id like to know more about the site:
When was it started, why, how the community might be able to submit input, and how much you update everything; and I'm a little interested in whether it's just you or you have other help *shrug*
regardless, a pleasure to be around
When? Launched August 2006. I started writing and researching the text a few months before.
Why? Blizzard had designed a lot of hidden detail into fishing, in spite of the basic mechanics being very simple. Yet in spite of WoW being possibly the most popular complex video game ever, nobody had definitive answers to some quite simple questions, like what skill is required to fish in an area? I enjoy probing games (I had written quite a lot of FAQs previously) and deriving patterns from data, so thought WoW fishing would be a bit of a challenge.
Updates? I try and keep the site as up to date as possible. Of course Blizzard do make undocumented changes to fishing (the Terokkar Forest elevated lakes skill change being a good example), and it isn't viable to check every aspect of the game after every patch.
While I tend to lag behind the news sites with headline changes, I aim to have written up those changes in depth before a patch goes live. So you won't find mention of the upcoming daily fishing quests yet, because the patch isn't yet available for testing.
Who? It is just me!
Community input? Part of the reason for creating forums here was to test the strength of the community. I know a lot of people visit the site (currently over 70,000 each month), but had no idea whether they would want to do anything except read.
I believe one of the strengths of the site is the fact content is well written and organised. Readers don't have to wade through pages of random comments to find the important information. However, a lot of that information still comes from other players - either from emails, or posts on other forums/sites that I read. I'm a big fan of collaborative information gathering, just not wiki-style collaborative writing.
So, I'd like to throw the question of input back to you and others who are reading: Beyond forums for comments, feedback, discoveries, and general discussion, how would you like to contribute? Or indeed, would you like to contribute?
Hey El ! I wanted to introduce myself...My name is Darven from the U.S. RP server Farstriders. I am the Guild Master of <The Highest Order> and have just stumbled upon your wonderful website. We have several anglers in our guild and I have been spreading the word about your wonderful website. Thank you for all the information you have compiled and we look forward to continually visiting your site.
I have a thought to run by you...What about coverage of the SV fishing tourney? I know this would require folks from their respective servers to "report" in, but I was thinking...at least for the Farstriders server...we at The Highest Order would love to be the "reporters" covering the tournament on behalf of El's Extreme Angling. We can update from week to week who the winner is, time it took, maybe a gear profile of the winner, etc... Let me know what you think, as well as the thoughts from the other anglers here in the forums.
Again thank you for your website and all you do! :)
Heh, good idea about STV Extravaganza coverage but then... do you know how many servers there are?? Yuch!
It would almost certainly have to be something automated and I can see where that could be a bit tricky.
How about just us Forum Readers who win posting here? That should provide some good insight. And also, stories about non-winners could be good as well.
Yeah, I did take into account the number of servers, and the only thing I could logically come up with was this... If the interest is there, someone will cover it for their server. I know it's not the greatest of ideas, but it's the best I got. :)
I thought that maybe if we did some kind of coverage, then more people would possibly get interested in it and cover their particular server. Again this is just a thought, and wanted to throw it at you fellow anglers and see what was biting...HA!
I also have another idea for a server-wide fishing tournament circuit. It would be held once a month for probably 7 months. There would be a point system for the overall series, with the "Grand Champion" being crowned at the end of the series. There would be a monthly winner and also the circuit winner...so participation would be required to be crowned "Grand Champion". I am currently getting details down on paper and will let everyone know what I come up with. As of right now, I think it will be held on a different dock each month and the 7th month would be the big one to crown the champ! I think it will be done with at least one guild "sponsoring" the event(s), and those guild members would be the marshalls. Contestants would be grouped with a marshall, that way the marshall can keep track of who catches what, so no one can bring fish to the tourney and finish the required catches quicker. Like I said, still ironing out the details, but I think it could turn out really cool.
