Author - gumdrops

TSM 4.10 Release Date!

The TradeSkillMaster 4.10 Beta is sadly drawing to a close, but that means the public release is imminent!

Over the last 7 weeks, we have had more than 10,000 beta participants, who shared 8,500 comments or pieces of feedback and received a total of 15 addon updates containing 250 individual additions, changes or fixes.

In our mission to provide the very best tool to execute your gold-making strategy, we’re proud of the massive step forward we are taking from the original release of TSM 4 to today in what has been a very stable beta test of version 4.10.

Stable enough that we’re ready for a full release on Sunday, September 6th at 10AM Pacific! As part of the public launch, we’ll be hosting a “live” Q&A session with the TSM Team on our Discord server at 2PM Pacific time – read on to find out more.

To recap on some of the major updates and what to expect in TSM 4.10, check out some of our previous posts including:

A brand new and improved user interface, with colour themes!

Blog post: TSM 4.10: UI & Design

New price & value sources usable in more places, with validation!

Blog post: TSM 4.10: New Sources

Searching for any ungrouped item in the game, in the Base Group!

And much, much more! Check the full Change Log for the details.

“Live” Discord Q&A Session

For previous launches and announcements we have hosted several AMA sessions on reddit with TSM Founder Sapu, you can check those out here and here.

This time around we wanted to do something a bit different, so we’re going to collect Questions on reddit ahead of a live Answer session on our Discord server with the full TSM Team! This will begin at 2PM Pacific time on Sunday, September 6th 2020 (find your timezone here).

Who will be there?

Answering questions from the team will be:

Sapu – TSM Founder & Lead Developer
Resike – TSM Addon Developer
Muffin – TSM Backend Developer
H3GGERS – TSM UX & UI Designer
sigsig – TSM Frontend & Application Developer
Butchmonkey – TSM Application Developer
magurokun – Unannounced TSM Project Developer (Sneak peek!)
Gumdrops – TSM Community & Support Manager

How do I submit questions?

Submit your questions to this reddit post before Saturday, September 5th 2020 for your question to be considered. We may not get to all of them live, but the team may comment on reddit afterwards too.

Where do I listen to the answers?

Join our Discord server, and join the voice channel in the TradeSkillMaster category at the time of the event!

Thank You!

Some of you may not have had a chance to check out the Beta version, so as a thank you for your support you can sign up to the Beta in the final days leading up to the full release, and get an instant invite to get started with 4.10 early!

TSM 4.10: Beta Launch!

We’re thrilled to announce the TSM 4.10 Beta test has begun!

If you’re a TSM Premium member you will shortly be receiving an email inviting you to participate, along with instructions on how to get started.

Additional invites through our Beta sign-up page will be distributed on a First-In-First-Out system, so be sure to sign-up if you’d like to get involved! Otherwise, you can bypass the queue and get instant access by signing up to TSM Premium.

The 4.10 Change Log has been expanded and updated, with all of the new and improved features, fixes and enhancements. More blog posts will be published highlighting some of the bigger aspects throughout the Beta test.

We can’t wait to hear what you think, and thank you for your continued support!

TSM 4.10: UI & Design

This is the second in a series of TSM 4.10 feature highlight blogs. Today we will be discussing the new User Interface and Designs in 4.10.

This blog post is very GIF heavy to demonstrate the new functionality being discussed.

Overall Look & Feel

As we mentioned in an earlier teaser, one of the biggest areas we tackled in version 4.10 is a complete overhaul of the User Interface and the Design of the addon. Moving away from some of the bulky screens and reducing the amount of wasted space, surfacing more information in the right places and at the right time. Every screen and page has been scrutinized and rebuilt to make sure everything you do in TSM is incredibly responsive and intuitive.

Themes

The new Default colour scheme is called ‘Midnight’, which has a darker visual approach and higher contrast than version 4.9.

Additionally, as a re-introduction of sorts from the old colour selection options in TSM3, we have implemented a Theme selector in 4.10 which will switch to new colour palette instantly. We’ll be adding more colour schemes as part of the Beta program and through to release based on your feedback and suggestions!

Dashboard

The Dashboard in TSM 4.10 is made to be the first port-of-call in your daily gold-making activities. It allows you to keep track of your status or progress towards your goals, and check some at-a-glance statistics taken from your Accounting data such as your number of daily sales, your top purchase, or your most profitable item.

The Gold Chart is now much more interactive and provides significantly more detail. You can zoom in on specific time periods, and filter by character or guild. The chart will be coloured green or red depending on whether you finished the time period with more or less gold than you started with.

