We’re super excited to announce the launch of a brand new TradeSkillMaster website to elevate your gold making in The War Within and Classic World of Warcraft!

Along side a new website, rebuilt from the ground up – our TSM Premium offering has evolved in to multiple plans which are stuffed with brand new features and quality of life improvements to take your gold making even further.

If you’re an existing TSM Premium subscriber and are mostly interested in what happens to your current subscription, please check out this supplemantal support article that covers the possible scenarios, including keeping your existing subscription.

Let’s get started with what’s in store on the brand new TSM website.

The homepage now features a few important tools that will help you get an understanding of what’s going on with the Auction House – and what’s going on with your gold making activity, if you’re logged in.

You’ll first notice a heatmap of items and item categories that show trends in market value (red for declining trends, green for increasing trends) and volume of auctions (the bigger the square, the higher the volume) on your realm or your region – for the the version of the game you have selected on the homepage.

From here you can drill down in to a category, and then an item, to see current trends in price data at a glance. For example let’s look at Cooking Reagents.

Here we can see that cooking reagents are overall down in price trending when comparing the market value and historical value by -24.2%, then selecting the Reagents category the Cooking category shows individual items including Basically Beef trending down in price by -12.7% (perhaps oversupplied?) and Leyblood trending up by 505% (perhaps new demand?) – there’s also a tally of current volume of auctions for these item categories and individual items.

Let’s drill down further into Basically Beef as an item and check out the item page to see what’s going on in more detail.

At the top of the page we can see a summary of the item’s TSM Market Value, a confirmation of the current trend of the Market Value compared to the Historical Value, the current quantity on the Auction House – and if you’re logged in with TSM Premium (Platinum) an overview of your current inventory data across characters and the Auction House.

We also see an Auction House Quantity trend chart, showing volume of auctions for this item over time – coupled with your recent gold making actions pulled from your Ledger automatically, with TSM Premium (Platinum). In this example I might see I have a bunch of stock not listed and decide to log in and post them to the Auction House before the trend continues to fall, or realise I don’t have any stock on hand and decide to scoop any deals before the trend reverses.

Moving down the page, with a TSM Premium (Platinum) subscription, we see more visualisations representing the Region Sale Average and Region Sold Per Day values – information you’d usually only see in-game in the item tooltip. All of the tooltip information is also surfaced in the Item Statistics section to the right – including your personal Ledger and Accounting data for sales, purchases, sales, and sale rates. This data is available if you’re logged in with an active TSM Premium subsription.

The entire Auction House is your oyster now, giving new insights in market vs historical trends outside of the in-game addon for you to browse and research at any time. Time to start exploring!

Before moving away from the item page – you may have also noticed the ‘Alerts’ button at the top of the page. We’re very excited to introduce a more robust item notification system which includes realm, region, BMAH alerts via email and now also via Discord with a TSM Premium (Platinum) subscription!

It’s quick and easy to enable an alert from the item page, simply select the realm or region and your notification option, along with the price threshold and you’re all set. You must connect your Discord Account through OAuth in the TSM Account Management page in order to receive Discord notifications.

Ledger

The Ledger has had a coat of paint and now shows better charts and statistics based on your in-game gold making activity. The Ledger will continue to evolve over time as it is fully integrated in to the TSM website and new data flows are established from the in-game addon.

Groups

We’re also now making it easier than ever to view your in-game groups outside of the game via the Groups tab on the new TSM website. As a starting point, with TSM Premium (Gold) subscription, you can view the groups and the operations assigned to them separated by profile and also by account.

From here you can also opt to Publish your group to create an easy-to-share link with a friend or the TSM community – which will allow an easy import of the group and operation in one go in-game

Website Future

The new TSM website is a foundation for a lot of things we want to do in future, including more Auction House analysis tools, and more ways to understand your own gold making activity and to help you make more informed decisions on what you should or could do to improve your strategies.

We have a dedicated team working on it full time so we’ll be introducing new features and pushing out updates frequently now that it has been introduced to the world.

For the launch we have opened a new channel in Discord where you can share your feedback or ideas, and report any bugs you might encounter as you’re exploring and discovering our new website.

