Pet Peeves: Mines a Guppy
23 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in Fishing, Shared Topic
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams
This week’s Blog Azeroth Shared Topic has to do with pet peeves of all shapes and sizes. A quick survey of those that have already responded shows a large number of totally legitimate complaints, mostly about things I can totally relate to, from “gogogogogogogo guy” guy to “uses-his-mount-to-hide-the-npc” guy. As I said, the issues they list are all totally legitimate complaints, and it would be difficult to find players that disagreed that such behavior is a problem.
I don’t foresee my issue being nearly as unifying, but I am prepared to stand by it – my pet peeve is fishing. Well, that’s kind of a misleading sentence. It started as a pet peeve, the first time someone showed me how to equip by pole and fish. “Oh, that’s kind of annoying” I thought to myself.
Days went by, and I fished and fished, and watched as my skill-ups slowed to a virtual crawl. Every 17 second channeled cast was another dagger in my heart, a stark reminder that I was paying to work at something not fun. As has been noted in this blog before, I can get a little batty over achievements, and the fishing profession is a veritable trove of free achievement points, if one will only have the patience, not to mention the awesome “Salty” title.
And yet my hatred persists. Each time I look longingly over the dark and empty fishing achievements on my main, I think to myself “I could just sit down and grit it out for a few hours..” and I’ll get out Mr. Paeggle’s rod and go for two fish before remembering my utter hatred for the whole endeavor. I have 5 characters at or over 80, and have been playing the game for going on four years, and still have never gotten character over 300 fishing.
So no, pet peeve does not quite do justice to describe my hatred for the foul beast of fishing, but it will suffice.
