WoW Gold Guide Reviews – What To Look For In Good Reviews
WoW gold guide reviews are everywhere but few provide the minimum necessary information that a gamer needs to make an informed purchase. Because of this I wanted to point out a few things that a good WoW gold guide review needs in order to provide the minimum needed info that we gamers are looking for. Let me state that I’m talking about article reviews or reviews that WoW gamers put up on their site, and not about the mini-reviews/opinions that gamers write on our site. Our site is a ratings system that allows commentary/reviews/opinions.
I’ve written a ton of reviews for gold guides. Let me give you what I consider the minimum necessary for a good guide and then paste one of my reviews:
- 450 word minimum – In my opinion, that is the minimum you need to describe in decent detail the main guide. If there are supplemental guides I recommend you review those as well, it’ll likely increase the size of the review.
- A list of all the guides included in the package. You can’t review what you don’t have and listing them shows proof of ownership.
- No hype salesletters disguised as a review. This is the primary culprit in many online reviews, if you sound like your pushing a used car then readers will turn elsewhere. Don’t get me wrong, if a guide is good then by all means recommend it, but don’t hype it likes it the invention of the wheel.
- Explain in detail what you like or don’t like about the guide. You don’t need to write an encyclopedia hyping or hating a guide, but provide at least one example to why you like/dislike.
Allright, with that said, the following is my review of Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook. I won’t give an opinion here, I’ll just let the review speak for itself.
Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook Review – A WoW Tycoon Honest Review
There are a lot of WoW gold guides out there, and they all have something to offer. I have found through my experience that each WoW gold guide is a reflection of the style of the player who authored the guide. I can go through a ton of different reasons why but the main point is that as WoW gamers, we all have different styles and the guides simply reflect that style. And though there is always some crossover material between guides, for the most part each guide is unique just because each gamer is unique. So what does Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook bring to the table. Let’s review it.
The Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook is written by Steven Rice. It comprises of one primary guide and three supplemental guides:
- Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook; 154 pages
- Warcraft Tycoon’s Auction House Secrets; 18 pages
- Warcraft Tycoon’s Fishin & Cooking Profit Guide; 11 pages
- Warcraft Tycoon’s Guide to Northrend Rare Mob Hunting; 19 pages
As you can see they are not very big guides. At the end of the review I’ll give another guides size for comparison so you have a better idea of why I’m critical about the size. But size isn’t everything, we have to take quality into account as well. Let’s get deeper into the main guide to see if the quality stands up.
Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook has 14 chapters (15 actually but the last is just a summary chapter with no real new information). The overall approach of this guide is more generalized information and less step by step walkthroughs. It is focused on high end items with not much specific strategy for long term profits. It’s much closer to a list of where the most valuable items are located than a gold strategy implementation guide, though there is a little of that. Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook is much more geared towards the intermediate player that just wants to know where to find the most valuable items so he/she can stock up on gold. This is fine and dandy, but if your an inexperienced player I would probably look to another guide for help. I think the real value in the primary guide is in the Auction House section. Here’s why.
Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook best chapter is the Auction House chapter and it’s sub-chapters, it is one of the rare parts of the primary guide that gives you a step-by-step method for long term profits. This approach to dominating the Auction House was new information for me. For all my other criticisms of this guide, this section of the guide makes up alot of ground in terms of quality and strategy. By far, this section is the best and most valuable information you will get out of Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook. Some might say this method alone is worth the price of the guide. This method of Auction House monopolization is the best explained I’ve ever seen, and the most practical and realistic.
Now to explain why I think this guide is a short on information I’m going to compare the size of one of it’s competitors, the Gold Secrets Guide. The Gold Secrets Guide main guide is 343 pages versus Warcraft Tycoon’s 154. Yes, Gold Secrets Guide is over twice as big, and I can also say that each page of Gold Secrets has more information than each of Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook pages. So you need to take that into consideration.
To close, I think that the real value in this guide lies mostly in the one area I specified above – The Auction House section. There are other chapters that are good as well, but the AH chapter has the best long term approach to making tons of gold. I found the price a little high for this guide since there are other guides for less that have more and overall better information. Another thing I wasn’t enthused about is the way the guide is organized. It doesn’t feel fluid, it’s somewhat mechanical. As for the supplemental guides they only bring moderate value, they are nothing special and again seem like lists of valuable items instead of strategy guides.
This Warcraft Tycoon’s Handbook review was inspired because I saw some other reviews that didn’t really give pertinent information about this guide. I hope this review helps you out a little in that department. Make sure you do some research on any guide you are considering purchasing. Don’t make quick decisions because you might be getting a dud guide. Best of luck.
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As you can see it meets all the criteria: It’s well over 700 words, it provides the list of guides and manuals with number of pages, it tells you why I liked or disliked the guide, and it doesn’t overly hype or hate it. This is what I consider to be a helpful review. I approach almost all my reviews like this, there have been exception, such as when there’s just not much to like about a guide. Even though I might be critical of a guide, I like to add what I found to be the best part of a guide as most guide have something pretty good about them, even if overall it’s the best guide around.
Well, I hope others take to writing helpful reviews instead of just hyped up ads disguised as reviews.