Since returning to WoW in February, I’ve been slowly growing my stock (I lost it all to expired mail) and optimizing my sales little by little. I worked on leveling some characters, swapping server around a bit, and grew slowly, re-learning the gold making game. This month I set a mini goal for myself to earn a steady 100k+ a day, and I’m very happy to say that for the past two weeks I’ve managed to keep that up.
The most surprising sales for me have been the strange goop. It took me a very long time to farm my first one (over 3800 casts) and then a few days later I went back, and I managed to find FOUR in a single evening of relaxing fishing. I’ve sold three of those, and I have two more to sell (one more if I ever actually do the mount for myself, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet).
Arcane crystals moved all over the map this week, I usually sell them for 500-800g a piece, but some competition moved in and had theirs priced at 200g – I still ended up with some sales at least. Prog essentia continue to fall, prices anywhere from 6k-4k on my low population (15k players according to Raider.io) realm.
A few pets, a few glyphs, my usual mash up of ‘a little bit of everything’ rounded out the week. The inscription shoulder enchants are doing particularly well, but again there’s also a lot of competition lately, and I don’t have time to cancel scan and fight off other goblins (nor do I wish I had that time, it’s just not my play style). I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up the gains, but it is nice short term at least.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts regarding gold making? Feel free to leave a comment and let me know. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
Well, it was a slower week for sales (540k vs. 711k) but I think it was a lot steadier which is lovely. I didn’t have any vendor sales to add to the week (last week it was 200k of vendor sales, gotta love those composite bows). My rough ‘goal’ is to be making around 100k each day on average, anything extra would just be nice. I’m getting closer to that, on my limited play time it does make things difficult.
The big surprise for this week was the haunted steel headguard, which I assume someone bought for transmog. This is a blacksmith item that costs roughly 20k to craft, so selling it at 85k was a nice chunk of change. Marrowroot was another fantastic seller, over 82k coming from that alone. At one point it was selling for 105g each piece – it has since dropped back down to 40g or so. It is all about being in the right place at the right time.
A few pet sales, a few transmogs, some glyphs. It’s my usual mash of everything (minus Shadowlands crafts, I’ve stayed away from the expansion for the most part). I focused a bit more on restocking glyphs, and collecting raw materials to either use (I leveled vanilla alchemy to 300 so I could make another transmute master) or to sell.
Of course the big news of the week was that TSM came down for a bit with some issues. Thankfully they’ve (mostly) recovered from their outage, they have a lovely blog post detailing it all here. Be sure to read up.
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.
am sure it as been asked before but I cant seem to find it I am not very good at writing operations how would I tell tsm to look at what I can craft and de for profit or do I need to just keep looking at them one at a time o this is for classic tbc kind of like a disenchant scan for my crafting
In your crafting operation you’d enable ‘override default craft value’ and set it to destroy so that the profit is being calculated with your disenchant value. Then assign the operation to a group with items that you want to DE for profit
A comment that comes up a LOT in the WoW economy discord is that the price of crafted goods in TSM doesn’t match up with the math on the auction house, or with the math in their head. That is usually because the method they’re using to reach an overall craft cost does not match the one that TSM is using. Players tend to use ‘dbminbuyout’ as a price source in their mind (ie: I am looking at the AH right this second, and THIS is the price, so THIS is my profit), which isn’t reliable (especially if you’re crafting more than one item) or recommended. The reason is quoted in the discord:
TSM does not reference dbminbuyout by default, and it’s not recommended to do so. You are not in a contract with a supplier to obtain all materials at the same price, and the lowest buyout is only representing the individual cheapest auction as of the last price snapshot, which may be old. Any reasonable craft, or crafting queue, needs more than one material, so what happens if the next auction is 10x more expensive?
You will always have to compromise somewhere between what you could pay, which is the market value, or what you have paid, based on your accounting data.
TSMBot 03/13/2022
To explain DBMinbuyout further:
DBMinBuyout is the lowest priced auction on your realms Auction House, as of the last pricing update processed from Blizzard’s Auction House API. This value is not ‘real-time’, your pricing data may be 30 minutes or older before the next pricing update. If an auction is posted between pricing updates, this value does not get updated with the new lowest priced auction until the next pricing update. If there are no auctions for a particular item on your realms Auction House, DBMinBuyout could be an invalid price source.
