What do you think will make heRO better?

[GM-Ayu]

The 'problem' with fish to me is not so much that it exist, but rather we lost direction of why it exist. What did the original GM team want to do with the existence of fish?

a) is it to ease newcomers' adjustment to a low rate with easier to access pots to speed up leveling?

b) is it *meant* to replace pots as a cheaper alternative (is it mean to overshadow pots)?

c) is it suppose to be a standalone healing item that should co-exist with pots?


Even I have no idea why fish was made back then and what was the goal to them. It's a lot easier to settle all the fish problem if we know what is the purpose of them.

I personally *GUESS* that the point of fish is a) and c).

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I doubt that taking it out is a potential option. Thinking of the compensation is a pain (or how to get the compensation rather) and difficult to decide what's the compensation is suddenly losing 10000 different items in storage. You can disagree with pot all you want, but don't take it out on people who are using them now because they are available.


I personally think that weight, healing amount or cost of bait is really the only variable that we can change.

My personal preference: separate pot and fish by affecting their heal/time.

However, instead of balancing it on a one unit vs one unit comparison, why don't we balance it on a "spam fish" vs "spam pot" type of deal?

We know that pot got 0 drawback for spamming it. You get its heal effects immediately.

I propose 2 potential options to lower fish spammability.

a) Whenever fish is consumed, all incoming heals are weakened for x seconds. Severity should match with strength of the fish. Think of "reversed cake hat" effect the moment you consume fish. If you want to spam fish, then sure, but the next fish/any heal you get will be reduced in effectiveness. (eg. Using salmon reduces all other heal by 40% for 4 seconds).

b) Let fish heal that same amount but over time. Then the difference between pot and fish is that one is immediate, but the other isn't. Recall things similar to small life potion. We can set up fish to be like them (eg. Heal 325 Hp and 60 SP over 5 seconds.) Drawback of this one is that we have to test if these heal over time effects can stack, or else someone may be regenerating 5000 hp per second because he just ate 60 salmons before entering precast zone.


I prefer these 2 methods because it still helps with players in faster and lower cost leveling without punishing people who stored up fish too harshly. It fixes some of the OP aspect of PVMing to (yes, even PVM can have a sense of balance. Looking at you, nemo spamming asuraciders killing my mvp babies )

New svn allows many different new types of drawback, such as decreasing atk/defense/flee/hit/mspd/aspd/"performance stat" for a certain period of time, which we haven't tapped into yet. From a PvM direction, you can even be strict enough to affect exp/item rate output for fish consumption. Even if you insist on 'balancing' fish by a one-to-one comparison with pot, there are many other unique drawbacks possible.

We worked our butt off for this svn. Let's use some of its many powers.


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Now just cause changing fish isn't immediately fix all problem. Personally, I think that diminishing pvp population is just a general state of being for all low rate servers. Catching up isn't something everyone can stand, and as RO population age with very little new players, people prefer HR or SHR so they are immediately ready to pvp on the day they join. RMS proves this empirically with the increased amount of people looking for 99/70 high rates. Being a 6 year old game doesn't help as some people regardless of whatever server they are on, is just bored by now. Big hit MMOs just came out recently, and in general *all* servers including officials, lost part of their population to Aion and L2.