[Satimasu]

You could lvl 1-75 in that amount of time. 4 hours a day for 3.5 months is a heck of a lot of time for no immediate return on that investment.



I don't think 25k an hour is a crazy amount of gil. Here's an example of a crazy amount of gil: When your cooking is lvl 90, buy Land Crab Meat for 3k/stack on the AH (I just bought 12 stacks for this price yesterday). Synth into Pet Food Delta. Sell to vendor. Profit = ~6k per stack of meat. You can synth 10 stacks in an hour easily, that's 60k in 1 hour's work. Oh yea and you don't need to spend 4 hours a day for 3.5 months with no profit in order to do this. That's just one example I saw, and no doubt you can make even crazier gil if you make stuff that's in high demand on the AH.

I suspect most people don't play this game to craft. If you don't want to do anything but craft, fishing is great then you can spend 100% of your playtime fishing and obtaining the LuShang and eventually the Ebisu. It's your own little mini-game. But if you like to level, kill NM's, merit, do Assaults, Besieged, Campaign, etc. then you'd probably be much much better off leveling another craft that earns you more gil/hour.

Yeah, you just need to get your cooking to 90 in order to profit. It also doesn't help if there isn't any crab meat on the AH. I don't know about you, but on my server, we're better off farming it. My wife skills up cooking with the fish that she catches. The sushi she makes ends up being less than just turning the fish in when you factor in all the ingredients and such. You have to make a big investment to either power level your cooking to 90 (either NPCing everything you make or dropping it), or wait to sell on the AH. Now, fishing and cooking go hand in hand. You could easily level it while fishing. That's what my wife does.

We fish while we seek for a party. If we get one, great! If not, well, we're still making our gil and don't have to run around gathering materials. When we wanna do something else, we do it. We know we're still making a steady income and don't have to worry about inventory space and such.

This right here is what stops me from caring about fishing, even though I kind of enjoy it. When I started fishing about 3-4 years ago the pinnacle of fishing money making, or so I thought, was catching high level fish on the ferry with your LuShang's. That sounds cool and fun and something to look forward to as a way of making gil. Over time, though, high level fishing has degraded to fishing the same old lvl 50 bot-ridden fishing spots, just with a better rod. To me, that's a massive turn-off. Leveling fishing and obtaining the rod takes a crapload of effort and there should be some kind of payoff beyond just more gil/hour at the same location. If I just want more gil/hour I can take up other crafts as I have already said. Plus the bots are disgusting and a huge insult to real fishermen. When I went to SSG for a quest the other day I was so mad that they are allowed to so blatantly cheat without immediate repurcussions.

The fish I'm fishing will sustain me till 99. The ferry isn't the only place with high level fish anymore. I will admit that it does take a lot of time to level fishing itself. It is the slowest craft to level after all. It is also the cheapest to level as well. The bots aren't just plaguing fishing. They are also in crafting and other things too. That screws things up too. I've leveled other crafts, it's not all that easy when some materials aren't available or when you run out.

The bots are an insult to everyone, not just us fishermen. I do wish something could be done right then and there when it's so obvious. At least like what they used to do when fish botting with real players and RMT was a big problem. I did notice that after I got my Lu Rod and went to skill up with it in Nashmau, bots had Lu Rods as well. Then STF banned 'em and now they have to take a cut in profits. It really does seem like they are on their last leg.