I (no surprise) spend very little time on the official WoW forums, but more and more I see people posting about how much they dislike TSM for ABCXYZ reason and the information they’re upset about is just plain wrong. The person in the post I quoted above doesn’t like cancel scanning. Well, that’s not a TSM specific thing – if anything, be angry that Blizzard has developed an economic system where that is almost required (especially on busy realms) in order to compete. Note; there are LOTS of other ways to compete, cancel scanning is just one. As an example, I personally do not cancel scan. It just doesn’t make sense for me to on my low population servers. I DO post at very specific times of the day. I will even add competition to my friends list and see when they’ve logged in, then post after them. None of this requires TSM, nor is it caused by TSM. It also doesn’t ruin economies.
Blizzard could knock back the efforts of cancel scanning by implementing a timer before you could retrieve your mail from something that you cancelled early – or by having players pay a larger fee, if they cancel their posting. There are work arounds for this either way. Players could just post in smaller stacks so when you’re undercut you just list the next little bundle of items, thus never really running out and never having to cancel.
This comment made me chuckle.
Anything that TSM does, players have done at one point in time, manually. There are spreadsheets, calculators, and a plethora of other methods that players use BESIDES TSM to obtain the same results that TSM gives. With TSM, it’s just in a nice handy package that we can all share. The economy in World of Warcraft is not destroyed, if anything it flourishes under the right conditions (like, players in game enjoying themselves, spare gold floating around, etc). Blaming TSM for your inability to make gold is also an incorrect comment.
TSM requires manual input. If you’re automating it, you’re not using it as it was intended. That would be against the TOS, and isn’t encouraged or supported in any way. What ruins the auction house for others in their head is “I didn’t get any sales, and someone else did, therefor they cheated” – what ACTUALLY happened, is someone worked smarter than you. HOW they worked smarter is up in the air, maybe they listed at the right time, maybe they had more items, maybe they did cancel scan. Those people who are across multiple servers will *always* make more gold than me, they are working at it smarter than I am. It’s simply not something I can do at the moment. I don’t blame them for my lack of time / dedication.
This comment rings true. You don’t HAVE to use TSM at all to make gold. It is not a requirement in the least. It IS a popular go-to because it is very simple to pick it up and start using it, as it were. Makes it easy to blame, too when things don’t go the way you imagine.
Finally.
I play the market in World of Warcraft more than the ‘actual’ game – and I love it. I love collecting, I love challenging myself. On days when my multiple sclerosis is really bad and I can’t actively participate in combat because it’s too painful – I can still browse the AH. I can still make sales. I can hit the ‘craft all’ button. I can plan and decide what I want to focus on (economy wise) next. Some days, that’s all I can do. I WANT to play, but some days I just physically can’t, and playing the economy has opened up an entire amazing community to me and lets me feel connected in a way that I am unable to experience in base game with my limitations.
I wish the World of Warcraft community at large would realize there are many ways to play this amazing game. Stop being so angry.
Girl Goblin 