When we last left Gedd, he was planning to fish in order to make money and get supplies. I'd happily spent a good bit of time leveling up my fishing skill, allowing me to fish in increasingly better areas. I had just spent an hour gathering enough fish to sell in order to purchase what's known as an Expert Tome, which allows you to continue increasing your fishing skill.

I purchased the tome, read it in order to reach the next skill tier, and then logged off. I planned to spend the next day fishing in a zone known as Booty Bay, so called because it's home to a great many pirates.

The next day I logged in during lunch, stepped to the edge of the dock, and cast my line. Or rather, I tried to cast, but instead got an error message stating simply, "There are no fish here."

What? No fish here? In my mind I knew the game didn't model the ecology and it was not possible to overfish an area. Clearly there was some bug. I jumped on the boat and went to one of the other, lower-level, fishing areas. I cast my line and behold, it worked.

At this point I began receiving reports of from other fishermen in my guild...none of the higher-level fishing zones were working, all of them giving the "no fish" message.

Eventually a community relations representative informed us that they had intentionally shut down the fishing in those zones. Apparently some people had created scripts which allowed for fishing bots. Bots are characters that players create to do something repeatedly while unattended. Essentially these bots were programmed to fish without any player input at all, and these players will using them to build up a large amount of coin without any work on their part. It's also illegal according to the terms of service of just about every MMO game out there because it can absolutely ruin a game's economy.

Blizzard left lower-level fishing enabled because it is much harder to make a lot of coin there, although there are still some useful fish in these zones. So, for now Gedd spends his lunches at a lower-level zone, pulling up what fish and trinkets he can. Someday he hopes to return to Booty Bay and see it teeming with cod.

Within the World of Warcraft there are many things to do other than simply quest or kill things. The second most common thing to do is take part in professions or tradeskills.

Tradeskills allow you to either gather things or create things. Within the primary professions, of which your character can have two, are skinning, herbalism, mining, leatherworking, tailoring, blacksmithing, alchemy, enchanting, and engineering. Additionally, characters can have secondary tradeskills including first aid, cooking, and, believe it or not, fishing.

Fishing, at first glance, does not sound like a terribly exciting thing to do, especially since it's in a game. After all, if you wanted to fish, you could just head to the local lake with your fishing pole and go at it. However, fishing is one of World of Warcraft's best kept secrets...if you have the patience for it.

Fishing is the only part of the game where you don't compete with other players or need materials from the gathering professions. When you're fishing, it's just you and the loot table. No risk, lots of reward.

Now most of what you're catching is fish, which will never make anyone rich. Fish is mostly used for cooking, and once cooked, can be useful for healing in between fights. Fish can also be sold to computer-controlled characters (called NPCs) which are vendors for a trivial amount. Fishing in higher-level areas (something I'll talk about in a second) can net you more coin, as the fish in those areas are worth more.

About once in every fifth or sixth catch, you will get some other sort of item, whether it's an old axe, a potion, a crafting component, or piece of armor. Indeed, there are a wide variety of these "special" catches. These items tend to not be very useful, but can often be sold for a good bit more than the fish.

Every profession, fishing included, has a separate skill stat. As you do things in that profession, your skill in that profession will go up. Higher skill stats give you access to higher-level actions. So if I was a leatherworker, which I am, if I create enough "trashy boots," I will eventually advance to the point where I can create "boots of mediocrity" and even "boots of excellence."

Fishing is no different, but it does work a little difficulty. Every body of water in the game has a minimum fishing skill attached to it. The fishing areas in the starter areas, you can fish in right away. These fishing areas will yield fish and other goods that aren't worth much at all, but fishing there will build up your fishing stat. Once you get to the next tier, say around 50 or 75, you can begin fishing in the next level areas. These locations are stocked with somewhat better fish and loot. Meanwhile you'll be building up your stat even more.

Now that you understand how fishing works, I'll tell you how it applies to my character. One more piece of background first...Leisa and I make sure that no matter what else we do, we always do things with earn XP, or experience points, together. This ensures that our characters are always at the same level. If one of us went off and did quests or killed mobs (MMO slang for things that can be killed in the game, like a beast or bad guy) on their own, then eventually one of us would be a higher character level than the other. That causes problems because quests are typically limited to a certain level range, so we wouldn't be able to play the game together, which is pretty much the whole point. Fishing and the other professions don't give XP, so doing them doesn't cause the level disparity problems I just mentioned.

And now to the story of Gedd...

The first day, while Leisa was at work, I didn't have much to do here. I'm at a point where several of my projects are awaiting input from clients, so I wanted to play a bit, but I had to do something that wouldn't give me any XP. I decided to fish. I figured that I could earn us a little coin, grab some fish for Leisa to cook, and maybe catch some useful goodies.

