TSM

WoW September (Personal) Economy Update

Have I mentioned lately how much I’m loving the newly revamped Tradeskillmaster website? Well, I am, and the improvements keep coming. I decided to do an update for September even though I’ve only been back to Warcraft since September 23 so my ledger is a bit sparse. You can see that September 29th was a great day for sales and the rest of the week was pretty steady. I did take 1 day off from posting just to get the timing all under control (I post every 24h and it has to fit within my morning schedule, if it doesn’t then I leave it be until the next day).

The next screenshot shows how much I made per server, with my top 10 (I actually sell on 22 servers at the moment) along with the sales quantity per server. The more servers you can spread yourself over, the larger chance that *something* will sell. I (currently) sell exactly 1 full inventory worth of items on each server, and I restock once a week. The more time you devote to making gold, the higher your chance at returns – but I’ve been doing this for quite some time now, and I limit myself to 1h or so a day. One full inventory of items across 22 servers hits that threshold nicely. If I started selling more than one full inventory worth, or I increased the number of servers I was on, then the amount of time it would take me would also increase. I’m not interested in that at this point in time.

The third screenshot shows where the gold went – most of my sales comes from transmog, so weapons and armor is no surprise. In third place is recipes. I purchased some TWW recipes for my blacksmith, and she also worked on her professions for the first time this expansion, so that’s why there’s so many purchases under the trade goods category. I’ve also been doing some fishing to relax, and I’ve been selling all of that back on the auction house (I expect it will drop significantly in value a month from now). The consumable category includes the haunted memento which is the only item I sold in that category, I don’t typically deal with consumables (this is a category that Blizzard has it under).

Over all, I’m pretty happy with how September went. Old items are still selling just fine (none of the items I sell are from The War Within) and if you’re looking for big numbers, that’s where you’ll want to focus – but I focus on the long game, steady sales. I’ll leave the current expansion stuff to the big players who are devoting a lot more time to it than I am.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

The New Tradeskillmaster

I’ve been a huge fan of Tradeskillmaster ever since I started my gold making adventures in World of Warcraft – way back in 2016. They’ve been around even before that, but for me, that’s the exact year that I decided I wanted to get into the meta game and I’ve been playing it ever since.

TSM has recently overhauled their entire website, and I have to say – HUGE – fan of these changes. They’re not perfect (yet) and there’s still some issues to work out, but as I take a look at what they’re doing I couldn’t be more excited for the future of TSM. Another big bonus is that if you were already supporting TSM with a subscription they’ve grandfathered you in to the new platinum tier for 6 months. This is a great show of faith to their customer base, and I appreciate it. Using TSM is free and always will be – but if you’re a fanatic about statistics, like I am, you may want to look at their gold and platinum subscription options.

What I’m most interested in is their updated ledger. I’ve been away from the game for a little while, and my ledger doesn’t appear to be up to date quite yet (at the time of this post it’s not picking up on my most recent sales this week, I believe there is a 3 day delay going on that is being looked into), but one of the most exciting things they’re displaying is your profit and loss across ALL of your servers. Normally, I keep track of this in a google sheet – and once it’s working as it should be, I can’t wait to see.

Another big perk to this revamp is the ability to easily see your in-game groups outside of the game. When you have a gold or higher subscription you can publish your groups and create easy-to-share links, which allow for import of the group and operations. If you’re interested in gold making at all, I HIGHLY suggest you join the WoW Economy & TSM discord (you’ll find me there as a moderator, just look for Stargrace) and spend a few days lurking around and getting familiar with the basics.

Gumdrops, Sapu, and the rest of the TSM team have been doing a fantastic job – so give it a look, and let me know what you think! As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

TSM and Dragonflight – Is it Worth It?

Let’s face it, updates that break our favourite addons suck, and we all hope that the developers of these mods are able to roll with those changes and get everything working again in a timely manor. Tradeskillmaster has undergone some massive changes in the past few years thanks to gold making changes on World of Warcraft’s end, and some of those changes I’m a fan of while others not so much.

The staff is dedicated and passionate (as are the goblins who use it) and the updates do come, but TSM updates in DF have been lacking (IMO). Unfortunately some things that I personally want to make use of (restocking SL with crafters marks) remain broken after 6 months. We all know that as goblins the whole point is to get in before the masses get in, and TSM has fallen well behind in function for anything relating to this.

4.13 has released and cross-realm trading was enabled only to have Blizzard pull the plug on that one temporarily while they look into server stability. This single feature is amazing for anyone who works on multiple realms, it not only tracks gold but also your craft components. There have also been some changes to professions (inspiration function has been added!) which you can read all about on their blog post linked above.