I'm just glad that there is a bit of a fishing community for WoW, seeing as how it is the one thing in the game that isn't really necessary but is a whole lot of fun. I really enjoy my fishing trips because I am the Guild Master of <The Highest Order> on U.S. Farstriders RP server, so I am constantly having to manage a guild, and it helps me to relax in-game. :)
Ok, I'm done rambling (for now). Let me know what everyone thinks...
Gone Fishin'
Darven
I'm starting to visualise WoWJutsu for anglers! That takes gear information from the Armory to guess at guild progression. Unfortunately the contest winnings will very rarely be equipped, so very hard to spot automatically; and virtually impossible to spot who won this week.
A better method would be a client based (that's you) data-gathering-addon-thingumi, which would simply pick out the "And the winner is..." line from the chat log. If enough anglers were running it in the background, we would get reasonably good automated data each week. But I doubt many people would run an addon, and install and use a .exe to send back the data. At least not just for something so trivial.
One idea that has been in the back of my mind for a while was to build a "data-gathering-addon-thingumi" for the Fish Finder. It wouldn't replace the existing "hand-crafted" information, but would add detail on catch rates, time variations, and so on. This is something none of the big WoW database sites do well yet. I don't know if that is because they don't understand or care; or if there are technical limitations.
Perhaps I could convince Sutorix to bundle it with Fishing Buddy?
Hy started on winning contest strategies by posting some useful information about how to win the contest in the Have you won the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza? topic. Ultimately, I wouldn't worry to much about where this information is posted. If it starts to get hard to find, I'll filter it somehow.
One of my distant plans for the site was a match-up/friend system for forum members, allowing you to find fellow anglers on your own server. Clearly the number of members needs to grow a lot first. Right now (admittedly only 2 weeks after launch) there are still more servers than members.
Keep the ideas coming.
well ah say theres no reason to think small, this sounds like ah promisin' development; however i feel there may be two other things to take into consideration. advertisement and input.
nae, im no newsie, but i think that those interested in taking up an attempt might be able to make an influence by trying the life of a newsie in game, by manipulation of the mail system to create notes.
(until they allow postboard creation, which i dont forsee.. but thats the idea of them making a item that has a text area and you can drop it like a totem once every 10 mins or hours... and others can rclick to read...never mind that though)
otherwise, do yae have some other strong ways of increasing the site attendance? do yeh think that this would be a good thing or bad for the sites popularity?
also, back to the input request, a web-based form might be a nice addition. i mean like -
title
type of input (new fish)(new fishing site)(new loot)(bug)(changed difficulty)(theory)(suggestion)
textarea
require sign in and a higher than base rank to suit to keep spammers low, perhaps?
ach, and there seems to be a problem with the text in the forums, it moves further beyond the left and and right sides each new post...
I'm usin' IE, 6.0.2900, its not awful but it is annoyin and something to take note of.
I've (hopefully) fixed the issue of text progressively drifting to one side in Internet Explorer 6. Thanks for telling me about it.
I didn't really understand your other points. Perhaps you could explain them in more detail?
point one, how do you want to get your name out.
we can each do little things in game but first i wonder if such publicity as i first tried to suggest would be taken correctly.
point two, a page on the website to help us input information, in the format above, is something that may prove helpful over just the forums, although this is also a dismissable plan.
Hmmmm WowJutsu for fishing. I like it. Who's won the extravaganza, who's caught Mr. Pinchy, who's caught Old Ironjaw? In all of the Realms who has completed the most epic fishing events? That person could be known far and wide as the Iron Angler! LOL (Yes, I'm a huge Iron Chef fan!)
As for data gathering, I'm wondering if there is a way to log fishing information sort of like the Combat Log records fighting information? Maybe a small addon that scans fishing events and then writes it to a log file. Then they could be uploaded in a similar way to how WowWebStats does it. (http://www.wowwebstats.com)
You're right though it would be much easier for the Fishing Buddy addon to collect the data and the user could opt to send it or not. Either way I think it would have to be a manual upload or uploaded by a separate program.
I'd love to see that kind of data collected and put into nice shiny reports.
How about WowHead style tooltips for fish that reflect your data and link back to your fish database? I know that I would use something like that on my blog.
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