Story continues next time...

If you're wondering where I've been, lets just say that I've been wandering around the land of Azeroth for the last week and it's cut into my free time. Yes, I've been too busy with a game to spend 5 minutes writing. Pretty sad, eh?

A brief update: World of Warcraft was released last Tuesday and I was there on Tuesday morning at 10am, when the store opened, to get our copies. This may seem a little crazy, and to be honest, it probably is. Even moreso since up to about last year, I was not the "release day" kind of gamer. I've long been of the thinking that games are like a good wine, they get better with a little ageing.

Over the last few years, more and more "release day" gamers find themselves stuck with a product pushed from the nest, before they were ready, in order to meet some fiscal date. The common thinking is "we'll fix the game with a patch in a few weeks." It's sad, but it's the state of the industry. Certainly there are exceptions, but those are the rare games, most of which don't get the recognition they deserve.

In defense of the PC gaming industry, they are faced with a nightmare of a billion different hardware combinations, the majority of which can be covered by routine testing, but until there's a "standard" PC, hardware/software conflicts will always be present.

Some problems can always be expected. However, it doesn't excuse publishers who push games out with known gameplay bugs. It doesn't forgive the current copy protection schemes, which seem to cause more problems than they solve.

All these reasons, combined with the fact that most games end up halving in price within a month or two, turned me into a "wait-and-see" type gamer. Let other folks run out on release day and test the game, give the developer a chance to put out a patch, let the price drop. That was my line of thinking.

WoW was different. We've played the game for something like 6 to 9 months. We knew what we were getting into, so we pre-ordered the game and rushed out on Tuesday morning to pick it up. I created the accounts in case the registration server got hammered (as happens sometimes with MMOG launches) and waited for Leisa to come home.

Tuesday night was great. We started playing that afternoon and again that evening. The lag we'd experienced in Open Beta was gone. The only problem we had was the result of having the starting areas overcrowded by new players, but that was fairly short-lived. All was good...

Wednesday it started...the servers started lagging, and then they started crashing. Blizzard worked quickly and fixed some of the issues, but many players found themselves in a queue, basically a line to get into the game. Apparently WoW was showing the strain of 200,000 account registrations, and it wasn't going well.

They quickly brought up extra servers, but most folks had already gotten attached to the ones they were on, so they crowding was still evident at peak times. They did some patching as well, trying to fix the cause of the problem, removing the bottlenecks, but the problems persisted.

We played a good bit over the next few days. In fact, I belive we've played every day except Thursday since the game launched. 95% of the time things are great, but the other 5% we suffer from the lag effects and server crashes.

The important thing? We're still having fun. The server crashes and lag are frustrating, really frustrating, but typically short-lived. So, for now, Gedd and Chiy will continue to explore the land of Azeroth, playing the roles of Protectors, Adventures, and even occasionally, medieval FedEx employees.

In my next post, I'll tell the tale of Gedd, and his adventures in...fishing.

Wow. The end of the race yesterday was just about everything you could ask for. Three guys all within 20 points of the lead, all together towards the front. Bumping, great moves...it was all there. What a great finish. My heart was racing, I can only imagine what was going through everyone else's head at the time.

Kurt Busch ended up winning the first NASCAR Nextel cup, but only by less than 10 points. Johnson ends up in second place after an incredible rally in the last 6 races. Gordon ended up 3rd.

My favorites, Martin and Junior, ended up fourth and fifth when it was all said and done. I would've really liked to see Mark win it all, but in the end he was just a race or two short on making it happen. There's always next year.

Junior ended up right about where he should. In fact, he should be pretty happy that he wasn't further back. Their team really had some fantastic races this year, but they'd go and blow it by having a really terrible race. Hopefully they can pull it together for next year.

So it's back to football Sundays for me. The Panthers seem to be playing a little better. Maybe they'll be able to pull this one out of the gutter.

I'm writing this from the comfort of my couch in the living room as I watch the last NASCAR race of the season. It's been a great race so far, with a lot of the prerequisite drama. Seeing Kurt Busch (who was leading in the points as the race started) lose a tire just as he was entering pit lane, and almost wrecking into the retaining wall, was extremely exciting. So much can change so quickly in this sport.

There's been a lot of speculation about whether the 10 race shoot-out between the top 10 point holders was going to be a good thing or not. Your opinion is likely to vary based on who you support, and how things end up in a few hours. If I try to take the unbiased view, I think it has been a good thing for the sport, at least for the spectators. Last year it was pretty clear who was going to win the championship several weeks before the end of the season. This year there has been a great deal of suspense. It all culminated in a race where anyone of the top 5 drivers could walk away with the big prize.

See you tomorrow, after the checkered.