At the start of Dragonflight and for the months following I actually stopped using TSM and instead relied heavily on auctionator and craftsim. TSM wasn’t taking into account the DF specific specials like multicraft, inspiration, etc. Craftsim is a much better addon for these things. Queuing anything into the TSM craft queue was creating an unplayable game with lag and stuttering. I am happy to say that this looks to be mostly resolved, so long as I keep the queue under control. Instead of doing multiple groups at once, I tend to just focus on one section, so for example I’ll restock blacksmithing – > current content, in one go, and then after I’m done I’ll clear the queue and do blacksmithing -> old content.

I have yet to find another addon that offers everything TSM does despite the issues I have with the latest renditions. I continue to use it exclusively to post auctions, restock crafted goods, and check my gold & supplies across multiple servers. For ease I use a profile created by BilisOnyxia for his patreon’s, and then I’ve customized and adjusted it for my server specific needs (transmog) – I use a different profile that I’ve built for pet sales which I do cross realm. In Shadowlands I used a combination of profiles from Penguin & Manthieus.

Is TSM worth it?

It depends on what you’re doing. I think if you’re well versed in using it there’s still potential, especially in posting things like gear / transmog – but when it comes to professions (specifically DF professions) and crafting – other addons like Craftsim really do a much better job. If you’re restocking SL speed gear or anything that uses crafters marks, then TSM won’t be of any use to you (at the time of this post in any case).

Have a favourite addon that makes your gold making easier? Let me know in comments! As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Weekly Wrap Up [Mar6-Mar14]

I know, I’m behind in my weekly posts – but I’ve been having a difficult time with an MS relapse, so my I decided it was probably best if I just minimized the amount of extra ‘stuff’ I had to do – sadly one of the first things to go in that case is content creation. During that time I decided to also stop re-listing most of my items for sale, the exception being – pets. I kept listing my pets.

I’m currently selling around 1200 pets spread across 20 servers. It takes me less than 1h a day to re-post those, and I leave them up for 24h with no cancel scanning or anything like that.

It has been interesting to watch the trends – when it was pet battle week I had a significant number of sales vs. non pet battle weeks, and the types of pets I was selling also changed.

My most sold pet of all time is Rotten Little Helper, and it’s used in quite a few pet battle scenarios so it makes sense. This is the first year where I’ve branched into a multi-realm selling scenario, and I have to admit, I see why it’s so popular with larger goblins. You rely less on expecting huge sales from one place, and are still able to make some fairly significant gains with smaller sales spread across multiple servers. I personally don’t want to invest more than 1h a day listing items for sale and handling the basics – but I absolutely see how others could be drawn to this and why it’s appealing.

I’m also still making significant amounts of gold with craft orders which are not tracked by TSM. On the profession side of things I have JC/LW/INSC/ALCH/ENG/BS “completed” (ie: at 100 skill, but not yet completed their knowledge trees) and I tend to check all of the public craft orders a few times a day if I’m in game, and then have a steady number of people sending me personal orders on top of that. I’m using journalator to track these (which is amazing, I love this addon).

Overall? Things are going very well! I’m excited to see what 10.0.7 brings, and hopefully I’m able to continue on creating content now that my hands don’t feel like molten lumps of lava. As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself!

Weekly Wrap Up [Feb6-Feb13]

This week was a pretty good week, with 1.6 million gold in profit. The numbers are skewed a bit because I was shuffling some gold around, but overall, sales were up, with a number of larger sales. My process? I spend 1h a day working on active gold making, in this case it’s logging to 20+ different servers to put items back up for sale. Most of those items are pets, but on a handful of servers it also includes transmog and mounts. I don’t bother doing cancel scans or getting into AH pvp with anyone – I have tried in the past, and it’s just bad for my mental health.

I leave everything up for a 24h period, and rinse and repeat. If I can’t re-post, I’ll leave the items until the next day. In most cases it tends to work pretty well. If I need a break, I’ll post for 48h. Being on multiple servers means I can get smaller sales here and there and it simply adds up over time. Once I reach 100k on any realm, I tend to shuffle the gold back to my main servers. This can be through the AH, or through buying tokens, or maybe moving a character to shuffle goods around. It really depends on what I need at the time.

I did have a few other sales in there, the steelbound harness is crafted by a blacksmith, the ‘ol smoky recipe is engineering. Most of the sales continue to be pets since that’s the largest market that I’m in these days.

I’ve said this before but I think it should be repeated – the amount of effort you put into gold making is going to be directly related to the amount of gold you can potentially earn. I am content with my earnings considering I only spend 1h a day working on it. It leaves me with a lot of time to do other things, and some days especially during an MS relapse (like right now) doing even the mundane like looking at the computer screen, becomes a difficult task. I know if I wanted to push my gold making I’d have to devote more time to it. Then as you learn to optimize your method, you’ll shave time off. The amount of time devoted (in my specific case) tends to ebb and flow. When I add a new server, or restock my craft items, the time spent increases. Once those things are done, I optimize my time spent, and it reduces again.

I would absolutely love to spend more time learning markets and making mistakes and honing in on the parts of gold making that I really enjoy – but alas, I do only have so many hours in a day, and so for now it is what it is.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!