Your characters total gold is also displayed at the top right of the core TSM UI, and mousing over it will show a tooltip with how much gold you have on your other characters with a sum total of everything.

Tables

In TSM 4.9 we recognised a lot of the information displayed across the addon and the Auction House was a bit cramped, or might not be particularly necessary for certain situations. So we have turbo-charged all of the tables to allow resizing and hiding of columns across all interfaces.

Here are some examples. At the Auction House you can hide or add new columns including Buyout Total and Bid %.

In the Ledger, you can hide or add new columns such as Total Profit per item. You will also notice a new summary at the bottom of this screen that shows the sum of both total Items Resold, and Total Profit of all items per the group and time period selected.

Where there are vertical dividers in the interface, such as the Crafting UI, these can now also be dragged left and right to be resized. Combined with table customisation this offers a lot of possibilities to tailor your addon to your specific preferences.

Group Tree

In all places that the Group Tree is surfaced, it’s now much easier to select or deselect and expand or collapse all of your groups with the options taken out of the context menu.

All of this UI contextual information, such as positioning, sizing, displayed/hidden columns plus Group Tree selection will be saved and persist across sessions either per character, per profile, or globally as appropriate.

Inputs & Selections

Creating Custom Sources wasn’t the most elegant experience in 4.9, so we have introduced a new dialog which also includes the validation mentioned in the previous blog. If the string you have entered is not valid, the text box will be highlighted red and saving will not be possible until the string is valid.

Selecting multiple items can be quite cumbersome, such as a list of items in a Group or the items shown in ‘Post From Bags’ at the Auction House. A big quality of life improvement in 4.10 is the addition of multi-select while dragging with the right mouse button held down to quickly select multiple rows.

Commodity Buying

With the changes introduced in patch 8.3, there was a lot more room for improvement in the flow and process of purchasing commodity items from the Auction House. With 4.10 we have introduced a new dialog that takes inspiration from the Blizzard UI but enhances it to meet the expectations of functionality in TSM.

You can see the % at which the items are posted against your independent search or Shopping scan, plus a total buyout is dynamically updated for the quantity you are selecting to purchase. The overall experience is much smoother and quicker than before.

Sign up to the TSM 4.10 Beta!

We’re sure you’re excited to check out TSM 4.10, and we certainly can’t wait to start the Beta testing phase. You can sign up for a Beta invite by visiting our Registration page, or guarantee your access the moment it starts with a TSM Premium membership.

As always, join us on Discord to participate in the #discussion of TSM 4.10 and share your feedback!

TSM 4.10: New Sources

This is the first in a series of TSM 4.10 feature highlight blogs. Today we will introduce the new Price Sources and Value Sources, and new places you can use them in 4.10

Operation-Based Price Sources

When you’re setting up Auctioning Operations for example, you might have already set up a preferred maximum purchase price in a Shopping Operation or vice versa. We thought it would be beneficial to leverage those prices in other Operations so in TSM 4.10 there are new Operation-based Price Sources available.

In the example, your Maximum Purchase price from a Shopping Operation can be referenced as shoppingopmax. If you’ve assigned an Auctioning Operation to a group, the Minimum, Normal, and Maximum price can be referenced as auctioningopmin, auctioningopnorm, and auctioningopmax respectively.

Additionally, if your Sniper Operation differs in Maximum Purchase price you can reference this with sniperopmax. Now you can buy things for less than your Minimum Auctioning price, or post things for more than your Maximum Purchase price!

Smart Average Buy Changes

A lot of you make use of the ‘Smart Average Buy’ setting, which sets your Average Buy price according to the number of the item you currently hold. In TSM 4.10 this will become its own Price Source in the form of SmartAvgBuy, independent of AvgBuy.

If you currently have none of a particular item, then SmartAvgBuy will be invalid for that item. However, if you have ever purchased the item then AvgBuy will return the average of all purchases.

Personal Sale Rate

A common request we receive is to expand the Region Sale Rate values to specific Realms. We would certainly love to do that but there’s just not enough data to provide something meaningful. Having said that, we believe in making use of the data we do have and the next best thing is your own data. From your own Accounting Data we can calculate your personal Sale Rate and you can reference this as SaleRate in TSM 4.10.

Inventory Data

Sometimes you want to change your action, or make a decision based on how many of a particular item you have. Perhaps you might buy fewer if you already have a large stock, or you’d pay more if you don’t have many on hand. The new Value Source NumInventory represents your total inventory quantity of a particular item. This will include your bags, the AH, your bank, mailbox, alts, and guild bank.

