Category: Gaming

TSM Lightning Round: DBMinbuyout

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.

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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.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

BDO – Seasonal Fun

I know I have too many BDO accounts (the total right now is three for those of you keeping track at home) but I have to say, this is probably one of my top favourite MMO of all time. It’s just that good. Anyway, I decided to cut down playing all three accounts and I’m trying to focus on just one. I swapped my 60 tamer for a newly boosted 60 guardian in the season, and I’m hoping to finish off the achievements they have before it ends, but one of those achievements is to kill 5k mobs and that one I’m a bit reluctant to get started on because ew.

Like most games I play I tend to spend all of my time crafting or doing life skills, so going out and slaughtering bad guys for a few hours doesn’t exactly speak to me. That being said, I have been having a LOT of fun in game. Artifacts were added, and new content releases just a few short weeks from now. BDO also recently celebrated their 6 year anniversary, a huge congratulations on that milestone!

I am unsure as to whether or not I’ll participate in the next season event. I think I have more than enough characters by now, and running through the same content at ultra fast speed has never really been my thing. I’m quite taken with my Shai, and I play very little else (the guardian is a close second, and the lahn is my combat character of choice). Next? Maybe working towards a dream horse…

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Solway Firth – The Largest Deed I’ve Ever Owned

Back when Wurm Online had their black Friday sale, I bought two years of game time (30% off) on two of my accounts. One on the Northern Islands, where I live on Independence (Hermit Island) and the other on the Southern Islands, on Cadence. It has been two years and I’ve waited for these islands to be joined together so I could condense things, but so far that hasn’t happened. In the meantime, I had done very little work on the Cadence deed. I’ve spoken about this before, but I am not a huge fan of building a deed from scratch. After playing this game for 10+ years, I prefer to work on my characters, decorate, and look at pretty things. Building from scratch isn’t something that has ever interested me that much.

I decided the best thing for me would be to see if anyone was selling a completed deed. I had 50 silver to spend, and I posted on the forums that I was looking for something with highway access so I could make use of wagoneers, something I’ve never been able to participate in before because I always seem to live on some secluded island.

Before the day was out, I had a response. Kookii was interested in selling Solway Firth, an enormous deed on the Cadence island. The deed was worth well more than what I could afford, but they seemed in a hurry to sell, and they were willing to accept what I was offering. This place is amazing, to say the least. It has over 1g in upkeep paid, and the monthly cost is 15s (I’m planning on downsizing it slightly to reduce this cost). It came with 10 completed buildings, a full mine, an enormous amount of bits and bobs, a magic chest, guard tower, clay and tar on deed, pens with animals, and so much more.

Considering I am only one player, it will take some time to get it set up the way I want, but I am VERY excited about this deed. I’ll have to remember to work slowly, so as to not burn out. It is large enough for multiple players to live here comfortably but I don’t think anyone I know is actually playing WO these days. I do know quite a few who continue to play WU (the self hosted steam version). I wish the company had not stopped support of WU, the new WO UI is so much easier on my hands and I absolutely love the graphic chances they’ve made to the game and the new features they’ve added over time (caffeine is their latest). Anyway, expect lots of pictures in the future!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

[Unpopular Opinion] You don’t HAVE to make millions

One thing I’ve noticed when it comes to making gold (honestly this translates to anything anyone ever feels passionate about) is that there is a handful of people who consider their opinions elite – and they are not afraid to let you know it. They talk with confidence about things they may or may not actually know about, and if you’re making gold in some other ‘lesser’ way you feel shamed over it. Consider this the min/max conversation of the gold making realm. It’s no different than raiders discussing the best mechanics and gear to wear. There are plenty of great gold makers out there who are successful at what they do and don’t make you feel like a lesser being. Those are the ones I love listening to.

My unpopular opinion: You don’t have to make millions of gold to be a successful gold maker. You don’t have to min/max and optimize every second of every play session. Making gold is a frame of mind, and if it’s something you enjoy doing then guess what, that makes you a goblin (or whatever other phrase you want to use). Are there optimized methods of making gold out there? Yes, there are. If you don’t enjoy doing it the chances of you sticking with it are not going to be that great. Be open to learning new methods, trying new things, and taking in advice – but you shouldn’t feel pressured into it. This is, after all, a game. It is OK (and even expected) to make mistakes. Learn from them.

If you happen to be an amazing gold maker, try not talking down to the newer goblins who are still learning the ropes. Embrace their sales (yes, even those small ones), encourage their methods, and make suggestions that could help them out when requested. We don’t have to be condescending. This is an amazing community, with some fantastic people that I’ve gotten to know over the years – but it can still be an unwelcoming place if you’re not constantly playing by those unspoken ‘rules’.

Sniper vs. Shopping Lists in TSM

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.