Some what related: if you’re wondering why your prices are the way they are when it comes to crafting and profit, make sure you enable your crafting tooltips, and work out step by step the cost / price sources of each stage so they make sense to you.
If I want to craft a glyph that is displaying a nice profit, I can see I need 15 sallow pigments.
It’s really easy to stop here and think ‘well TSM must be wrong! How on earth am I getting 6k profit when I need 15 sallow pigment at 1380g each?!
So then you mouse over sallow pigment:
Now I can see where the pricing data is coming from, and the profit makes more sense.
TSM might seem like a huge daunting prospect when you’re trying to learn all of the components all at once, but break it down into smaller bite sized pieces, take your time, and listen to what others have asked before you. It will make sense, it just takes a bit to get there.
Last week I had a profit of 438,553g and this week we surpassed that slightly, 711,183g profit for the week. I also spent a lot more this week, 317,191g vs. last week 170,476g. I bought a bunch of recipes, mounts, and crafted goods and swapped them over to my low population server to see how they’d sell. Long story short – they haven’t sold yet (well, a mount did and some Shadowlands craft goods). There are no raid guilds on my server and moving expensive materials like this takes a long time. Most of my gold this week came from a few very expensive items and without those items I’d have barely made anything.
A fel hardened maul recipe that I had farmed up ages ago finally sold for a hefty profit, and just below it, those composite bows I’ve been selling to vendor. I sold five progenitor essentia before the market crashed (they’re less than 10k now on my low population servers) and I flipped a great sea ray mount for 100k that I purchased for 65k. I also finally had a sale from my sunwell runs, my vengeance wrap sold for almost 40k.
Solenium rings (ilevel 151) are still selling VERY well for me, I sold 6 last week, at around 3k each. The rest of my sales came from a very odd and confusing mixture of old world materials. I sold some nether dragonscales which I don’t think have ever sold before, along with khorium bars, arcane crystals, thick clefthoof leather, and motes of fire. Glyphs also did pretty well, but I really need to focus on restocking properly, and setting aside a restocking day. My tailor also needs to restock.
If you’re wondering where to get those fancy stats at, you can check it out on the TSM ledger . Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
How did this casual goblin do last week in sales? According to the TSM ledger, not too shabby at all. I spent a total of 170,476 gold, and I sold 609,029 worth of items, leaving me with a 7 day profit of 438,553. Remember, making gold is something that does take time and the more time you can invest in it, the bigger the payout. For the amount of time I spend actively working towards making gold I am incredibly pleased with this amount. Keep in mind I am not crafting any fancy shadowlands gear. I have none of my legendary leveled, and I only just recently (as of yesterday) unlocked the latest crafters marks.
A large portion of my gold this week actually came from the vendor. HALF of all my gold, in fact. I bought the supplies for composite bows at a very cheap price, and I made a lot of them. Below is what I spent:
You can see I bought thread, bones, and leather. Then I sold everything I crafted to vendor (that’s the ‘unknown at the top of the sales item list).
I also made a huge purchase of korthite crystals. I bought 510 of them for 435g. At the start of the week these were selling for around 600g and I sold off about half of my stock at that price. I still have 210 left, and the price has dipped back down to around 410g so I am hanging onto them for now. I sold some progenitor essentia that I looted for 30k because I expect the cost of the 291 legendary base to fall once more people unlock the item, and I’m also not really concerned about owning one myself. I don’t run anything more than LFR these days, and my ilevel is already well above the requirement to run dailies.
The next surprise I encountered was just a ‘right place at the right time’ moment. On Sunday someone bought out almost all of the laestrite ore. I had purchased around 800 of them for 1-2g the previous week. They were reset to 25g each and I put my 800 up – and they actually sold. I was quite pleased with this, to say the least.