TSM Premium

With the launch of the new website, we are also revamping the TSM Premium offering with many more features described in the post above, and many more to come.

As of today September 4th, 2024 TSM Premium will be offered at two tiers, each with their own price point and access to features. The Premium plan offered before September 4th, 2024 will no longer be available to new subscribers.

TSM will always be available for free, which gives access to the TSM Desktop Application with TSM Price data and basic Auction House analysis on the website.

TSM Premium will now be offered at a Gold tier and a Platinum tier.

Price Changes

TSM Gold will start at just $3.00 US per month, while TSM Platinum for all the extra benefits and features will start at just $7.50 US per month, each while billed annually. Monthly and bi-annual options are also now available for each plan.

Current Subscribers

To celebrate the launch of our new Premium offerings, all current TSM Premium subscribers will gain access to the Platinum TSM Premium tier for 6 months at no extra cost!

If you’re a current subscriber and want to know what to expect during and after those 6 months, we have prepared a supplemental support article that covers all of the scenarios – including keeping your existing subscription.

We’re thankful for you being part of the TradeSkillMaster community, and hope you enjoy the new website and can benefit from all of the new enhancements to the TSM Premium offering.

EDIT: This position has been filled. Thanks for your interest.

The TradeSkillMaster team is a small group of gamers who love to learn new skills and constantly push the boundaries of what TradeSkillMaster can do for our users. What started as a small addon has grown into a comprehensive gold making addon, desktop application, and set of web-based tools and resources. We are driven by self-improvement and creating a great set of products and services for our users, while working in an efficient, but low-stress environment.

We are always exploring new ways to improve the experience we offer to our users. To that end, we are looking to add an experienced React Front-End Developer to the team in order to deliver a new web project to our hundreds of thousands of users.

The Role

As a part of this role, you will be expected to work closely with other members of the team to turn UI/UX designs into high-quality, responsive, and accessible front-end applications.

This position is short-term (2-3 months), full-time and paid. The work will be purely remote with EU time zones strongly preferred.

About You

Qualifications:

• Strong technical background in JavaScript and TypeScript. Good code design sense with an emphasis on UI and data processing.
• Expertise and experience in React and Remix, creating components for data-driven APIs.
• A proven ability to work in established code bases as part of a team and self-motivation to constantly improve code quality and processes.
• Experience with TradeSkillMaster and a passion for improving it

Ready to join us? Send me (Sapu) a message on Discord (https://discord.gg/woweconomy). Come prepared with your resume and any questions about the role you may have.

UPDATE: This role has been filled so we are no longer accepting applicants. Thanks for your interest!

The TradeSkillMaster team is a small group of gamers who love to learn new skills and constantly push the boundaries of what TradeSkillMaster can do for our users. What started as a small addon has grown into a comprehensive gold making addon, desktop application, and set of web-based tools and resources. We are driven by self-improvement and creating a great set of products and services for our users, while working in an efficient, but low-stress environment.

We are always exploring new ways to improve the experience we offer to our users. To that end, we are looking for help in improving the various ways in which we communicate the value of our suite of tools to our users and potential users in the form of written content on our website and distribution platforms (Curseforge, Wago, etc), transactional emails, and more.

The Role

As a part of this role, you will be expected to work closely with other members of the team to create marketing content including copy and assets, ideate and manage marketing campaigns, and measure performance.

This position is short-term (3-6 months), part-time and paid. The work will be purely remote with NA/EU time zones strongly preferred.

About You

Qualifications:

• At least 3 years in roles with a significant focus on written digital marketing
• Strong written communication skills
• Experience with TradeSkillMaster and a passion for improving it

Ready to join us? Send me (Sapu) a message on Discord (https://discord.gg/woweconomy. Come prepared with your resume, some examples of your past work, and any questions about the role you may have.

