TSM 4 Speculation and a retrospective

Tradeskillmaster 4 was recently announced by the TSM team. I am obviously a huge fan of TSM, so this is extremely exciting.

Today we’re going to talk about TSM and why I am such a fan, as well as some speculation on what might be included in TSM 4. My long term memory isn’t really good enough that I remember the leap from 1 to 2 or from 2 to 3. I do remember the first time I found TSM and realized that this was definetly the addon for me.

My history with TSM

Through the help of google I have figured out that TSM has been out at least since the end of Wrath of the Lich King. I got my start in gold making during Wrath, specifically jumping on the glyph bandwagon.

Before TSM, Auctioneer and QuickAuctions were the addons of choice for AH play. And while they could get the job done, none of them were at the level of TSM.

QuickAuctions3 UI

Love at first sight

My first foray into TSM was amazing. I had just started realizing the power of crafting for making gold and automating posting settings to work across items was a major milestone. I have always had an affinity for logic, so the set-up was quite intuitive for me. (Lucky Bastard). I didn’t play WoW too much during Cataclysm, so I only used it in fairly small scales, but I was absolutely amazed at what it could do for me.

For me, the core of TSM is the auctioning interface. It is the main feature I use and by far the biggest advantage of the addon.

Getting good

The first time I had a large scale gold operation running was during Mists of Pandaria. At the time I was using all of the crafting professions in the game to make gold. I had a pretty good TSM set/up, that used crafting operations, mailing and auctioning to effectively move a lot of product. I learned by doing and by reading the gold bloggers of the day.

Legion

During Legion have gotten much better at TSM. My operations use more refined pricing settings and a wider variety of price sources and stack sizes. I have also started flipping pets cross realm and I do BoE flipping on 7 realms using my core setup.

Why I love TSM

The simple reason is that I can outsource my decision making to preset rules. I can create rules that guarantee that my operations generate a profit. This is such a massive time/saver it cannot be overstated and it allows me to have a very large operation.

Decisions come in a lot of flavors in Gold making. Examples include:

  • Should I buy this item?
  • What price should I post this item at?
  • Which items should I craft?
  • What’s a good price to buy this material at?

Using my TSM settings all of these questions can be answered dynamically. You can find all the settings I have published in my pastebin. The answers change over time and TSM can keep your operation running smoothly.

What features am I hoping for

My gold making is so tied to TSM it is hard to find issues with the addon. I can’t really envision anything more or less in terms of functionality. In terms of one server, oone account gameplay I do not think there’s much that’s missing. While I agree with people that the addon can be inaccesible I do not personally think that is a major issue. It is after all also the biggest selling point. It is inaccessible, because it is so extremely powerful.

There are some features I personally would love to see. Most of this is very much in the nice to have realm and is definetly only useful for more practiced goblins. They would definetly improve the addon for me personally.

Stronger mathematics

The ability to use more complex mathematical formulas to create pricing sources would be very interesting. You could use this both for making shopping decisions and for posting. I don’t have any use cases off the top of my head, but I have a significant background in statistics, so I am sure I would find one.

Cross-realm accounting

In Legion I have started flipping pets cross-realm. It would be amazing to be able to access the global average buy and sell prices across your realms for pets at least. This would let me create a way better set-up for flipping pets cross-realm. I could actually feel confident buying on a wider variety of realms than I currently do.

Cross-account accounting

This is very much tied to the last point. I have two accounts and if I mail gold from one to the other it is listed as an expense. This makes the accounting summary pretty useless. Just look at the screenshot below.

Support for more than 5 operations

I have just recently started experimenting with multiple operations for the same item. If you are running a large scale material operation 5 operations becomes too little quite fast actually. I think support for more auctioning operations for a single group would be very nice.

Closing remarks

I am extremely proud to be an affiliate partner with TSM, and I am very exciting to see what version 4.0 has in store for us. I will likely be writing a full guide series as soon as we get the new version, although it depends on how far out the launch is. It’s about time for an up to date written TSM guide.

 

If you like my blog, you should follow me on twitch and twitter because it will give you a live glimpse into my gold making adventures. 

 

7 thoughts on “TSM 4 Speculation and a retrospective

  1. Nothing about the performance? TSM 3 is a complete resource hog, it uses so much cpu and memory even wen not doing anything TSM related (cpu profiling addons show TSM by far the most cpu consuming addon when I’m alone in my garrison, not doing anything and no windows open on the screen), profession windows and crafting itself are freezing the game all the time (micro-freezes, stutters – same on 2 different gaming PCs I play on) and then the loading times are significantly increased vs with addon off (with the exception of loading times impacted, the other issues were never a thing in TSM 2). Hoping they’d manage to make a ten-fold efficiency increase there *prays to the TSM gods*

    1. I can’t really remember WoW without TSM 3, so I can’t relate to how the performance should be.

      Outside of UI reloads I haven’t personally noticed any performance issues. That being said any performance increases would be be amazing

      1. You can just disable TSM and try it without for a few mins >.<
        Do some measurements in both idle and heavy settings (outdoor raids, BGs etc), just look at fps and at cpu usage too (if you can measure it – recommended).
        One particular thing when I'm not happy at all with TSM 3 is, ok, letting aside the hickups and the benchmarks/number measurements and the longer loading screens… It's that at 60 fps, when I have TSM3 on the game feels slowly responsive vs with TSM3 off and still 60 fps. Display is showing constant 60.0 fps, but I could point out at any "blind" test which version of the 60 fps has TSM on and which has it off. It's got something to do with input lag or something. I preffer keeping TSM3 enabled even when I'm questing and such (disabling and enabling TSM everyday several times would be a complete mess that I'm not up to do all the time) but really I wish that having TSM enabled would have literally 0 impact on resource usage when I'm not using it. I really have no clue why it's actually affecting the game when I'm not using it in the first place.

  2. What I would really like to see is the ability to pause a Shopping search so I can jump on some deals, then re-start where I left off. Hope they include this!

    1. Didn’t they shown that in the pre-Blizzcon livestream, with sniper? They paused sniper so they could buyout the item, then un-paused Sniper, all in the same window. Or was it not working like this?

  3. Support for more than 5 operations
    You can do this by a simple code change! It’s just an arbritrary limit

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