Archaeology - better guide?

[fluffychef]

No offense, but the Archaeology guide isn't too great.

It gives you basic information that you already know; look for digsites, go to them, and use your survey ability within the digsite. Once you have the required amount of artifact pieces, open the profession window to solve them.

I had to download a separate addon to help me with Archaeology; it does something I think the Zygor guides should have incorporated into their guide: The waypoint arrow points to the closest digsite - which is mighty helpful.

There are a couple other features with the addon, but nothing too major; a separate window keeps track of the pieces you've found, what artifact you're working to solve, and how many it takes to solve them. Also conveniently placed in the window is a button to solve the artifact, so you won't have to pop open the profession window to do it.

Like I said, nothing major - but definitely convenient and helpful.

The one thing I would certainly like to suggest that Zygor incorporates into the guide, is the waypoint arrow that points you to the nearest digsite; also a good idea would be to suggest a higher zone to go to to start digging, based on your current skill level and character level. I'm 530 (level 90) right now and have never left EK; which is a good thing in that I can completely level Archaeology right here - but it would also be cool to dig in other areas along the way if there's nothing 'useful' to find in the area I'm currently at.

[Cartman]

I've tried some archeology addons in the past and but none convinced me to use it again.
What is a bit useful is that Gatherer marks found fragments on the map. So when I survey and see red or yellow I know where the fragment may be.
But everything else other addons do is not necessary.
An overview of projects and fragments? It's not that far away in the Blizzard interface.
Waypoint to nearest dig site? Might be useful but it can also lead to more traveling than you like if there's one dig site in one direction but all others in the opposite direction. And after depleting a dig site a new one will spawn anywhere.

What I would like to see is an addon that shows exactly the type of dig site on the map. Especially for the fossil fragments for the Darkmoon Faire quest I find myself searching on both continent maps for a dig site.

Apart from that, as long as there are addons like the one you mention around there is no need for the Zygor addon to include all this functionality. Implementing more and more features that are not directly necessary for the guide causes the addon to grow which makes it difficult to maintain and causes more bugs.
Not that I don't like the idea to have as few as possible addons but sometimes having separate addons is better.

Maybe we should make some separate sticky thread about helpful addons that work along with the guide. Like the archeology one, tradeskill addons (Skillet), map addons (mapster, Carbonite), rotation helpers (Spell Flash).

Edit: I looked up archeology addons at cures and it seems Archy now shows the type of the available dig sites in a list.
I'll give this addon another chance

[cabby]

I have always used Archy because it has a nice color coded overlay you can use in conjunction with Gatherer to make spotting the most likely dig spot even faster.

[fluffychef]

Archy is the one I use - even at 600 now, I still use to quickly find digsites.

The reason I suggested that these features be incorporated into the Zygor guide is because they're great features; if we're using free addons that have better features, then the chances go down for someone to purchase a Zygor guide that doesn't have this stuff.

I installed Archy at skill level 15~, and used it to level me up to 600. I thought adding a feature to suggest a new zone to go to might be a good thing because I got pretty sick of EK, and I looked on wowhead to check the rewards for the types of fragments I was digging for, and it seems a lot of the "fun" stuff is with the Tol'Vir fragments...personal opinion, of course. Though the fossil fragments contain a couple cool rewards.

I understand the argument about the bugs due to a growing guide, but if we have Zygor guides through and through, wouldn't there be less of a chance of guides/addons conflicting? Ultimately I think it would make leveling the profession so much easier, and the profession guide that much more attractive to purchase.

Edit: Not trying to open any sort of wound here, but I think the psychology behind it all is that we as customers feel a greater amount of security in knowing that we've spent real world money on a guide that trumps free guides - and when we see a free guide that outdoes such a great paid guide, we feel pretty...disappointed.

Of course, I don't feel this way with the Professions guide overall - as well as with the achievements with it (speaking of which, OverAchiever, anyone? That would be useful to write into the guide as well...) - which I would still purchase it because the other guides are great. But it makes me wonder, if Archy, as a free addon, is so much better than the Zygor Archaeology guide, what other profession guides are out there that I've missed, and are also free?

