For many people TSM is incredibly complicated and hard to grasp. Using custom value sources is of course useful, but buy changing to hard-coded gold values you get a much easier to understand setup.
Understanding pricing in TSM
In TSM you generally need to tell the addon what your maximum shopping price is, what the minimum price you’re willing to sell something for is, the normal price you want to sell it at and the maximum price. In all my published settings I use value sources that change on a per item basis based on the price data TSM supplies. This is great, but it can make it hard to understand what your operations do.
You can in stead just use gold values directly, for instance setting your minimum, normal and maximum prices to 1000g, 2000g and 10000g respectively.
The main advantage
The main advantage is of course that it is much easier to understand. You also get settings that are quite easy to use in practice. If you know that you post something for 1000g minimum and it requires 8 of one material to craft you can then just set your maximum shopping price for that material to 100g and you will always make a profit.
Putting it into practice
The main thing you need to do to use this in practice is of course figuring out how much gold you need to craft or get something. Then you set your minimum price somewhere above that. If you are planning to use this with crafting you may want to go backwards from a max shopping price for your materials based on what you can typically find them available for.
An example
Let’s make an example setup so you can get an idea for how this works. We’ll keep it to a simple example where this can work well, which is glyphs. Glyphs take a lot of different materials, but with the ink trader you can always just trade with the higher level stuff to get the three inks you need for old world glyphs.
Valuing the inks
We will be using roseate pigments to trade for other inks from the trader. The current market value on my realm is about 20 gold for these, so we will use that as the maximum shopping price (it would probably be more efficient to mill for these, but this example is just to show the concept).
The shopping operation would look like the picture below.
Selling the glyphs
Almost all the old world glyphs in the game just requires 3 inks and a light parchment. We value our inks right now at 20 gold and the parchment can safely be ignored. To guarantee some form of profit we will want to sell these glyphs for at least 80 gold. A simple auctioning operation is shown below with fairly high normal and maximum prices. Cool glyphs can often go for high prices, so we are not afraid of posting these far above crafting cost if the AH is actually empty.
The disadvantage
The main disadvantage with this way of doing prices is that the operation only works for one single item. You have to spend a lot of time setting up your operations for very specific markets and this takes a lot of time upfront, as well as keeping the setup working if the market value of something changes.
The next step would be to learn the dynamic price sources TSM includes that varies with the market value so you can save all that time.