Introduction

Custom strings have long been at the heart of what makes TradeSkillMaster such a versatile and powerful tool for gold making. They allow the user to focus on their gold making strategy, and allow the addon to worry about doing all the complex math for them. For example, the default Auctioning operation settings ensure that items will be posted above their vendor sell price and a percentage of an average of the crafting cost, realm market value, and region market value, while transparently accommodating items that can’t be either vendored or crafted, all without requiring the user to ever need to manually calculate or input those values. In v4.13, we completely rewrote how the addon parses and evaluates custom strings to allow for much greater optimization and user debuggability. This blog post will dive deep into the changes that were made and the performance improvements they’ve enabled.

Background

TSM’s custom strings are defined by a set of functions and sources that can be used together in a single expression. As an example, let’s dissect the default Auctioning Operation minimum price setting:

check(
	first(crafting,dbmarket,dbregionmarketavg),
	max(
		0.25*avg(crafting,dbmarket,dbregionmarketavg),
		1.5*vendorsell
	)
)

There are a few things going on here. First of all, the outer check() function ensures that the first parameter is valid (and greater than 0); making the entire thing invalid if not. This is used here to ensure that the item has either a crafting cost, realm market value, or region market value. If all of these are missing for the item, we don’t have enough information available to properly post the item, so the custom string is made invalid to prevent posting the item at a potentially erroneous price. Assuming that check passes, we’re left with:

max(
	0.25*avg(crafting,dbmarket,dbregionmarketavg),
	1.5*vendorsell
)

The max() function here takes the higher of its two parameters. The first parameter is the average of the crafting cost, realm market value, and region market value multiplied by 0.25. The second parameter is 1.5 times the vendor sell price. This ensures that this custom string always evaluates to at least 1.5 times the vendor sell price, even if the market values / crafting cost is very low. Both avg() and max() also have a side-effect of silently ignoring any invalid parameters, meaning if the item doesn’t have a crafting cost or a vendor sell price, the custom string can still be evaluated based on the other parameters.

Let’s plug some values into this custom string and see how it gets evaluated. Let’s assume we’re trying to post “Spice Bread” which has the following prices:

• Crafting Cost: 35c
• Vendor Sell Price: 5c
• Market Value: 12s 70c
• Region Market Value: 11s 57c

If we simply plug these into our custom string, we get the following:

check(
	first(35c, 12s70c, 11s57c),
	max(
		0.25 * avg(35c, 12s70c, 11s57c),
		1.5 * 5c
	)
)

After evaluating the first() and avg() functions:

check(
	35c,
	max(0.25 * 8s21c, 1.5 * 5c)
)

The first parameter of check() is valid (greater than 0) so it simply evaluates to its second parameter, the max(), which calculated out results in 2s5c.

This is the same math that TSM is doing under the hood, but obviously TSM needs to do it in a well-defined and programmatic manner. It has traditionally accomplished this by relying on the fact that the custom string syntax (that is, the format used to write custom strings) is very similar to valid Lua code (the programming language addons are written in), and Lua allows for dynamically loading and executing code. In other words, we can treat the custom string as Lua code and execute it directly as if it were programmed directly into the addon. However, we don’t simply want to directly execute what gets entered into a custom string setting for multiple reasons:

1. We need to be able to plug in the correct value for the sources depending on the item which the custom string is being evaluated for.
2. The set of functions which are valid in custom strings are specific to TSM, and not necessarily part of the Lua language itself.
3. We need a way to ensure that what the user enters is a valid TSM custom string, and not just some arbitrary snippet of Lua code.

This was previously accomplished by doing a very rough tokenization of the string followed by applying some rules and string replacements to the tokens to ensure the input was valid and create a valid, loadable snippet of Lua code to present the custom string. Tokenization is the process of turning an arbitrary string (i.e. the entire custom string the user enters into a setting input) into a series of known words (a.k.a. tokens). For example, the custom string “max(crafting, vendorsell)” gets turned into the tokens:

• max
• (
• crafting
• ,
• vendorsell
• )

In this tokenized form, we can then easily perform a series of validation checks, such as requiring that there is an equal number of left and right parentheses, and replace sources and functions as appropriate to turn this into a valid snippet of Lua code we can execute:

function(helpers, _item)
	local result = helpers._max(
		helpers._priceHelper(_item, “crafting”),
		helpers._priceHelper(_item, “vendorsell”)
	)
	if not result or helpers.IsInvalid(result) or result <= 0 then return end
	return result
end

Above is a simplified version of what the code generated by the original custom string implementation would look like. It looks very similar to the custom string we started with, but the sources have been replaced with function calls to look up the specified price for the item being evaluated, and the max() function call has been replaced with a call to a max() function TSM defines and provides.