Using The New Sources

Many Operation settings only allowed integers, such as buying 500 items in a Shopping Operation or making a maximum of 20 items in a Crafting Operation. We felt this was quite restrictive for goblins that had mastered a lot of TSM configuration, so in TSM 4.10 we have converted these fields to accept Custom Strings.

This also applies to Auctioning Operation settings, including Post Cap, Max Expires, Keep Quantity, and Stack Size which will all accept Custom Strings.

For some simple examples, now you can set a lower Post Cap based on the new NumInventory Value Source, or Craft more of an item if the DBRegionSaleRate is greater than a certain threshold with a Logic Function.

On a related note, the Auctioning Operation Post Cap limit has also been increased to 50,000 from 5,000 in Retail WoW.

Finally, to help with editing all of these settings we have also implemented some improvements to the input fields of Operations. If a Custom String is invalid, the field will be highlighted red and will prevent you from pressing ‘enter’ to save it. Previously this would have cleared the field, but your progress will persist and allow you to double check your input and close any parentheses.

Further Reading

Our Knowledge Base has been updated with all of the available Custom Strings including Price Sources, Value Sources and Functions. You can reference the documentation and find some examples while you’re configuring your addon.

Sign up to the TSM 4.10 Beta!

We’re sure you’re excited to check out TSM 4.10, and we certainly can’t wait to start the Beta testing phase. You can sign up for a Beta invite by visiting our Registration page, or guarantee your access the moment it starts with a TSM Premium membership.

As always, join us on Discord to participate in the #discussion of TSM 4.10 and share your feedback!

Auction House Throttling

We’d like to extend our thanks to the gold-making and TradeSkillMaster community for sharing constructive and polite feedback after the changes to the Auction House were announced earlier this week.

At that time we made the decision to push an update to TSM that disabled the TSM Sniper functionality in the Retail version of the game, in the hope that Blizzard responded to our requests to engage in discussions on how we can contribute to improve the Auction House for everyone.

Blizzard continued to make adjustments and finally confirmed publicly that their initial implementation of ‘Throttling’ has been significantly relaxed.

It is worth noting that there has been a throttle of 100 searches per 60 seconds since patch 8.3 went live. This would have appeared as your TSM scan pausing for a while, but importantly would not have impacted posting speed as the recent throttling did. We believe the fact that people are just now noticing this shows how slow the Auction House has been since 8.3 launched, and how much faster it is now that Blizzard have reverted or relaxed the more recently implemented aggressive throttling.

At this point in time, we plan to re-enable Sniper with TSM4.10 as we have still not heard back from Blizzard. However, we remain absolutely open to working with their team to address any concerns they are willing to share regarding TSM functionality or implementation. As we’ve expressed in the past, we are prepared to make changes to TSM, including permanently removing the Sniper feature to help improve the AH for everyone. We hope to hear back from them soon on these topics.

TSM 4.10 Change Log

We’re very excited to share the following work-in-progress list of changes you can expect in TSM 4.10. Over the coming weeks we’ll deep-dive and highlight some of these new features in future blog posts.

You can register your interest to participate in the upcoming TSM 4.10 beta test by visiting this sign-up page, or guarantee instant access once it’s available with a priority Beta invite through TSM Premium. There is currently no date set for when the Beta phase will begin.

We would love to hear your thoughts on what you’re most excited about! You can join the discussion in Discord, or Tweet us @TSMAddon with hashtag #TSM410

Addon UI Customizations

  • The UI is now much more customizable, including the following:
    • You can now select between a few different themes to change the color scheme of all TSM windows.
    • Scrolling tables can now have their columns resized and hidden.
    • Vertical dividers can now be dragged to resize the left/right content.
    • In selection lists (i.e. group item lists and Auctioning “Post from Bags” list) now allow for dragging with the right mouse button down to quickly select multiple rows.
    • All UI state and context (i.e. collapsed / expanded groups, divider position, table context, etc) is saved between sessions.

General Features

  • Account syncing has been updated to include Accounting sales and purchases.
  • Filter strings now support a max quality (i.e. /armor/uncommon/epic).
  • Throughout TSM, there have been a ton of optimizations (especially around UI performance) and minor fixes. Some of the bug fixes are detailed below:
    • Fixed error with Skillet + TSM loaded.
    • Fixed recording of incorrect commodity purchase quantities when not using TSM to open mail.
    • Fixed a bug where the “Destroy Next” button would get stuck.
    • Fixed various issues when buying commodities via Shopping / Sniper.
    • Fixed the auction purchase message to properly show the item / price.
    • Fixed issue with Auctioning not posting the right quantity of commodities.

