New info from the World of Warcraft “Ask the Devs” global Q&A

Q: Archaeology is supposed to be about discovering, preserving, and honoring cultural items found, in order to learn from the past. Currently we don’t do that. Instead we are forced to coldly vendor what we don’t want. No donation to a museum, no return to the races of origin. Couldn’t we do something more important with these items? Can we expect more interesting stories with artifacts? Will you do something about this to make it feel like the player is getting something useful back, and perhaps remove a little bit of the random part of it so that it’s more fun and focused? – Whitewnd (KR), Pusen (EU-EN), Unjoiner (NA/ANZ)

A: Originally, we didn’t intend to create items at all when you completed a normal archaeology find, but that didn’t feel right. So now we have these items that still don’t feel right because you can’t do anything fun with them. We are working on a more thematic and interesting way to consume the artifacts you dig up. These include returning them to the museums (for the devoted archaeologist) and the option to continue vendoring them (if you wish to continue your career as a cold-blooded treasure hunter.)

Additionally, we plan to add daily quests, a deeper story, additional skill gains, and the flexibility to focus on a specific race.

Some players may not have noticed that all artifacts have lore associated with them in the journal, even the grey ones. Every bit of it is Genuine Lore, and verified by our lore masters. So were the Dalaran Coins, of course, but not those silly Romance Novels. Source Link

Q: Are there any plans to make Archaeology more closely connected with other professions? Like make inscriptors able to create scripts of the night elves that would help with the fragments or something like that? – Алонжи (EU-RU)

A: We feel like we can better tune and balance the archaeology experience if we keep it mostly self-contained. However, we’ve discussed additional methods for gaining fragments through dailies and potentially as rewards for turning artifacts. Nonetheless, it’s quite unlikely that another profession will ever craft keystones or fragments. Source Link

Q: Are there any plans to somehow change Archeology and Fishing, which have become notoriously tedious? Do you have plans to make archaeology more appealing, maybe with puzzles or something else? – Boîndal (EU-DE), Kalani (NA/ANZ), Käworu (LA)

A: Yes. The dailies help with fishing skill gain, and we plan to add archaeology dailies as well. We’ve also discussed further incentivizing fishing in pools with faster skill gain.

We would love to add a puzzle mini-game to archaeology, and may do that one day, but we can’t make any guarantees. There are some other ideas floating around for moving between archaeology sites more quickly, and we’ve been brainstorming for rare random events when you are digging or fishing.

Our overall goal for these professions is that it shouldn’t be too difficult to max out your skill, but catching every fish and finding every artifact should be a long journey. Source Link