This implementation has suited TSM well for a very long time, but has a few key limitations. First of all, the amount of validation that can be performed on a list of tokens is fairly limited and isn’t robust enough to catch all possible syntax errors. Having more robust processes in place for how custom strings are parsed will also enable better user-facing error messages and debugging functionality. Also, there’s no chance to perform any optimization on the generated code with this implementation. For example, if a custom string references the same source multiple times, the generated Lua code will look up the value of that source each and every time, with these lookups accounting for the majority of the computation time needed to evaluate custom strings in general.

New Implementation

The new implementation works much more like a traditional compiler and consists of 4 high-level steps: tokenization, abstract syntax tree generation, optimization, and code generation. We’ll use the following (somewhat contrived) custom string to demonstrate this process:
ifgt(crafting, 50g, crafting + 150% crafting, 10g + 5g)

For reference, here’s what that custom string would be converted to using the old system:

function(helpers, _item)
	local result = helpers._ifgt(
		helpers._priceHelper(_item, “crafting”),
		500000,
		helpers._priceHelper(_item, “crafting”) +
			1.5 * helpers._priceHelper(_item, “crafting”),
		100000 + 50000,
	)
	if not result or helpers.IsInvalid(result) or result <= 0 then return end
	return result
end

Tokenization

The tokenization step is similar to the prior implementation, but much more in-depth. It is responsible for taking the input string and converting it into a series of well-defined tokens which can then be more easily processed further. A token can be thought of similar to a word in an English sentence. It’s the smallest discrete unit which is meaningful by itself. The tokenizer works by methodically going through each character of the input string and separating out distinct tokens which are often separated by whitespace or formatting characters (i.e. parentheses or commas). In the case of our example (ignoring whitespace tokens), the tokenizer splits up our custom string into the following tokens:

ifgt ( crafting , 50g , crafting + 150 % crafting , 10g + 5g )

In addition to just splitting up the string into tokens, the tokenizer also classifies each token based on their type:

• FUNCTION – ifgt
• LEFT_PAREN – (
• IDENTIFIER – crafting
• COMMA – ,
• MONEY – 50g
• COMMA – ,
• IDENTIFIER – crafting
• MATH_OPERATOR – +
• NUMBER – 150
• MATH_OPERATOR – %
• IDENTIFIER – crafting
• COMMA – ,
• MONEY – 10g
• MATH_OPERATOR – +
• MONEY – 5g
• RIGHT_PAREN – )

The tokenization step takes care of a lot of the ambiguity of string parsing, and we now have a well-defined representation of the custom string which can more easily be worked with programmatically. The next step is to take this series of tokens and convert it into an abstract syntax tree, or AST for short.

AST Generation

An abstract syntax tree (AST) is a tree-based (per the name) form which better represents the structure of the custom string and the discrete operations (i.e. mathematical operations and / or function calls) which it consists of. A description of the algorithm for transforming the list of tokens into an AST is beyond the scope of this blog post, but we’ll visualize it with our example string, starting with a slightly more formatted version of the original string:

ifgt(
	crafting,
	50g,
	crafting + 150 % crafting,
	10g + 5g
)

In this form, we can visually see that this example has an outer “ifgt” function which has 4 parameters. Its 3rd parameter consists of 2 separate math operations (“+” and “%”). The 4th parameter of the outer “ifgt” also consists of a “+” math operation. Each of these distinct functions and operations is turned into a node in the tree, with its arguments becoming its children:

This AST form is helpful for doing a few things:

1. It abstracts away all the original syntax of the custom string with the order of operations entirely determined by the location of a node within the tree. For example, we can look at the tree and see that we must calculate the “%” operation of “150” and “crafting” before we can calculate the “+” operation, as the result of the former is a dependency of the latter.
2. We can easily validate that functions are being used properly. The “ifgt” function can only take either 3 or 4 parameters. We can easily see from this tree form that the “ifgt” node in the tree has 4 direct children, and therefore the “ifgt” function has a valid number of arguments. One thing worth noting here is that TSM stores enough information in both this tree form and the token list in order to reverse the process back to the original string form. This allows TSM to point the user at exactly where their custom string is invalid, which is one of the main benefits of this new custom string implementation as a whole.
3. Lastly, we can perform very well-informed optimizations based on this AST form, which we’ll dive into next.

Optimizer

Now that we have the custom string represented as an AST, we can methodically go through it and look for opportunities where we can optimize it without changing the result. There are dozens of different optimizations which are attempted at this stage, but for this example there are just a few which apply.

The first optimization we can perform here is to realize that taking “150%” of something is the same as multiplying it by 1.5. Multiplication is generally a lot easier to reason about than a “%” operator, so we’ll update that part of the tree accordingly:

If we zoom out one level from that new multiplication, we can see that we now have the expression “crafting + (1.5 * crafting)” which, using some simple rules of algebra, we can rewrite as “2.5 * crafting”, or in AST form as:

Lastly, we can see that the 4th argument of our “ifgt” function is simply adding two constant values together, which can be precomputed to just “15g” with our optimized AST looking like this:

Although this was a relatively contrived example, we were able to reduce the number of nodes in the AST from 11 down to just 7 just through some simple optimizations. Most importantly, we were able to get rid of one out of three of the “crafting” source nodes. These optimizations mean that TSM users can format their custom strings in a way which makes managing them as easy as possible rather than worrying about trying to write them in an optimal way. The addon itself will take care of all the optimization.

Code Generation

The last step is to turn our optimized AST into Lua code that can be executed by the addon. Compared to the previous custom string implementation, having the AST allows us to do this in a much more controlled and optimized way. For example, we can cache intermediate values so we only need to compute them a single time, even if they are used multiple times within the custom string. The generated code for our example custom string (edited for readability) is as follows:

return function(itemString, helpers)
	-- Locals
	local res_ifgt_1901082 = nil

	-- Code
	local var_crafting = helpers.GetPrice(itemString, "crafting")
	if var_crafting == helpers.INVALID then
		return nil
	end

	if var_crafting > 500000 then
		res_ifgt_1901082 = (2.5 * var_crafting)
	else
		res_ifgt_1901082 = 150000
	end

	return helpers.ValidateResult(res_ifgt_1901082)
end

This code very closely matches our optimized AST, and has many optimizations when compared to our original custom string and the previous implementation. Most importantly, we only need to look up the “crafting” source for the item a single time, and then are able to reuse that multiple times within the generated code. One important optimization that’s not shown here is that we only evaluate sources as they are needed, and at most a single time. For example, if “crafting” was referenced in the “else” part of the “ifgt”, it would reference the same “var_crafting” variable rather than re-computing the crafting cost for the item.

Conclusion

Custom strings are one of the most powerful aspects of TSM, and we continue to dedicate significant time to improving their functionality and efficiency. With these under-the-hood improvements we made in 4.13, we are able to make the process of writing and debugging custom strings much better for all TSM users, while also improving their performance.

In this post, we’re going to dive into where we’re at, what’s coming soon, and where we’re going with regards to supporting gold making in Dragonflight. I’ll start things off here by apologizing for not being as active as I would have liked with communicating this information sooner. TSM was definitely not as ready as I would have hoped for the changes in Dragonflight. There are a variety of reasons for this, which mainly boil down to not having enough development hours to spend and underestimating just how much of TSM would need to change to support the new profession changes. I understand people’s frustration with the state of TSM in Dragonflight so far, and am committed to improving things going forward. However, this will take some time.

