Following on from our last update with a recap of what was done and was to come in TSM in support of Dragonflight professions and systems – we’re pleased to share further improvements as well as the release of TSM 4.13!
Recent Dragonflight Profession Updates
Rounding out the last releases in TSM 4.12, let’s recap what has been introduced since the start of the year and our last blog update.
Updated milling / prospecting / disenchanting rates for Dragonflight reagents.
Given the significant variations of profession knowledge and equipment we gathered a lot of data to represent averages across the board as best as possible.
New quality selector to easily switch between different target qualities for a given crafted item, as well as easy access to add finishing reagents.
Selecting a different quality will automatically adjust the reagents selected to meet the selected quality, and is further enhanced in 4.13!
Quality reagents can now easily be changed by clicking on the material row in the material list
Seeing each quality of the reagent for at-a-glance pricing info and inventory quantity helps you decide what to use
New improvements in 4.13
With the launch of patch 10.15 we are introducing version 4.13 of TSM with a number of improvements to Dragonflight profession support and other additions we think you’ll love.
4.13 Profession Updates
Iterating on the things introduced in 4.12, we have continued to improve profession support including:
Adding support for Dragonflight salvaging for milling and prospecting
Adding support for crafting inspiration to show potential cost and profit of a crafted item that is not guaranteed
Improving the Optional Reagent flow further from the modal introduced in 4.12 to an in-line editor when a recipe is selected, allowing quicker access to add embellishments and finishing reagents
Region-wide support in 10.1.5
With the introduction of direct trading between any characters for gold and items on any realm in a given region, we are also very excited to expand on TSM cross-faction support added in 4.12 to cover region-wide tracking and reporting.
In 4.13, and if the option is enabled in the TSM General Settings, addon information such as inventory and accounting data will be available on any realm in your region. That way you can reference what you paid for an item and see how many you have on any realm from any other realm.
This will also include gold quantity and gold history, so your TSM Dashboard will cover all realms in your region if you’re actively using the addon on multiple realms!
To manage Accounting Data, the option to remove old sales and purchases has been modified to support an input instead of a predefined list in the Accounting Settings. If you’re making use of this feature and experience some performance issues it’s recommended to purge older data (which won’t affect your gold charts).
Custom String Performance Enhancements
Some TSM users have created some monster Custom Strings for all kinds of Operations and material prices. We’ve spent some time optimizing how Custom Strings are calculated to improve performance for very large or complex Custom Strings in very large profiles. This should also reduce the number of errors encountered when using TSM with some content creator profiles.
Grouping pets by level
We are also introducing ‘item level’ grouping for Pets in 4.13, where the pet item level translates to the level of the pet. When you’re grouping items by ‘item level’ they will be treated differently when shopping and posting through operations vs pets of other levels that are not grouped for example.
As the launch of the Dragonflight expansion draws near, we’re very happy to announce the beta test of the 4.12 addon update to TradeSkillMaster!
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.
Let’s take a look at some of the major features 4.12 brings!
New Crafting UI
To support the upcoming Dragonflight Profession changes, we’ve taken a look at the overall design of the Crafting UI for professions. This approach will form the basis of the UI design improvements as the new expansion features are introduced.
You’ll notice primarily that the Group Restocking flow has been moved out of a sub-tab and is presented at the top of the Craft Queue. Selecting Restock Groups will show the Group Tree and from here you can select any Groups that have a Crafting Operation assigned to be restocked.
At the bottom of the Crafting UI there has been some rearranging of some of the familiar elements including the reagents required for the recipe, the crafting cost, rank, and any recipe status such as ‘Missing Materials’ or ‘On Cooldown’. This will accommodate the new Dragonflight features including profession skills, and reagent quality selection.
In the Craft Queue itself, there’s a new indicator showing when you’re not logged into a character that can craft that particular item.
Pricing & Data Updates
Korean & Taiwan Region Support
We’ve been working hard to expand the reach of TradeSkillMaster, and with recent improvements by Blizzard on the Community Auction House API data feed we are very happy to be able to include support for more WoW Regions in 4.12. TSM users in Korea and Taiwan will now be able to use the TSM Desktop Application to get pricing updates exactly the same as users playing on North American and European realms.
Over the years we’ve had a lot of feedback and discussion around the use of ‘AuctionDB Minimum Buyout’ to represent the material cost of reagents, and we have generally not recommended this approach for various reasons. However, we do appreciate that there is a middle ground between what is happening on the Auction House ‘now’ and what has happened on average over the last 14 days with the ‘AuctionDB Market Value’ calculation – especially when there are significant changes to the economy such as an expansion launch, or a patch affecting a sub-set of items and markets.
