Archaeologists should fight only three things: Snakes, Nazis, and Unimaginable Tedium

Since I can't fly in Draenor and I keep forgetting that I can fly elsewhere and the ores there aren't worthless, I've stopped using mining as my chilling between missions/queues activity. Archaeology has filled that gap. I go somewhere and press a bunch of buttons on my mouse. Sometimes I press my keyboard. My screen fills up with various colors marking off where things might be. It's the world's slowest laser show.

In case you're wondering what prompts the grats in that shot: someone has an auto-grats addon, and I think the other person is being sarcastic about it. Also, I spelled you're wrong the first time. And while trying to write that. I am filled with shame.

But do you see that other thing? Over there. Left. Not my character portrait. Right of that. Up. Those are the words above the picture, not that far...

That's an elemental fighting another elemental. Not a problem, right? Except sometimes they have no one to fight, so they fight me. It's little more than a momentary distraction, but the whole point of this archaeology expedition is chilling. I'm just not in a mood to hit things with my sword.

Most days I don't have to fight to get my artifacts. And I don't even thing I'd mind, but implementation matters. I don't want to fight some over-sized bird or rocks that don't know how to sit still. If I'm going to fight, it better be a Nazi, crypt filled with snakes, or the crushing boredom which is slowly, very slowly, digging up a giant plot of sand, only to find a few bits of pottery from the early 21st century and a taunting note from Dr. Evelius, my archeological arch-nemesis.

Alternative Sources of Artifacts

I recently realized that digging is a pointlessly inefficient way of gathering artifacts. Or at least the random digging in the middle of nowhere. There are better ways!

For starters, there are more than a few animated fossils in Tanaris. These should be able to be surveyed. Kill them and pick out the bones that look the oldest. Or the ones that best fit your preexisting idea of how the world came to be. Fortunately we don't have carbon-dating, so this method still works. These can be called pre-dug, or self-digging fossils.

But these fossils are dirty. And besides, what if you want something other than fossil artifacts? That doesn't even make sense, since artifacts are artificial. Then again, so are our interpretations of fossils. But I digress. Let's see, where can we find dwarf and fossil artifacts, nicely dug up for us? Ironforge, of course. Yes, I propose that Horde in general, and Alliance rogues in specific, be able to rob the museum of Ironforge. For good measure, the Stormwind library as well.

To keep things balanced, the Alliance will have every opportunity to take any artifacts that the Horde trolls have managed to recover from their more savage cousins.

Of course Outland is a free-for-all of looting gravesites. Why bother with random artifact spawns when you can simply dig up everything and find something?

The night elves should not be left out, so I propose that players be able to simply dig up the many ruins scattered around the everywhere.

But let's face it, these are still all very inefficient. I mean, why wait for artifacts to get old before taking them? We have access to the Caverns of Time. While so far we've only gone as far back as the first invasion of the Orcs, I see no reason that we could not go further back. You might call it time travel and theft, but I call it preemptive archaeology.

The Imminent Death of Archaeology

I have a theory for you. It's not a particularly complex one, but it may make you try, just like I did. I'm exaggerating. Maybe.

Of course I'm not going to just tell you the theory. No, I have some talking to do. Let's start with a strange coincidence: getting two artifact spawns in exactly the same place. Last survey points to an artifact at (X,Y). Drop another survey and aha, an artifact at (X,Y). This is, of course, not impossible with random placement of the artifacts within the boundaries. But it's highly unlikely, especially if it happens multiple times. Clearly something is going on here, something more than random (X,Y) with a Z to match the elevation. For starters, certain areas are blocked: such as walls and deep water, as well as nothing else that I can think of. And yet when going from really tiny odds to three times as high as really tiny odds, well it makes me think of those studies that find that X causes a 200% increase in the rate of Y, only to find that the usual rate of Y is something like one in a hundred million, so who gives a shit?

I'm trying to suggest that artifacts, much like ore or herbs, are not random in an area, but random over certain spawns. Even further, said spawns may not even be all that numerous. See where I'm going with this?

Imagine that you have a small field with three artifact spawn locations. You know where they are, having dug them up, or looked online. Just by dropping the survey in the right location you can know exactly which artifact is there. Don't argue too much with the geometry and exceptions, it's beside the point, which is that if we know the spawn locations, we can very easily determine optimal surveying locations in order to test the limited number of possible spawn locations.

Currently archaeology is a bit of an Explorer activity. You don't know quite where the fields are, though someone will make that database soon enough. But you definitely don't know where the spawns are, though someone will make that database soon enough. But at least the actual finding isn't... oh hell, it's all over, we know the best places to drop a survey at a given field and that's that. Shit.

I'm not a perfect explorer. I've a bit of achiever in myself. A bit of killer. A bit of social. Depending on the situation, one may appear dominant. Do I explore the one tiny corner of the map that I've flown past but not quite looked at? (marginal gain) or do I go hang out at CoC and throw hammers at people wiping to bosses? (FREE XP WOO!) The achiever/killer wins that one. And so at some point the achiever may say "Hey, quit fucking around with the random surveys and put one here, here, and here so I can get my artifacts and make something cool. By make something cool I mean get more numbers. Do you see that number? Is it as big as it could be? No? Then start surveying in the right place!"

Well, on a more positive note, I'm very glad that Blizzard included the panel for what has already been created, including the flavor text. A pack rat like me would go insane having to throw away that precious, precious yellow text which may or may not contain a joke.

[edit] There's also the Imminent Death of Archaeologists.