WoW Journal - 7-April-2005

I spent a mainly peaceful evening on a tour of the world of Azeroth, picking herbs. Not a single quest, and no dungeon, so I made only a handful of xp from monsters standing too close to a herb. But I got herbalism up to 290, and alchemy to 275. That means I can now transform arcanite, but that has a very long cooldown of several days. Still, for the guild it might be useful.

My main problem as alchemist are fish, which are used in several recipes. I would really need some Stonescale Eel, but can never find any on the auction house. Fishing is one of the few less well done parts of this game. It started out as being boring, but profitable. That resulted in people using fishing "bots", automated macros that fish unattended. Blizzard banned a couple of people, but was unable to prevent fishing being macroed. So instead they made it unprofitable. Of course now that fishing is both boring and unprofitable, nobody is doing it any more. And thus there are no fish to be bought for alchemy.

I refuse to do fishing without some sort of UI mod making it less annoying. But I certainly don't want to do anything illegal that could get me banned. So now I'm unsure what sort of fishing macros are legal and which aren't. Cosmos had some fishing macro stuff, that saved a few clicks, but I'm not running Cosmos any more since the last patch.

What Blizzard *should* do, is to make fishing a lot more interesting, some sort of more interactive mini-game. As a game, it could not be macroed any more. And when it isn't bot-able, it could be a bit more profitable again.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link