver is non-functional at the time.

I guess I am just belaboring the obvious again but how can I achieve some kind of training parity? Perhaps these long skills could require fewer PPs to complete a level of training or generate  more PPs per usage.

[Zon]

There might be hotspots. In the gold mine in Gug I always mine on an edge. I get more there than anywhere alse
^
|
|
Ulbers /
        /
       /Mining area in Gug
      /_________
      ^
      Here

[weltall]

yes skill there you go what i forgot. well there is a problem pp are tied to practice exp and anyway this goes on the rules department to settle. PP in crafting is done in order to give you enough to level up the same goes for mining just you don't get practice exp at all for a failure

[bilbous]

wait. what they replaced the platinum with gold?

Anyway the problem is not that failure garners no practice, and I was never talking about progression points which are directly related to experience, the problem is that the opportunities to gain practice points are wildly varied across skills.
I would suggest though that what is considered to be a failure is also not consistent. You can cast a magic spell that has no effect ... healing non-existent damage ... and it counts as successful practice but then spells rarely fail if no attempt to overpower them is made. Spells do get quicker as your levels go up but you do not dig any faster. You do succeed more often as your mining goes up but at low levels failure is very common. 

Even if the failure rate per attempt at a given skill level was constant across all skills the attempt rate of some skills is so much slower than other skills as to ghettoize them.

Anyway nobody else seems to care so I guess I shouldn't either. Maybe someone from the rules department could offer an opinion on this topic but it is probably better they concentrate on what they need to be doing whatever it is. I am sure they wear many hats.