Not really any other surprises in sales this week, it’s my usual mash up of crafting + flips. I have some non-gold making related goals that I’d like to accomplish, so I’ve been spending my precious moments in game doing that (silly things like finishing each covenant story once, reaching 80 in each covenant, and obtaining faction on my four main crafters). I expect sales to slow down now that the buying phase of 9.2 has cooled off a bit, at least on my low pop servers. We’ll just have to see next week!
Disclaimer: TSM does not guarantee you sales, and it does not automate anything. Every action requires manual input. As one wise person said: “TSM helps you execute a strategy for gold making. TSM is not the strategy. – Gumdrops 2022”
One of the most useful tools that TSM offers (in my opinion) is the ability to restock crafted goods based on variables that you set. This is going to be a very basic introduction to doing that – it can get a LOT more complicated. I’m a fan of starting with things on the base level and then learning and building your operations from there so don’t be afraid to play around. Before getting started I would also suggest you go into the TSM settings and make sure the crafting tooltips are enabled.
First, you’ll want to make some groups. We already know that I love organization, so my crafting groups are organized by specific tradeskill->current content stuff-> old content stuff. You can organize this any way you want. The default restock operations are all you technically need to get started.
This will restock a minimum of one item, a maximum of three, with 100g profit. Now, that’s not always going to be what you want so let’s get a little more complicated. TSM lets you use ‘If-functions’ and there’s a wonderful article written by BilisOnyxia on how they work. One of the common values I like to use is DBRegionSaleRate. I don’t necessarily want to restock something that is REALLY slow to sell (or perhaps never sells). If I want to only craft items that have a profit of at least 50g, and have a DBRegionSaleRate greater than 0.3 I would write my restock operation in the ‘min profit amount’ section to read: ifgt(DBRegionSaleRate, 0.3, 50g) – you can adjust these values for your own use on your own servers. Remember to reference those awesome if-functions that you read about earlier.
When you have a restock operation that you like, assign it to the group you want (you might want different operations for say, alchemy compared to inscription) and then open your craft window. Click TSM groups, highlight the stuff you want to restock, and of course click restock selected groups. What you SHOULD see next is the crafting queue fill up like I’ve got showing in the very first screenshot. You will then want to make sure you have someone selected in the ‘gathering’ tab of the crafting UI and you may also want to fiddle with the ‘sources’ section.
You’ll have also populated the tasklist of steps you need to take to complete your restock. /tsm tasklist if you happen to have closed this or it didn’t open. This list is based on your sources in the gathering tab, so if you’re not sure why it’s making you do ABC thing, check there first to make sure you have the order the way you expected.
As you craft that task list will update, and so will the queue in your crafting UI. Put them for sale, and you’re done!
A few things to keep in mind – if you want your restocking to be accurate, do your AH/Mail stuff first and then restock after. TSM needs to ‘see’ that stuff to know what has sold / hasn’t sold. Otherwise you might end up crafting 10 more of something that you already had 10 of. Another thing that often comes up is the crafting price of something is WAY off base. There can be a few reasons for this, but that’s why we enable crafting tooltips. This lets you see what the exact item is that might be throwing off costs. Perhaps someone put a single enchanting item for sale for 1,000,000 gold on the AH and now TSM thinks it’s going to cost you that much because you’re referencing it. Sometimes you won’t have a crafting value for an item, so it won’t restock. A common solution for this is to check and make sure your vendor sold items have a value attached to them. After certain updates TSM loses that data, just open the vendor who sells it and they should repopulate. Now let’s say you want to manually adjust the price of an item. For example you want a specific ore valued at 1g and nothing else. To change the price of a material, open your craft UI, reports, materials, and search for the item. Then manually adjust it to read 1g (or whatever string you want to use).
Remember that there is a LOT of support for TSM out there, and no one way of doing anything. If you’re not sure how something is going to work for you, create a new profile and play around with operations. Don’t mindlessly post things without LOOKING at what you’re doing. That’s an easy way to lose gold. If you have a question check out TSM support, check out the WoW Economy & TSM discord, and check out reddit. There are people who are willing to help – but the more specific you are, the better. If you come in asking vague questions, the vague answers you’ll get back might be frustrating.
