Markco's Corner - The Control

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

Wow
 
Today's corner is all about the control. In science class you may have learned that the control is the part of the experiment which is used as the normal or unaffected piece which you can compare to the affects of your experiment. In the case of making gold while leveling, Thunderion was the control, Jhaman was the new person trying out a few strategies, and I was the full blown master. The experiment is still going on, but here are the approximate results so far:

Markco Level 26 - 800 gold in bags (mount, gear, trade skill supplies purchased)
Jhaman Level 29 - 40 gold in bags earned (mount, gear, trade skill supplies purchased)
Thunderion Level 20 - 2 gold in bags (skills purchased)

Jhaman is following the simplest methods of my guide, the really noob friendly and basic sections whereas I am moving on to some of the more advanced strategies which require an understanding of market mechanics and item values. Now keep in mind that neither Jhaman or Thunderion are stupid people/players, but they do have limitations on their time and we are all making leveling our primary concern. For this reason I limitted my auction house time to 30 minutes maximum (including emptying mail box), Jhaman is spending about 15 minutes at most and usually every other day and Thunderion hasn't even seen the auction house.

As you can see from the results, if you are more dedicated to making gold and have an excellent grasp of strategies you will easily acquire massive amounts of money quickly in this game, especially while leveling even without professions. Currently I'm using enchanting/mining but I may switch to enchanting/tailoring since I'm quickly out leveling my mining using the LFD tool. I decided to write a small new chapter for the gold guide based on these findings and analyze each profession's usefulness when combined with the looking for dungeon tool. So far I haven't made much use of my trade skills for making gold and have primarily been flipping items on the auction house.

Castaclysm has been exploding in terms of growth, it appears that many players enjoy listening to Thunderer, Jhaman and myself go back and forth about the upcoming wow expansion.

I've been watching for gold making blogs this week and I came across a few good ones, but one that really sticks out as consistently releasing good content is Cold's Gold Factory. The one post I really liked was extremely simple but effective: Flipping Black Vitriol. Check his site out and let him know what you think!

Real Life

The 10 mile broad street run was really fun and I must say I would do it again next week in a heart beat! It was a wonderful crowd (both in the race and cheering us on) and there was plenty of really distracting characters during the race to keep things interesting... a guy running it backwards, people wearing funny outfits, a preacher on a soap box yelling at us in south philly, and so on and so on. I really enjoyed the experience of doing such a massive group event, and I just want to say grats to anyone else who ran the race last weekend.

Life has been pretty divided between my online blogging work and projects outside of the realm of the internet. I played starcraft 2 and I must say it is a brilliantly designed game!!! Little things like units canceling attacks since the target is going to die from another missile are absolutely ground breaking. What's more the editor is just made for someone like myself who loves to program games and provides a lot of power which I hope to tap into some time in the near future.