Exposing Gold Guides

Gold continues to plague a lot of World of Warcraft gamers, particularly new and less experienced players. This of course, has spawned a series of gold guides, many which are easily available and read on discussion forums but another series can be found on private web sites and sold for real cash prices. These usually come in the form of digital documents, like pdf (readable with Adobe Acrobat), although some are nothing more than text files done with doc or rtf files.

The guides often advertise each other with colorful, long single page sites, giving anything between 20 to 50 reason why the guide signifies nothing less but the end of your financial problems in-game, not far removed from hail mary.

If you have ever tuned on the TV-shop channel, you should have a good idea what to expect when venturing to these sites.

This morning, browsing the mmo-champion forums, I can across a poster inquiring about this very topic: are the gold guides worth it?

On this, I can speak with some level of experience, for this was actually one of the first topics I had in mind for this blog. Back in the first days of playing, when it began to dawn on me just how much gold it takes to play this game effectively, I also bought a gold guide, with another two at a later date for testing purposes.

So let me share you a valuable lesson from those days; no, the gold guides are not worth it.

The simple reason is, you do not need their help and in actuality, they are not real guides, but inventories of valuable items and materials. While that might sound like useful information, it is not because the guides are all hopelessly behind in time. Some have not been upgraded since the TBC and a majority of what you buy will be useless, alas the merchandice moves ahead with each patch. What was valuable yesterday, has now become absolete.

In the end you will goes through your guide, page by page and by the time you finally get to the back cover, you realize there was hardly anything worth-while inside. Certainly nothing you could not have figured out for yourself, and definitely nothing worth 30 dollars.