With that in mind, we are introducing a new Price Source called ‘AuctionDB Recent’, or DBRecent. This Price Source uses the same approach for ‘AuctionDB Market Value’ however it is only applied to the auctions contained in the most recent pricing snapshot. It is not an average over time, nor is it a single data point for one auction at the lowest price contained in the last price snapshot.
We hope this can create even more flexibility when determining the value of something, and allow for more input to any decisions you make while executing your gold-making strategy.
Pricing Trend Indicators
In addition to the new Price Source, we are introducing trend indicators in item tooltips where pricing data is available.
Trend Indicators
In this example, you will see two trend indicators. The first is beside Market Value which represents the trend when compared to the Historical Price, this trend indicator is enabled by default. The second is beside Region Market Value Avg which represents the trend when compared to the Region Historical Price, this trend indicator is disabled by default.
Improvements to Region Sale Data
Both Region Sale Rate and Region Sold Per Day have been given another decimal point to give more visibility on items that sell infrequently. Previously, an item that had a Region Sale Rate lower than 0.01 for example, indicating that fewer than 1 in every 100 auctions posted sells on average, would not have a valid value for this source. Now, this value can go down to 0.001 which would indicate that 1 in every 1000 auctions posted sells on average.
Retail Scanning Improvements
Since the launch of the region-wide commodities, Blizzard has not resolved several issues with addons interacting with the Auction House. One of these issues is failing to return Seller information during a Post Scan with an Auctioning Operation. With the launch of TSM 4.12, we have decided to workaround this issue by ignoring the Seller information for posted auctions, which should improve scanning performance, particularly Post Scans.
As a result of this decision, we are retiring the ‘whitelist’ and ‘blacklist’ features in Retail which relied on the Seller information being available.
Cross-Faction Support in Retail
Earlier this year, Cross-Faction support was introduced in Shadowlands. This means you can now leverage professions, items, and gold on any realm regardless of whether the characters are Horde or Alliance.
With 4.12 we have introduced support for inventory/item tracking between factions in the Ledger and item tooltips, profession and recipe data is considered if the recipe is known on the opposite faction, gold is tracked across factions including in the gold graph of the TSM Dashboard, plus the ability to see your opposite faction characters in the Alts dropdown in the Mail UI.
Custom String Editing UI
We’ve supercharged the experience of editing Custom Strings in Operations, with IDE-style syntax highlighting.
Syntax highlight, invalid price source, and unbalanced parentheses
This new modal will give much more information when things go wrong like typos, unbalanced parentheses, missing values, or unexpected characters when building out a Custom String. It also includes automatic white-spacing for easier reading and clearer indications that the input is saved without accidentally closing/escaping the editor.
Automatic white-spacing once saved
Performance & General Enhancements
Under-the-hood Improvements
We’ve taken a look through a lot of the TSM addon codebase and refactored things to improve the rendering of TSM Addon windows and make them even more responsive.
Commodity buying reliability has also been improved while browsing in general and during a Gathering search.
Group Management
Item tracking is now more intelligent and can distinguish between things that are grouped as ‘Base Item’ and those that are grouped as ‘Item Level’. This means you can now manage inventory for things like transmog that could be any item level due to scaling but is generally grouped by Base Item.
When searching the Base Group, we have introduced the Select/Deselect All option that is available in most other Group Trees. Additionally when selecting an option in the ‘Show ungrouped items as’ drop down menu while managing groups, this selection will persist when navigating around the TSM UI or closing and reopening it.
The Addon API has been enhanced to include an option for returning items that are in a given TSM group, check the Addon API documentation to learn more.
Getting Help
Please join our Discord server as per the Get Started instructions, to share your feedback on the 4.12 Beta or report any bugs and issues you encounter.
Let’s start with the actions you are recommended to take as a TSM user:
All users: Update the TSM Desktop Application to the latest version (r410)
Your app should update automatically, but you can download it here manually
All users: Re-select any Burning Crusade Realms previously configured on the Realm Selection Page for pricing data
All users: Enable any Group Notifications previously selected on the Deal Notifications Page
Background
Early in the morning US time on Friday, March 25th, we were notified by our hosting provider that the hard drive containing our primary database died, and they were unable to recover any data from it. After a ton of work, we have since been able to restore all of our services. However, there was some data which we, unfortunately, were not able to recover, which is listed as follows:
Premium user addon backups
Desktop App realm selections for Burning Crusade realms
User configuration data for Group Notifications
Some other user account-level and user configuration changes between 4am PDT on March 24th and when our website was brought back online including new accounts and any other changes made on our website during that time
What we Did
We take regular backups of our database and quickly worked to restore from those backups on Friday. Unfortunately, we realized that our backup process had not been updated to include database tables related to Burning Crusade Classic. Additionally, a configuration issue with a script that manages Premium user addon backups also resulted in all backups being lost as a result of this outage.
