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.

We are excited to announce that we are launching a brand new public web API! If you aren’t sure what this means, you can probably stop reading here and just keep an eye on for new spreadsheets and other out-of-game tools from our favorite content creators and other community members.

Background

We launched the original version of our public API back in early 2016 to allow our users and 3rd party developers to integrate our pricing data in their spreadsheets and other out-of-game tools, websites, and programs. However, we took this version of our public API down at the beginning of Shadowlands as we worked behind the scenes on an extensive (and still ongoing) process of rebuilding all of the backend infrastructure and services which generate TSM pricing data and power our website and desktop application. As part of this, we’ve been working hard on bringing online a new version of our API which leverages this new infrastructure, and we’re finally ready to make it public.

Features

The list of API endpoints we are releasing today covers all the same AuctionDB pricing data you would find in-game from realm-specific min buyout and market value, to region-wide sale prices and rates. This includes both base items and battle pets. This should enable a wide range out-of-game website and tools to leverage TSM’s data to build some great user experiences for gold-makers.

Get Started

Read through the documentation here to get started. We can’t wait to see what you build!

In this series, we are detailing what goes on behind the scenes to ship a new major TSM addon release. Specifically, we will be describing how version 4.12 of the addon is being built, from deciding what features will be included, to publicly releasing it. This first post will focus on how we decided what features will be in version 4.12 of the addon.

Selection Criteria

There is no end to the list of things we want to implement into TSM to make it the best gold making addon possible. We have curated a list of improvements we are considering on our public roadmap, so any discussion on what we prioritize for the next version starts by reviewing the list there. Our biggest constraint as a team (and, not to get philosophical, but in life as well) is time, but there are many factors we consider as we filter through this list. In no particular order, and with much less formality than they are described here, these include the following high-level points:

• What portion of our user base would benefit from this feature? How much value will this feature bring to them? How much complexity would it add to the addon for new users or those who wouldn’t directly benefit from it?
• Is this feature especially relevant to the current state of the game or the other projects being worked on within TSM (i.e. new pricing data functionality)?
• What resources (design time, development time, dependencies on our web backend or desktop app, etc) are required to ship this feature?

Back when we were deciding what the focus of TSM 4.11 was going to be, we went through a ranking exercise to help us prioritize our list of high-level features we wanted to implement. This resulted in optional material support and custom themes being prioritized for 4.11, and also Gathering being called out as the next big feature to prioritize in 4.12. Therefore, when it came time to plan out 4.12, we went in with the idea of Gathering being the primary focus.

Digging Deeper

Once we’ve decided on the primary feature, in this case Gathering, the next step is to go one level deeper and figure out exactly what use-cases we want to better support. This is almost entirely influenced by feedback we’ve received around Gathering from our users over the years. The most challenging part of this is deciding what we are NOT going to do. Again, we are balancing how much of our time we want to spend on a given feature (and how long before we can release it) vs. how much value it will deliver to our users. For example, Gathering for multiple characters at the same time is not something we are going to be doing in 4.12 because it would require a ton of design and development effort to do it in a way which doesn’t add a ton of complexity that the user needs to manage. It would also provide relatively-low value when compared with the other features, such as supporting intermediate crafts from other professions. The result of this exercise is again reflected in our public roadmap under the “Prioritised Ideas” column. In the case of 4.12, it includes the following:

• A bunch of general usability and UI improvements to the Task List and Gathering tab of the Crafting UI
• Adding support for gathering from the bank in Classic
• Support intermediate crafts on alts as a Gathering source
• Improved connected realm support
• Add a default “Farming” source which will track how many the player has acquired through a more manual means

This is a fairly ambitious set of features, but we are fairly confident in being able to tackle them within 4.12. Of course, things may change as we go along, and we may tweak this list as we go through the design and implementation process. However, this list is what we are currently working towards delivering. In addition to the major feature of Gathering, we also went through our overall backlog of feature requests and pulled out a few things which we thought would be easy to implement and/or especially timely to pull into 4.12. This includes things like persisting the “Show Ungrouped Items as” selection between sessions.

Next Steps

The next steps are split between design and development. On the design side, we are brainstorming what a better UI/UX for the task list and Gathering tab looks and feels like. On the development side, we are starting to implement some of the backend changes to support the new features, and knocking out other things which don’t have any dependencies on the new UI.

UPDATE 3/28: This position has been filled so we are no longer taking applicants for it. 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 working on a new version of our desktop application and are looking to add a passionate JS developer to the team to get it across the finish line and shipped 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 implement new features, constantly improve the overall quality of the codebase, and drive the project towards initial release and beyond.

This position is part-time (we all have day jobs) and paid hourly. While we are looking for somebody to work on a specific project initially (our new desktop application), this position may be extended beyond that. The work will be purely remote with NA/EU time zones strongly preferred.

About You

Minimum Qualifications:

• Strong technical background in JS (React preferred) and good code design sense with an emphasis on UI and data processing
• A proven ability to work in established code bases as part of a team and self-motivation to constantly improve code quality and processes

Preferred Qualifications:

• The tech stack for this project includes React, Redux. Electron, Socket.IO, Node.js, and Python (backend), so expertise with any or all of those
• An eagerness to learn about new technologies and jump into different areas of our overall tech stack (from in-game addon to backend infrastructure) as needed
• Experience with TradeSkillMaster and a passion for improving it

Ready to join us? Send me (Sapu) a message on Discord (https://discord.gg/woweconomy – if I’m AFK I’ll respond ASAP) or send me an email ([email protected]). Come prepared with your resume and any questions about the role you may have.