Today was the St Patrick’s Day fishing competition, and the region was packed. with 90+ avatars all fishing.. unfortunatly a couple couldn’t fish due to limitations with the Fishing Server that I didn’t know about.

I think most people had fun, but for a few it was frustrating, and so for me, it was very frustrating.

Thoughts

While I do plan on trying to make the fishing server work with a full region, I think there are some key takeaways for me from todays competition.

1. Fishing Contest Prizes need to be fun and rewarding, but also frivolous.

Having prizes like custom fish tanks, free food etc is ok. The Axolotl perhaps not so much. Not everyone can be online at the time I am to host a competition, and when those who can be online and make the effort to come, can’t fish, it’s not really fair.

2. Alts.

There isn’t much I can do to stop people using alts. What I can do is make prizes non-transferable - another reason Axolotl’s don’t work as prizes.

3. Huds, attachments, and chat lag.

I’m fairly certain the cause of the fishing server malfunctioning was because SL was dropping chat messages from fishing rods. The server wasn’t seeing them, so wasn’t responding to them. I don’t know if removing attachments or huds would have improved that situation, but it would probably have helped those who were lagging. The auto accept chat spam is annoying - in the latest firestorm it appears to default to write messages in local when you turn on auto accept, I don’t know about other viewers.

Perhaps people who won’t fix this should be removed from the region during competitions?

The duration between casts could be increased and slightly randomized to avoid creating so many messages at once from everyone fishing?

Solutions

I think probably the easiest fix here would be to remove the Axolotl from prizes - I expect we’d see less people at competitions. That leaves a new problem, for which I am open for suggestions for solutions, what would be a fun & inclusive way to distribute axolotls that doesn’t involve a fishing competition?

Obviously I also want to fix the system so it can handle a full region, and I can hypothosize on solutions, but the only way to see if those solutions actually work is to test them on a full region of fishers - which I imagine would be very hard to organize - I don’t want to rewrite the entire system and think it works, only for next time we manage to fill the region it doesn’t perform.

So I think adding a small random increase to the fishing time would work - it would also shake up the score board a bit and make it a bit more realistic as well.

Final Thoughts

I am listening to your frustrations - I want solutions as much as you to. I’m always happy for feed back, and the discord suggestions channel is the best way to give that - if you don’t have our discord, just press the discord button from your fishing rod menu to join it :)