2.05.2011

That Bloody Profession

Hey there archaeology, after a few weeks spent prowling around the world with you I think we know each other well enough for me to say: fuck you and everything about you.

Not that I'm a crass, angry, vulgar and entitled pustule on the face of perfect Azeroth, but I hate you more every day and it's all your fault. The evidence:

Scandalous Nightgowns. Night elf kink, presumably buried in mud and fossilised. The scent of sweat, sex and shame has never been more stale than now, whole millennia later. Why would I be interested, archaeology? Why?

Trees. Send me to Ashenvale again, archaeology, and I will whine on the forums every time a bloody tree trunk looms out of nowhere and cocks me in the face. Never mind the ridiculous branches and mid-air invisible walls. Your fault, archaeology.

Every fossil digsite in the world. No one cares about dead dinosaurs and ferns made of rock, archaeology. They don't give stats, archaeology. Stats matter, archaeology. Numbers. The only numbers you have are the steadily increasing values of hatred stored up in my black dwarven soul.

The red blinky light.
This is your idiot son, archaeology, and you are already an utter moron, so you have to realise how much of a unthinkable idiot he is to stand out. Archaeology, the red blinky light doesn't know where any of the underground rubbish even is. So he just points, blindly. You need better staff, archaeology. You need them now.

Tyrande's Favourite Doll.
Why. I could have avoided this. I COULD HAVE AVOIDED-

In all seriousness, what could I have avoided? A profession that requires hours of attention, that is largely luck-based, that involves flying the length of the continent just to clear out unwanted nodes, and contains some of the most powerful items currently available.

Let me just expand on why those things combine to create something honestly terrible.

Hours of attention.
It's a time sink. More importantly, there's no way around that: you can't throw money at it to speed things up. There's no cash-based power-levelling of archaeology: you can't gather money in a way you enjoy and work around the grind. This is unlike every other profession, and gives archaeology the uniquely ridiculous position of providing epics to casuals... if they invest hardcore amounts of time.

Luck based. There is no skill involved in archaeology. Everyone flies around, everyone smacks the survey button, everyone locates the item, everyone has the same chance of getting a fantastic sword/trinket or a bag full of worthless grey tat. This means there's no sense of personal success when you finally get what you wanted. Just the knowledge that you blew that much time on something that is utterly mind-numbing.

Flight time. This, of course, is the primary contributor to my previous point of hours of attention, but it deserves its own section. The easier flights are largely dealt with thusly: aim character at the next node. Hit auto-run. Space out. It reminds me intensely of such non-games as EVE, where the player is rewarded for leaving his character unattended. Further irritation, though, can be found in archaeology because of invisible barriers in the air that stop you from actually alt-tabbing out or doing something productive as you fly. Coming down from Mount Hyjal, you can’t set yourself to fly at a decreasing angle, you have to fly downward and then level off sharply when you hit the treetops in Ashenvale. Archaeology can’t make up its mind in this respect.

Powerful items.
The sort of player who wants the best they can get is going to feel compelled to work at this abhorrent profession. Tyrande’s Favourite Doll was the item that suckered me in. I was not content to let one of my blue trinkets survive while there was a replacement theoretically available. Honestly, I would feel like a bad player if I didn’t pursue it – but the profession is so poorly done that the grind gives me no grand sense of satisfaction either.

It needs a rethink, but it won’t be getting one.

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