Aikar's Thoughts

Here is some suggestions I made on FFXIclopedia forums for changes to the FFXI Fishing system!
Hopefully some will be answered.

• Fishing line: Why should a different rod have a different line? Add fishing line that players could choose better lines (which shouldnt affect ability to catch certain fish, just the chance of line breaking). And be a final hard quest like Ebisu for an ultimate line that cant break. then with an Ebisu + Special line combo you no longer can even line break on legendaries. Fishing line should come in stacks of 12 that only depletes if line snaps or rod breaks (as in real situations in fishing that would make you lose your line). The best line could have +3 fishing skill on it.
  Reason: If a halcyon rod can catch a certain fish with occasional line breaks but never break your rod, why not be able to use a better line that doesnt break, giving you better results in fishing. Possibly change it so its not the size of the rod that matters with the “too small to catch” error, but the line, as big lines dont work too well for catching small fish. rod shouldnt matter in fish size, rod should matter in stamina and depletion, and let the line justify if its too small of fish to catch or not. giving more possibilities of combinations to catch fish.
• Rod Repair Kits: Give woodworkers and alchemist a new recipe that makes a consumeable item that can repair rods, so that fishers can buy these to repair rods w/o the help of a woodworker following them around. Stacks of 12, Small Repair kit, Medium Repair Kit, Large Rod repair kit.
• Tacklebox: Multiple tackleboxes to choose from with different sizes from 20 to 60 in size. Tacklebox could hold all things involved with fishing such as bait, lure, lines and repair kits. Players should be able to get special tackleboxes that give +10 fishing skill as one the best tackle boxes, and another that gives +5 before that etc.
• Add 4 equipment new equipment slots to house the tacklebox, rod, line and bait. Letting players keep their fishing gear on with normal gear so they can fish at all times.
• Lu Shangs Quest: Increase the return gil on Carps back to 100g. As it currently stands Lu Shangs sells on AH for same price as it takes to buy all the carp, leaving not much incentive to do the quest itself. The quest itself, wether buying or fishing the carps yourself, should be cheaper than buying the rod itself. Alot of new players are discouraged from working on a lu shangs because they desperately need the money they could be getting from selling on the auction house. With the STF taking care of RMT, and the economy back down to good prices, It would not hurt to return the price to its original payment value to help new players still work for a lu shangs and make decent money back from it.
• Fatigue: With RMT being heavily taken care of, fatigue is nothing more than a nuissance to players. The fishing cap of 200 is not a real problem, but making fishing ANNOYING to do past 100 to 150+ fish is not enjoyable with the fatigue system, and so is the part of needing to zone or getting spammed with rusty items. Now that RMT problem is heavily hurt, can we get rid of the annoying factors like those that were designed to combat RMT.
• Fish Ranking: Speed up the contest, make it 1 week turnin, 1 week results. Give more players a chance to do it. also split it into 2 tiers. a 30-60 tier and a 60-100 tier. So low level fishers can get fish easier for them to catch and still participate in the contest.