On Saturday we brought the website back online in a read-only mode as we continued to try to restore some additional database data from a few raw database files which had not been corrupted. After much work, we were successful at restoring some additional data which we otherwise didn’t have proper backups of, but unfortunately, this still left us at the list above of completely lost data.
Naturally, the Premium user addon backups are the most critical. Working with a manifest of the missing files, we modified TSM Desktop Application (version r410) to re-upload any backup files that match the name from the recovered manifest. While we realize this does not guarantee a full recovery of all previously synced backups we have been able to get coverage of a majority of recent backups stored locally to Premium users.
With this in mind, we have set up a dedicated contact address that is available to Premium users who may be missing an important backup that was not captured in the re-upload efforts. We encourage those to reach out to [email protected] and we will explore any available options to make this right.
Additionally, with new resources available along with the protections and processes described in the next section of this post, we have removed the limit on the number of Premium user addon backups that can be marked as ‘saved’ and stored by TSM in the cloud going forward. This means Premium users no longer have to decide which backups to keep available long-term and all backups will be saved indefinitely.
Finally, if you created an account or reset your password on March 24th or March 25th and are having trouble logging in, it is recommended to re-create your account or reset your password again.
Learnings / Improvements
We’ve only had one outage like this in the past, but this one is significantly more serious given the loss of user data. We do take seriously the impact of this event and are working hard to correct things in the short-term, as we discussed above, as well as make immediate changes to prevent this from happening again in the future.
First and foremost, we’ve enabled multiple additional levels of redundancy and protection around our Premium user addon backups. This will prevent them from being irreversibly lost in the future, along with providing a mechanism to quickly recover them if any issues arise. This will have a non-negligible impact on our infrastructure costs, as it is certainly a non-trivial amount of data, especially with the change we’re making to not limit the number of backups we store for people but is the right thing to do given the importance of this data.
Next, we have addressed the gap in our database backup process which resulted in some user configuration data being lost, so any similar event in the future will just be a matter of quickly restoring the backups we have. We’ve also built a number of additional tools to help us recover any lost data in the future, although, of course, we hope we’ll never need to use those.
Lastly, the affected database has been running since 2016. A lot has changed since then in the server infrastructure space, and we’ve been steadily working over the past year to reimplement and migrate our backend services and infrastructure to a more modern, scalable, and maintainable architecture. Most of this has been behind the scenes and is already supporting more user-facing things like Ledger and all of the AuctionDB data which is downloaded by the desktop app, but this outage has definitely raised the importance of moving more things over to this much better system as quickly as possible.
Closing Thoughts
To wrap things up, we’d like to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this downtime and for the loss of data that occurred. We are looking forward to doing better and further improving the software and services we provide moving forward, and appreciate your continued support and usage of TSM. If you would like to share any thoughts, questions, or feedback – please feel free to share them in the #discussion channel on our Discord server.
Version 4.11 of TradeSkillMaster is now available for general release! Your Desktop application will update your addon automatically, or you can download it directly from our site or your favourite addon manager.
More details on all the new features can be found in our beta announcement post, but here’s a quick reminder of the highlights for this release:
Full Optional Reagent Support, including Crafting Operations, Gathering, and applying them in the TSM UI
Improved item Grouping, with the option to group by ilvl while ignoring secondary stats:
Granular item Tracking, with inventory considered by ilvl/variation instead of only by name
Drag & Drop for items between groups:
Region Sale Data for Classic, BCC, and Battle Pets in Retail
Custom Themes with export/import options:
Various under-the-hood optimisations for scrolling tables with a lot of results and syncing data between accounts
Please do join us in Discord if you run into any issues or encounter a bug or error in-game, we’ll be happy to help!
We are thrilled to announce that the beta test of TradeSkillMaster 4.11 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.
Let’s take a look at some of the major features 4.11 brings!
Shadowlands Profession Support
The biggest upgrade in 4.11 is supporting the new profession system introduced in Shadowlands, which includes optional reagents for your recipes and the various outcomes of those optional reagent combinations – including the base legendary crafted items.