...can we see where this might lead?

Even if Zygor used some of the same methodology as other free guides, as long as it didn't let those free guides get a leg up on them, there would be no question about using Zygor guides.

Of course, this would take work on the research team's behalf; checking out the free guides out there, and seeing how Zygor guides could benefit from that by noticing good techniques they've come up with, and implementing it into a Zygor guide.

Time. Work. Correcting bugs. But it would all be worth it, because at the end of the day, no matter how free a guide is, it won't beat a Zygor guide.

[Cartman]

The big question for me is why should the Zygor team spend a lot of time implementing features into the guide if an addon with a specialized addon with tons of features is out there.
I understand that having all in one would be nice because you only need to keep one addon up to date and especially free addons sometimes lack support if the programmers are busy with other things. Which may lead into a not working addon when a major WoW patch comes out.

On the other hand it takes a lot of time to develop such a big addon like Archy. And this would be only for one profession and is not necessary for leveling that profession.
The same applies to fishing. You can level fishing and never leave Stormwind. But if you really want to use fishing for cooking materials something like Fishing Buddy is useful.
But again maybe not many people will need those features and if they are included in the guide they will only raise resources taken by the guide.

Archy is not an archeology leveling guide. For leveling archeology you don't need to leave your starting continent.
But Archy makes life easier if you want to do certain things with archeology, for example hunt for certain artifacts.

Another addon I can recommend if you are ofting working with professions is Skillet. It's a tradeskill window replacement similar to Advanced Tradeskill Window but since ATSW has too many bugs I needed to switch over to Skillet.

On addon I would like to see is a quest tracker replacement.
I loved QuestGuru but it has been abandoned by the original author and the one who took over the development seems to have stopped too. So it lacks some important things: scenario goals, quest complete box (the flashing question mark it shows was an addition I made when Cata came out).
An alternative is Quest King. This one is working but has no ability to save settings so you cannot drag it's frame out of the way.

[fluffychef]

The only true request I made about the Archaeology leveling guide was the waypoint arrow, to point toward the closest digsite - or closest collection of digsites if that would make leveling faster than moving toward a close digsite, but in the opposite direction of several others.

The other things I mentioned are certainly noteworthy and definitely make life a bit easier as you stated. but I would understand if they couldn't be implemented.

As far as resources go, I don't think it would matter if it's replacing an addon (as the other addon would be removed) - in fact, it may not even take as much of the CPU if some of the unnecessary things are left out (like fancy flare or skins, useless windows, etc.). Personally, I only use Archy now to point toward digsites so I don't have to constantly open my map, or leave it open to cover a great deal of my window. The arrow alone I'm sure doesn't take as much demand as the entire Archy addon.

I've never used Skillet, I'll look it up though and see if it's something I think I'd like to use.

Speaking of the fishing guide - although I'm max level, could it not be used like the Archy guide, and use a waypoint arrow to point to schools of fish, like Archy points to digsites? I think that could be a good idea to incorporate, instead of just saying "look for pools". It could also get specific, like auto tracking which pools of fish you need to fish...maybe this could also be used with the cooking guide when fishing for ingredients? Maybe also make a manual selection available, which schools you want to fish.

I understand this stuff could probably be found in other addons; I'm simply trying to think of ways to help the consumer (such as myself) feel much more secure about their purchase with nice features like this are included in the guides. It really does make a difference.

[cabby]

I'm not sure if the dev team would be able to access the info on which dig sites are active to set a waypoint to the closest one. I wouldn't be surprised if it could be done, just I don't personally know if it can be done.

For the schools of fish, that might not be possible because I don't think they show up as active until you can see them on the mini map. The only thing we'd be able to do is try to imitate gatherer with keeping track of possible node locations and then try to route you to those different locations. This could get quite complex and a lot of work for one small portion of a leveling guide. In this instance it would probably be much easier to just use gatherer and the TomTom arrow combination as gatherer is very well updated with node locations and we'd have to start from scratch and wouldn't have them all.