Price Sources

  • There are new operation-based price sources available:
    • auctioningopmin, auctioningopmax, auctioningopnormal, shoppingmax, sniperopbelow
  • A new SmartAvgBuy price source has been added alongside the existing AvgBuy price source to replace the previous “Use Smart Average for Purchase Price” setting.
  • A new SaleRate price source has been added which represents your personal sale rate.
  • A new NumInventory price source has been added to represent your total inventory quantity.

Auction House

  • The Shopping tab of the auction house has been renamed to Browse and the various auction tabs have been reordered.
  • Browse scans now show browse results as they are loaded, and allow for pausing to quickly buy items before the entire scan finishes.
  • Auctioning scans can now be paused/resumed to post/cancel items before the scan completes.
  • The “even stacks” option has been removed from Shopping/Browse as it is no longer needed with the new commodity system in 8.3
  • The Bid and Buyout confirmation window with Browse and Sniper can now be added to the TSM macro.
  • You can now quickly cancel your own auctions from Browse (retail only).
  • The Crafting search mode has been removed from Shopping, and replaced with the (pre-existing) “/crafting” filter option.
  • The default commodity purchase quantity will now be more intelligently set when doing certain Shopping searches (i.e. gathering).
  • The My Auctions UI can now be sorted (retail only)
  • Favorited Auctioning searches can now be renamed

Operations

  • Various Auctioning operation settings (post cap, max expires, keep quantity, stack size) now accept custom prices.
  • Restock quantity settings within Shopping and Crafting operations now accept custom prices.
  • The Auctioning post cap has increased to 50k for retail.

Crafting

  • The crafting queue will now be sorted by profit (after whether or not you have the mats needed to craft things).
  • Recipes can now be favorited within the Crafting UI to allow for easy access.
  • Material costs can now be easily reset to the default value.
  • The crafting tooltip will now show for all craftable items, even if the crafting cost isn’t currently valid, to allow for more easy debugging of missing mat costs.

Groups

  • You can now search for any item in the game and easily add it to a group via the new Base Group UI.
  • A group with multiple operations can now have its operations easily be reordered by clicking and dragging them.

Dashboard

  • The gold graph on the dashboard is now much more interactive and provides significantly more detail.

Destroying / Ledger

  • The Destroying UI now allows for selecting a specific item to destroy next, and shows the expected results at the top of the UI.
  • Added a “Total” column to the Sales and Purchases tabs of Ledger
  • Added total and % profit columns to Resale tab of Ledger

Get 30 Days of free TSM Premium!

We understand that you may have some extra time available at the moment, and World of Warcraft may even be a welcome escape. If you’re looking to obtain the sought after Brutosaur mount or are currently focusing your energy on kickstarting your gold-making activities, we wanted to strengthen your efforts with 30 free days of TradeSkillMaster Premium.

What do I get with TradeSkillMaster Premium?

  • Peace of mind, with automated remote backups of all your TSM profiles, groups, operations and accounting data. In the event of data loss, or moving to a new system, you won’t have to worry about rebuilding your TSM configuration from the ground up. Check your latest backups and mark up to 20 as ‘saved’ so they’ll never be removed.
  • Quality of life, with Great Deal searching directly in-game, no need to leave the Auction House. Head to the Shopping tab and search with a click.
  • Additional perks, with ad-free site browsing and recognition in our Discord server. Sync your TSM Account with our bot on Discord to get a golden name, plus access to a private off-topic chat for Premium members.

How do I get 30 free days of TradeSkillMaster Premium?

If you’re not already a Premium TSM member, you can opt-in for 30 days of free TSM Premium by using code TSM2020 on our redeem page. This code will be active from today, May 1st, through to May 31st at 23:59 Pacific. You must register for a free TSM account in order to redeem the code.

Sniping with TSM in 8.3

Since the new Auction House changes went live in patch 8.3, we wanted to clarify some of the changes in fuctionality to the Sniper feature in TradeSkillMaster.

One of the biggest underlying changes, which was referenced in the blog post earlier this year, is that the AH no longer has ‘pages’.