Rank 4 legendary base item with accurate crafting cost in TSM 4.11
The TSM Crafting UI has the added functionality of applying optional reagents for secondary stats and ilvl, Crafting costs and profits are now accurate for the item variation you have, plus your Crafting Operations and Tasklist will consider the optional reagents required!
Adding Optional Reagents to a Craft in the TSM 4.11 Crafting UI
Speaking of grouping your items, a new option has been introduced to accommodate the various ways to craft in Shadowlands. In addition to grouping items by their specific variation, and by ignoring all variations, the new option is to only consider the ilvl of the item while ignoring the secondary stats.
Showing ungrouped items by ilvl while ignoring secondary stats in the TSM Groups UI
This means you can group, for example, ilvl 87, ilvl 151, and ilvl 168 crafted items separately but ignore the secondary stats, then apply distinct Crafting Operations to restock a certain ilvl, and Auctioning Operations to undercut the certain ilvl regardless of the secondary stats. To support this, inventory tracking has also been enhanced to track items more specifically by ilvl rather than by name only.
With 4 Shadebound Vest items in bags, TSM only tracks 2 with ilvl 151
Group & Item Management
In TSM 4.11 it’s even easier to manage your Groups and move items between them. Now you can drag and drop selected items between Groups, without needing to remove them or have them on hand! Selecting multiple items is also supported. Check this short video demonstration:
Drag and drop single or multiple items between groups in TSM 4.11
Custom Themes
Building on the introduction of Themes in TSM 4.10, we’ve added the option to customise the colour palette to your own preferences! Once you’ve found your perfect colours you can export a string to share with your friends to import.
For Classic Era and Burning Crusade Classic players, region-wide sale data is now generated and available via the TSM Desktop Application. This means you can now reference dbregionsalerate and dbregionsoldperday in your Operations!
For Retail players, this sale data is now also available on Battle Pets! This is particularly useful for those that like to flip pets across realms in your region.
TSM Region Sale Data now available for Classic Realms and Pets on Retail
Addon Optimisations
Various under-the-hood tweaks and tuning have been implemented, with an aim to improve stability and reduce lag when crafting, scrolling large tables from Shopping or Browse searches, and syncing data between accounts.
What’s next?
With all the features and enhancements we have introduced in 4.11 (and earlier!), we thought of ways to share and discuss the things we are planning to do in future updates of TradeSkillMaster and get your feedback or input on what is important to you as an every day user of the addon.
As an experiment we have created a Trello board with a public ‘Roadmap’, or a list of ideas and features we would like to introduce to take your gold-making to the next level with TSM. We would love to hear what you think!
Getting Help
Please join our Discord server as per the Get Started instructions, to share your feedback on the 4.11 Beta or report any bugs and issues you encounter.
It’s been possible to export your TSM Accounting data through the Desktop Application for quite some time, usually to manipulate and analyse in your favourite spreadsheeting software. To do this in the past meant maintaining several documents, and trying to figure out how to manually build formulae to interpret the vast amount of data available.
We wanted to power up this area of your gold-making, making it easier to take a deep dive into your sales and purchases to unearth the answer to questions like ‘Which Group has the highest profit margin?’ or ‘Where can I reduce my expenses?’ or maybe ‘Where am I taking the biggest losses?’.
To help you answer these questions, and many more, we’re very excited to announce the latest evolution to the TradeSkillMaster suite, with the launch of TSM Ledger – a powerful web-based analytics tool for your TSM Addon transactions, purchases and sales for Retail and Classic WoW.
TSM Ledger will use your Accounting data, allowing for automatic graphing and charting of your activity in-game over days, weeks or months – using pre-built reports or creating your own Data Queries. You can build your own Dashboards with your favourite searches, and highlight particular metrics that you want to keep track of regularly and personalise your analytic experience.
For those with large gold-making empires, you can filter between accounts, servers, profiles, or characters – making it incredibly easy to identify any weak links in the chain or even capitalise on an opportunity that may have otherwise been missed.
As a TSM Premium subscriber, your data will be automatically synced, so you don’t have to upload anything manually. If you’re not on TSM Premium you can upload things as-and-when you log out of the game, or when you need to.
You may recognise this tool, launched earlier this year by magorukun, and we’re just as excited to welcome him to the TSM Team to offer this tool as a native extension of TradeSkillMaster. You can view what’s upcoming for TSM Ledger on the public roadmap, where you’ll see there are lots of cool things planned. We can’t wait to hear what we can do make this tool the best it can be for all of your analysis requirements.
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!
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).
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!
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!
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.
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.
