Neutral auction houses. On many servers they are quiet and empty areas. My last trip to Winterspring I was totally alone in the whole area. Winterspring has always been one of my favourite places to level and make WoW Gold.

I did some rep grinding for the Frostsabre. I was in the area for a full two and a half hours and saw no-one. Likewise in Tanaris a few months ago, I saw a group off to Zul’Farrak, and that was about it.

This tells me one thing – on most servers the value of positioning alt’s at neutral auction houses is hugely under-rated. I found out the value of doing this myself a few months ago. And in this quick WoW Guide I will tell you how.

The guild I am in has about 40 members, most have level 80’s in both factions, and like most guild mates we like to do each other favors from time to time. But of course sometimes the favor involves getting something from one faction, and giving it to a character on another. A conversation between two horde characters might go like this.

Gromdol: Anyone got any Eternal Earth?
Hagemony: Trukkil is a miner, I think she’s got about 20, and some crystallized as well.
Gromdol: I’ll pay the market for them, but there’s only 1 on the AH at the moment.
Hagemony: Ok, i’ll need to log as Trukkil and post them to an Alliance character though.
Gromdol: I’ll get my Alliance character to the AH in Booty Bay, and we’ll have to do a quick swap. Put them on for one copper and i’ll buy them straight away.

As a result, both players have to take characters down to Booty Bay. Probably a journey of between 5 and 10 minutes. Then once the deal is done, repeat the process. Of course if they were in Kalimdor they could consider going to Tanaris or Winterspring, but the process would be about the same.

Ok, let’s look at a second scenario, a much more exciting one. A Warcraft Advanced Gold Guide to making gold at neutral auction houses

Gromdol: Just took the Titanium Ore to the AH. Selling for 4g a piece, I mean what’s the point of that, that’s 50% down on the price I could get only a week ago.
Hagemony: Man, that’s sick. They are going for 9g a piece on the Alliance AH’s. Can we get them across. I’ll get an Alliance down to Booty Bay, you stick them on real cheap, I’ll buy them and ship them up to Stormwind and I’ll take say 20% of the take, so you end up with about seven and a half gold each for them.
Gromdol: Ok, i’ll get down there. You be ready to buy to second I post. I’ll post for 1 copper a piece so we don’t pay any AH tax, but you keep pressing refresh. I don’t want someone else buying them for that price.

In both cases the deal is done. However, It has taken ages. Trips to Neutral Auction Houses and back again with your high level characters. Wouldn’t it be better if you just had some level one toons posted at these Neutral AH’s?

Your next comment is probably “But you can’t get a level 1 to a neutral AH, they are in high level areas.”

Watch the videos at my blog for how to do this (they are speeded up so you will only need 3 or 4 minutes). The link as at the bottom of this page.

So that’s my question;
Why spend time Horde Leveling or Alliance Leveling just to get down to Booty Bay?

I pick Booty Bay because this is where you can get level on characters to for the least hassle. Just over 30 minutes from rolling a new toon, to having them positioned and ready to go. Remember you can have up to ten characters PER SERVER, and up to 50 altogether, so don’t fret about using one for this.

Then just leave them there. You will get a lot of kudos from others. “OMG, how did you get here!!!”
Not only that, if you have a wow guild mate you can trust, then the whole idea of cross faction trading opens up.
Looking for big price differences between Horde and Alliance, buying up cheap stock, swapping faction and re-marketing for a much higher price.

With the toon’s already positioned to do the deal, it can be done from start-to-finish in about 5 minutes.

The other option is to have two accounts yourself (remember, you can’t buy from another character in your own account, no matter what faction they are. Blizzard have made sure you have to team up to do this – or have two accounts).

Anyway, watch the vids have see for yourself. There are also videos on how to check for profitability, how to use the AH properly and loads of other great vids (all to cool music as well). All completely free and well worth checking out.

Take care, I’ll catch you later.

My name is Paul Rone-Clarke, I’m a writer and gamesplayer. I’m particularly interested in how the economies of online games work. My idea? Get underneath the “skin” of these games. and understand them in terms of real human experience. Then hopefully, try real world gold/credit/ISK making techniques in game. Find more information at the following pages

Check out the videos for this article at;

http://www.wowgoldeliteguide.com/goldblog

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. 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

Do they work?

Yes, after investing some time understanding them, then a week and a half “playing” the market. (With more bag and bank space than we ever though possible thanks to the guide) we made a good sum. It is hard to say how many gold per hour. 300 gold might be close, but we spent a long time “sitting” in titansteel and we “went long cross market” on crafting materials… (No we had little idea what this meant a fortnight ago either). And made a tidy sum, with no farming

Ok, this guide works. It’s a serious guide for people with big foreheads and an understanding of numbers. In other words this guide is not for everyone.

At the moment guide comes with a complete set of Horde and Alliance leveling guides. Each one running to over 300 (well over 600 pages in all) in PDF format. They have the starting area quests for every race included. They are downloaded from the guide itself as they are given away under license (We presume the guys who wrote the Warcraft Advanced Guide pay a royalty to the leveling guide authors for each one sold) But to you, the end customer, these guides are absolutely FREE. This makes a great deal even better. We have reservations recommending this guide because of this, we give it 2 marks as a result For normal players… 88%

For those with good numeracy skills, and who want a different challenge, and as it’s main score – because there are enough “dummies” guides on the market we would rather give it a resounding.. 94%.

Paul Rone-Clarke is a writer and gamesplayer. With particular interest in how the economies of online games work. The idea? Get underneath the “skin” of these games. and understand them interms of real human experience. Then hopefully, try real world gold/credit/ISK making techniques in game. Find out more about the product reviewed above at;

http://wowgoldeliteguide.com

For more general reviews on guides for MMORPG’s please visit

http://comparethegameguide.com