Before 8.3 you could only see 50 auctions at a time, and you could only get information for another set of 50 auctions if you loaded the next or previous page. This also meant that there was a ‘first’ page and a ‘last’ page, and based on the way Auctions were sorted you could reliably identify those which had just been posted if they were on the ‘last’ page.

After 8.3 with pages being removed and no means to sort auctions by ‘most recent’, the only way to replicate the Sniper functionality is to repeatedly run a search for the items on the Auction House in general – just like you would search for something in the Default Blizzard UI.

This may feel sluggish and slower compared to how Sniper functioned before 8.3, so we would recommend using a smaller, focused group of items for a targeted approach to Sniping which requires searching for fewer things on the Auction House. We would also recommend removing the #Default Sniper Operation from the Base Group, as that will waste time running searches for all items that are not otherwise explicitly grouped.

When you search for an item in TSM or in the Default Blizzard UI, all items listed will be returned since there are no pages as described earlier. This behaviour will also occur behind the scenes when Sniping which slows down the process a little further – so when an auction is found to match your Sniper Operation, all auctions listed for that item will be loaded but those that do not match your Sniper Operation will be discarded by TSM.

We hope you are still finding deals while using TSM Sniper in 8.3. We will continue to explore options to improve the feature and adapt it to the new Auction House.

TradeSkillMaster to power Classic AH Database by NexusHub

We’re very happy to announce our partnership with NexusHub, to provide Auction House data for a brand new Classic WoW AH Database.

Through the NexusHub, you can monitor and report on current item prices on the Classic WoW Auction House as well as dive in to pricing history for all realms and factions in both regions, completely free. With this data they are also able to offer estimated Crafting profits and material price information for your convenience.

In addition, the entire database is available in a fully open and free API to integrate in your gold-making spreadsheets, apps or services.

You can access the site via desktop and mobile via classic.nexushub.co or nexushub.co/wow-classic today!

Read more from NexusHub developer Nakroma on the /r/woweconomy subreddit.

TSM Addon Changes for Patch 8.3

The first update to TradeSkillMaster in 2020 will be a considerable adaptation to the upcoming Auction House changes planned in Patch 8.3. If you haven’t heard about the in-game AH overhaul, or would like a reminder of the details, head over to the Wowhead preview post here.

The TSM Team have been primarily focusing getting the addon ready for Patch 8.3 since it was announced and made available on the PTR back in October. The following changes and adjustments have been made in the TSM Addon in Retail WoW for Patch 8.3 (Classic is not affected by this update):

Shopping & Sniper

One of the main changes of the Auction House is that listings are no longer paginated. You will no longer see 50 listings per page, because the AH is just one page now. This means there is no longer a first and last page of listed items.

Because of this change, we have adapted the Buyout Sniper to scan the entire Auction House. Additionally we have decided to retire the Bid Sniper, since it is no longer possible to bid on ‘commodities’ or sort them by duration.

When buying ‘commodities’, an extra confirmation dialog will be shown to enter the quantity to be bought at the lowest price. TSM can only let you buy the lowest priced commodities as per the new underlying Auction House behaviour.

Auctioning

With the new ‘commodities’ system, the Stack Size is no longer important in an Auctioning Operation so it has been removed. The Post Cap will determine how many items you are posting now, which has a maximum quantity increased to 5,000 from 200. Having multiple Auctioning Operations assigned to a group isn’t as useful as it was prior to 8.3, but this functionality has not been removed from TSM – your commodities will be posted in one large stack, per Operation.

When you run a Cancel Scan, TSM will suggest that you cancel an Auction that has been undercut, or has been listed more recently than your own at the same price.

It is also no longer necessary to Undercut with the new ‘last-in-first-out’ system, so Auctioning Operations will have no Undercut set on creation and by default.

All Auctioning Operations will be automatically migrated to function in 8.3 with the previously mentioned conditions in mind:

– Existing Operations with a Post Cap and Stack Size will multiply (Post Cap * Stack Size) to create a new Post Cap value
– Existing Operations with fixed-amount Undercuts will be rounded to the nearest 1s, meaning the default 1c will become ‘0’

Mailing

Some other infrastructure changes that Blizzard introduced for Patch 8.3 has allowed the mailbox to operate more efficiently. TSM will be updated to leverage the new 100 item inbox (up from 50) and 15 second mailbox refresh (down from 60).

Preview

You can test out all of the new changes on the PTR by updating to TSM4 version 4.9, which is live now. You can grab it on Twitch or let your TSM Desktop Application automatically update for your convenience.

Should you encounter any issues, please drop by our Discord server and let us know!