Current State of Things

With that said, let’s talk about what changes we’ve made so far, and where things are at as of the time of writing (v4.12.20). The following things are working today:

• For crafted commodity items, the crafting cost and profit will accurately display in the tooltip, and be available for use in custom strings (i.e. in Auctioning operation prices).
• Quality, optional, and finishing materials can all be added manually to a recipe within the Crafting UI and then either crafted directly or added to the queue. Gathering then supports collecting all the materials as normal.
• Restocking your groups based on Crafting operations is fully supported for crafted commodity items.

Coming Next

Here’s a list of things that are actively being worked on and can be expected to be released in the very near future:

• Crafting cost and restocking support for quality crafts which produce gear of varying item levels.
• Updated Destroying data for DF Milling, Prospecting, and Disenchanting.
• Crafting UI support for selecting materials for and crafting recipes that don’t have fixed materials. This includes things like Mass Milling, Mass Prospecting, Recrafting, etc.
• Improved UI for manually selected the target item for a quality craft, and having TSM automatically populate the cheapest set of quality materials needed.
• Improved UI for selecting optional materials (including quality mats and finishing mats).
• Display of crafting stats for quality crafts such as expected quality, inspiration, multicraft.
• Support for taking inspiration into account when calculating the crafting cost.

Longer-Term Roadmap

There are a few other areas of TSM which definitely need some love and will be revisited in the not-too-distant future, which I thought I’d also call out here:

• Improvements to how TSM handles buying commodities from the AH.
• Item cache rebuilding performance improvements.
• Account syncing performance improvements.

Crafting Cost

I thought it would be helpful to give some details on how we’re approaching crafting costs in Dragonflight. As we all know, Dragonflight greatly expanded the complexity of crafting things with professions. At its core, each recipe has a difficulty which gets matched up against your skill level to determine the result. That skill can then be modified with higher quality materials and various optional materials, as well as by proc’ing inspiration. In order to calculate how much it costs to craft something, TSM currently considers all the potential qualities of materials which result in the desired item being crafted.

As a hypothetical example, let’s assume there’s a potion which takes 1 herb and 1 vial to craft, with each of the materials being 1 of 3 qualities, and the recipe producing up to quality 3 of the potion. Let’s assume that using quality 3 of both materials results in quality 2 of the potion being crafted, and any other combination of materials results in quality 1 of the potion being crafted. To determine the crafting cost of the quality 1 potion, TSM will determine that there are 4 possible ways you could craft this item, from the 4 possible combinations of quality 1/2 of the herb, and quality 1/2 of the vial. TSM will then pick the cheapest of these options and use that as your crafting cost. Going further, it’s impossible to craft quality 3 of the potion, so TSM will treat that as an item you don’t yet know how to craft, and not display a crafting cost. Similarly, if you weren’t able to get your skill low enough to craft quality 1 of the potion anymore, TSM would treat that as something you can no longer craft and not show a crafting cost.

Currently, inspiration is not taken into account. From the above example, it’s possible that you could craft quality 3 of the potion if you were inspired. It seems like this will be important for some recipes where it won’t be feasible to get your skill high enough to craft at the highest quality without an inspiration proc for some crafts. This is something that’s not yet taken into account, but is something that we will plan to support in a future update as mentioned above.

Also, the game allows you to mix and max different qualities of the same material to hyper-optimize your crafting cost. For example, a recipe may require 5 of an herb, but you may only need to supply 1 at quality 3 with the remaining 4 being quality 1 in order to craft the desired quality of the crafted item. This isn’t something TSM takes into account, and is not something we have plans to support, due to the exponential increase in computing resource it would require to consider all possible permutations. Calculating crafting costs is already an order of magnitude slower than any other price source in TSM, so we felt that requiring all of a given material to be at the same quality struck the right balance between maximizing profits and keeping things performant and manageable for the user (i.e. when listing materials needed to craft something and/or gathering them).

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, there is a lot of work to do to get TSM where we want it to be for Dragonflight gold-making. This work is ongoing and we’re committed to aggressively work through the list of outstanding features and push out new functionality and bug fixes as they are ready. We’ll check in again with an update as things progress. If you have any feedback on the current state of things or the upcoming features, let us know in Discord.