Before I begin this article I want to state that I have somewhat of a biased opinion as I not only promote certain gold guides on this site, but I am also in the works of releasing guides of my own in the coming week.
Having said that, I have put a lot of thought into what type of guide would provide the most value and is that information worth paying for?
Value of Gold Guides
A gold guide is also known as an information product, where someone is passing on written solutions or ideas to a problem you want solved.
In this case the problem is that you want gold to purchase your epic mount, BoE gear, or gold sink items such as mammoth mount or the chopper. But the idea of doing 25 dailies a day or farming mining nodes for 40 hours doesn’t sound like your idea of a good time, there must be an easier and faster way?!
Players flock to the forums, asking for advice on “what’s the best gold making profession?” or “How can I get 5k gold as fast as possible?”. Responses to these questions are usually met with “depends on your server” or “Well I do [insert gold making method here] on [x] server and it works for me!”.
The problem with getting this advice is most of these players want step by step how to’s, and they might get that advice from players but will usually be met with frustration when they notice that what may work for a player on another server doesn’t apply to theirs due to a different market and mix of competitors.
I believe a good gold guide not only goes into extreme depth of all the steps, addons and ways to exploit a certain profession niche, but it should also try to teach the reader how to independently acquire analytical skills to assess their servers market and spot which items are currently the highest profit to make with the lowest competition.
In other words, a gold guide should turn a regular player into a gold making machine that can adjust with the market and always extract the maximum profit, rather than just following a mindless guide that tells you to buy x item and list at x price.
Why is it Worth Money?
Time is money right? Although I enjoy the gold making “mini-game” of playing the auction house and seeing how much money I can make with different professions, I know the majority of players would much rather prefer to be PvEing or PvPing.
A gold guide will relay months and months worth of information from a player who has gone through learning the in’s and outs of a certain profession through trial and error.
Example: In the last 3 months I have been heavily involved with inscription, developing a process in which I am spending the least amount of time milling, crafting and posting while pretty much crafting everything that earns a decent profit.
After I maxed inscription, I was making around 5,000g a week and putting in a lot of effort to make that 5k. It was taking me a long time to figure out what to craft, how to best craft it, dealing with undercutters and basically how to streamline the whole process from acquiring materials to getting a sale on a glyph.
As weeks went by I made little tweaks here and there until eventually I refined the glyph making process through utilizing certain gold making addons and setting up supply chains of materials from farmers to gain the competitive edge over anyone else posting glyphs. I was able to shave down the time it took me to craft 400 glyphs from 3 hours down to 1 hour.
If I had the opportunity to go back in time and tell myself all the things I know now with inscription, I think that has “value” and I’d probably pay for it if I knew it would up my gold making from 5k a week to my current 20k gold a week.
What is your opinion on gold guides? Would you be willing to buy one if you knew it would really show you how to make thousands of gold in very little time? or do you have the notion that it’s a game and you already spend your $15 a month playing it, why spend more on a product that will tell you how to play?
With all of the available information out there for free on the internet, it’s really hard for me to justify paying for a guide. Unless of course it came with some kind of a money back guarantee if it didn’t increase my gold intake, but that’s very hard to measure.
.-= Sarama´s last blog ..Auction House Series =-.
I am pretty sure every gold guide out there has a no hassle refund option within 30 days. At least with clickbank they do.
I have been keeping up with this and a couple of other gold making blogs, and although they give good advise, I am now tempted to buy a proper guide. People buy walkthroughs for other games all the time and don’t think twice, even as the game is released, but shy away from electronic, and not official, gold guides. I think the hardest part of the decision is due to the fact that there is no hard presentable evidence that it will work, And even with other peoples word it is still doubtable. Without a example showing that the processes work, which then gives the secrets in the guide away, scepticism creeps in. The only reason I am getting a guide in febuary is due to the fact that I have a bonus comming then. And I don’t buy gold.
Sectux you have briefly explained my entire outlook of buying gold guides. I do not want to waste my money on something that does not work. But I would pay for something that has proven to work.
Lets say I am now really considering buying a gold guide. Problem is not everyone knows which one to buy… So I searched Youtube and Google for proof of one that works. Here is what I found…
http://www.youtube.com/user/WoWGoldGuidesExposed#p/u/5/sPVW3W9bP-4
I hope this helps.
I wouldn’t buy a gold guide because I don’t think I could trust it to really provide me new information that hasn’t been seen in a thousand places on the internet.
Most of them I feel offer very basic information but I don’t know that forsure since i’ve never bought one.
Gold guides are really no better then anything free on the internet. What works on one server, won’t work on another. I.E. on my server the glyph market is a slaughter and so many people do it that i found it really isn’t worth going into the market and being undercut by a couple other banks within 2 minutes. I really feel that gold guides are a waste of money, finding a good website can help, but ultimately a player needs to find his own way to make gold.
I would think about buying one, but usually I figure out pretty quickly on my own how to make money. All my RL friends are always broke in-game, and in real life so I think sometimes a guide isn’t going to help most people.
.-= Brian Inman´s last blog ..Warhammer Online Removes My Favorite Scenarios =-.
To me, the only way I would buy a gold guide would be if it included custom set-up addons, etc. Just a .PDF file, even with valuable info, would not be worthwhile to me. If I really wanted a guide that was nothing but a .PDF, I’d find a way to D/L it free (torrent, etc), like I did Jaina’s horde guide way back in Vanilla WoW.
With custom versions of mods, etc it might then be worthwhile. Might feel like I was actually paying for ‘something’ more than a txt file.
Even following your website (which is amazing), it took quite a while to get all the addons working together happily and getting all my enchant scrolls and their different fallback/top-end prices set. If you had a way to automate a lot more of that through addons (custom macro’s, etc) it would be more valuable. In turn, it only took me 2 hours to get my friend all setup and able to do the same thing.
To top it off, most everything should be in-game. All the info, all the tutorials, etc should be able to be seen within the game. Not just by alt-tabbing to a website/pdf. Simple things like outputting a list of generally good enchants to make scrolls of should not only be in game, but should scan all the players enchants and tell him specifically which are normally good sellers. Giving a guide/link to getting some of the other better ones would be useful as well.
Overall I’d say its about the whole experience, not just saying what a good seller is. Its about telling the player where to find it, how to sell it, how to get good prices on mats (what times would it be cheaper to buy and use Abyssal Shatter instead of buying more Greater Cosmics directly). Informing people how cheap it is to make the parchment as opposed to buying it in the AH.