Personally, I think it would be nice to be able to skin the DSS and get perhaps 20 pieces of leather. It would make killing the wandering ones at least a little better without being game-breaking in terms of reward, and help keep more of the random ocean spawn clear.
Also, you will recover the sunken treasure even if the SOS isn't in the top level of your pack, and the serpents don't seem to automatically attack you.
Personally, I like the fact that I can remain hidden while fishing, but I understand why that would be changed. However, it would be a pain if the SOS needed to be in the top level of your pack.
Not that we should pick or choose accuracy.. just saying.
I hadn't tried fishing up the treasure with the SOS buried yet, so I haven't run across that one. The serpents not auto attacking doesn't seem to be 100% of the time though.
It's tough to tell whether they're attacking automatically or because they acquire you as a target as any new spawn would.I think it might be based on proximity? If they pop near the edge of the screen, they can definitely sometimes wander off.
True, it could just be opportunistic targeting.
Well some changes that will happen so far when I get around to them (probably in the next few patches):
- Fishing will unhide you.
- The proportion of deep sea serpents to sea serpents that spawn will decrease. Perhaps an overall sea creature spawn decrease.
- Neither deep sea serpents nor sea serpents will carry leather, but instead, extra meat (sorry, era accuracy :/)
- You will no longer gain past 95 fishing from shore.
- Treasure maps and MiBs will appear directly in your pack instead of on the serpent.
- There will be a bit of a nerf to the chance to catch an MiB. Stratics lists this as 1 per hour on average.
- There will be a small chance to fish up MiB loot with 0 fishing, if you have a MiB in your pack.
<url="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rec.games.computer.ultima.online/sea$20serpent/rec.games.computer.ultima.online/RK-wT9M5jvA/XfXNrtrdsaAJ">This post in April 1999</url> suggests Sea Serpents throughout the ocean should not be very common. However later posts complain that Sea Serpents are far too common, after a patch - which was then fixed. I think we can find a reasonable middle ground, I will take a look at the amount of sea/deep sea serpents.
edit: URL formatting not working
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search...XNrtrdsaAJ
- Treasure maps and MiBs will appear directly in your pack instead of on a serpent.
Unless the fished-up serpent is also going to despawn after a period of time, this is going to increase the spawn cluttering up the ocean. I don't particularly care one way or the other, this is just an observation.
Yeah, I will have a look at that one. I was assuming they currently do that, I will look into it though.
My observation is that they do not currently despawn, or else the despawn is on a very long timer. I tested it today by hiding and fishing for a couple hours. In that time I pulled up two sea serpents and one deep sea serpent, none of which had despawned more than an hour after I quit fishing. I actually sailed to shore, did some town business, then sailed back out where I had fished them up, killed them, and collected the maps/MiB.