The Warcraft Advanced Gold Guide makes some unusual claims. For a start it claims to be a market driven guide. Warcraft’s markets are pretty tight. The methods of buying and selling are much regimented. We were keen to find out exactly what this claim actually meant. It claims to…
“Be written by people who understand the Warcraft economy!”
Well one look at the landing page and details for this guide leave us in no doubt that whoever “The Gold Consortium” are, they certainly understand the Warcraft economy. Ouch. This is detailed stuff, and perhaps that’s where the small issue with this guide lies..
“Comes with tools to help you analyse your economy”
Yes, spreadsheets. Luckily these work with free to download Openoffice apps (and they bundle it in XLS format as well for those rich enough to afford Microsoft’s ubiquitous number cruncher). It seems to offer a “rationalized and indexed” price history for about 200 common Warcraft items. It includes just about everything that you might use for leveling professions.
But this guide is not all about spreadsheets. It contains an excellent Professions guide, going into detail about which items are worth making for profit, and which would be best to grind for leveling the profession itself. It then goes into some detail on how to make your gold back even though the market is flooded with “profession leveling” items made by other players.
There is an excellent and very comprehensive list or areas to farm for materials from about skill level 125 onwards (we suspect it starts at 125 because you will get to that level pretty easily in your starting zones)
Another section details “The most expensive farmed items in the game” and another on how to maximise profit at the market place be it auction house or trade channel. We are told that a detailed 1-450 profession leveling guide is being added in November (To be sent free to existing guide owners)
“Have real life business success and bring those skill to YOUR Warcraft server.”
Again, this must be the case. phrases like “Portfolio”, “Price Indexing” and “Normalizing” pop up (and are reasonably explained) We had to look some of these up for ourselves. He way they work seems pretty true to life though so what of the biggest claim.
“The Advanced Gold Guide will make you gold with a minimum of Grinding.”
Well, for once this might be true. It might even be possible to make more gold than other guides at a slightly lower level. Without giving the guide away, It revolves around buying and selling, storage and costs etc. It has a good guide for cross market (Alliance/Horde) trading, and shows how this might be possible with some effort.
But this comes at a price. Complexity. The PDF part of this guide runs to over 120 pages, and is full of tables and data. It has a lot of quite sophisticated market details in it which you would need to read and understand to make gold.
Now we spent 10 days on this guide. And make gold it certainly does. But if you are a younger player we cannot recommend this. It’s not a “play” guide to making money… but here is what we found
We tried out the top 5 tips
Are the tips Wikitips?
No not really. We even tried looking into market specific tips – nothing. Buy wow gold That’s what we really like about this guide – all the information and advice in it is unique, and, generally VERY good. We did find some detail on cross market trading on Wiki, but not in the way this guide explains. The “Farming and Gathering Guide” is apparently a free extra – only put there because, as Birch from the Gold Consortium put it in the interview; “people expect one”. It’s very good all the same
mike