I am a charts and graphs sort of person – love them. The more, the better. Before TSM announced their ledger feature, I was manually uploading my CSV and creating my own graphs – I’m quite happy not to be doing this any more. I do still record gold earnings daily by hand but for more detailed accounts, I leave it up to the ledger.
Despite the typical slow down that happens right before a big patch (people holding off on purchases until it’s released) I did pretty well with sales this week. Keep in mind I play casually, and until this week I didn’t do any farming. I’ve been rebuilding my stock as I lost everything in the mail when I left for four months. I’ve been back one month (4 weeks) now, and things are finally gaining a bit of traction. I also play on two low population servers with a smattering of other servers in between where I keep an AH character but don’t actively ‘play’ the game. I have 12 level 60 horde, and 12 level 50 alliance split between two servers (I haven’t started playing alliance this expansion).
Since I’ve been away for 4 months, I haven’t bothered getting into the legendary market so late in the game. I stuck to markets I was already familiar with, and branched off of those.
I dabble in a few markets, including recipes, battle pets, transmog, and crafted goods (tailoring, glyphs, and jewelcrafting, though I have one of each crafter). While some things do sell slow, I seem to catch a broad range of buyers – and I like that, it keeps things interesting when it comes time for me to decide how I want to spend my evenings.
I don’t make millions a week like some of the bigger goblins out there, but I absolutely love playing this meta game, and I find their gold making habits incredibly inspirational. I’m content on the three servers I frequent, and the amount of time I currently devote to things. There is always gold making opportunities, you just need to listen and then go for them.
I have also done absolutely zero preparation for 9.2 which releases *checks notes* today. I’ve been watching the WoW Economy Discord and seeing everyone stockpile their components and discuss where they think their markets are headed, but honestly it’s just not something I’m interested in so I’m content to watch from the sidelines and see how it pans out for everyone. There’s plenty of gold to go around.
Disclaimer – this is NOT a post telling you what items you should snipe.
If you’re familiar with Tradeskillmaster in any form you probably remember the older version of the addon when you could constantly run ‘sniper’ to find deals on the auction house that people had miss priced (this still works if you’re playing classic) but at the end of BFA things changed. Using shopping lists in TSM will get you results faster than sniper will (depending on how many items you’re trying to search through sniper). Personally, I still think there’s room for both depending on the situation.
If you’re running a second account while you’re doing something else, sniper may still have its use. Instead of searching the last page of the auction house scanning for constant deals (this doesn’t work) you create a group in TSM with very specific items you’re looking for (remember, you CANNOT assign a sniper operation to the base group). The smaller the group, the faster the search. In my case, I still search for current tier reagents this way. My operations are simple, whatever the maximum amount is that I’m willing to pay for something is what I assign as an operation. It’s usually a static number rather than a big string. There might only be 10 items I’m looking for, so sniper can happily run searching for those items and nothing else. Simple, right?
Then there’s shopping lists. These are usually groups you’ve created with numerous items in them, categorized in some way like ‘transmog’ ‘recipes’ ‘mounts’. You’d assign a shopping operation to these groups and run a shopping scan on them. I usually just scan one group at a time so that things keep moving. They’ll slow down if you have too many items in the groups or you select too many groups at once, but they’re still much faster than sniper. I know there are other addons that reportedly do this function faster (Auctionator) but I personally have no experience with it. The very basic formula would be using dbregionmarketavg and buying something that is cheap and re-selling the item or using it. You don’t have to use that price source though, /tsm sources and check for what makes sense in your situation.
One last thing – in the screenshot above you’ll see that TSM includes a handy list of recent searches, as well as favourite searches. You can create strings of things to search for and then save them if they’re items that you search for frequently.
My suggestion to new goblins is to start small and don’t get complicated with your strings until you’re ready for it. Don’t randomly import other peoples strings until you understand what they do – that’s an easy way to lose gold. I know it looks impressive when you see an operation that includes ifgte and a billion custom sources but you can get there with time. You also absolutely can still make plenty of gold not using any of these addons or methods. The key point is finding something you enjoy doing that you’ll actually stick with. The rest will fall into place.
Girl Goblin 