TSM 2.0: of Groups and Operations

TL;DR:

Items go in groups. Operations are performed on groups. Welcome to your new vocabulary. #tsm2
— Twitchie (@twitchietgw) June 19, 2013

From the green fire sharpened warlock mind who brought you the hashtag #TSM2, comes a post completely devoid of configuration screenshots to discuss concepts core to TSM 2.

Use #TSM2 in your #TSM2 tweets! Thanks to @twitchietgw
— Sapu (TSM Lead Dev) (@Sapu94) June 20, 2013

With a complete overhaul of TSM comes concepts of pure simplicity, that when combined make the automation of your virtual business both easy and powerful. Unlike some of my colleages, I have found the change is not in itself confusing, but merely change. For the better. If you forget what you know of TSM configuration and read on, you will probably find starting fresh quite instructive.

Starting Over

Moving to TSM 2 is permenant, and I'm here to tell you that there won't be any going back. In time you'll forget all about your TSM 1 backups that you diligently squirelled away. The only thing I forgot about before making the change was the details of my whitelist, but a message on my guild forums sorted that out quickly. Also note that the format for TSM Accounting will change, so make sure you are prepared if you store and manipulate your data outside the game.

Groups

Rather than jump right in, let's talk about the nature of things. A thing can be a finished product (belt buckle, potion) or it can be a material (golden lotus) or anything inbetween (ghost iron bar). In TSM 2 you put these things in groups and you can put those groups in groups to organise ALL THE THINGS.

The power of groups is that because your group can have subgroups and those subgroups can have subgroups, you really can organise things any way you can dream up. You might even go so far as to plan it out in advance:

@twitchietgw I created a visual map of how my groups flow, really helped me visualize exactly what I wanted, http://t.co/mFoNsZPCNR #TSM2
— The Drunken Mogul (@GoblinRaset) June 20, 2013

The beauty of groups is that TSM remembers the branching so that rather than an endless list of categories and groups, if you design your groups well, you can always find what you'd like to work on without the distraction of looking at your entire enterprise.

Operations

Operations are how you put ALL THE THINGS in motion. You apply an operation to a group to make something happen. So rather than navigate different modules for configuration, just ask yourself what do I want to DO with this group?

• Sell the things - Auctioning operation
• Mail the things - Mailing operation
• Store the things - Warehousing operation
• Create the things - Crafting operation
• Buy the things - Shopping operation 

Think of what you'd like to happen and setting that up is just a click away.

The elegance of operations is how easy it is to navigate and see what you've set up, and how quick it is to create new operations and apply them to a group.

The power of operations is many fold. Firstly you can have more than one operation for a group. Have you ever wanted to sell flasks in different sizes? I admit this feature got me a little giddy and instead of just selling 18 flasks in stacks of 3 (enough for a 3hr raid) I went nuts. 6 stacks of 3, 2 stacks of 1, 4 stacks of 5 and 2 stacks of 10. I thought no matter how you like to buy your flasks, Twitchie has you covered. You can apply this to duration or even just for novelty, offer a discount to 'bulk' purchases (I'm kidding of course).

Secondly, operations are reusable across different groups. Now I'm a little bit of a control freak, and tend to micromanage price thresholds in absolute gold values, but I couldn't resist this new technology as an opportunity to let go. So while my tailoring, leatherworking and blacksmithing PvP gear are all in seperate groups, the way I craft them, price and post them are defined in the same operations. You can name your operations with discriptive names to make the whole process intuative.

Thirdly, operations have been applied across everything. I can't say enough about how much warehousing has improved. Want to keep something in stock? Create a warehousing operation and specify a stock level. Hit 'restock bags' and watch things fly in both directions. It changed my cooking operation drastically.

Lastly, applying operations to groups is fun. When you are working on a materials group, and have your shopping operation implemented, you can't help but notice that you don't have an auctioning operation defined. So you think why not? I'll charge a King's ransom* and see what happens. When those lucrative sales roll in as a biproduct of playing with a new piece of software, you truly appreciate how elegance of the new design.

Next time I'll talk about the few things I miss about TSM 1, or a subset of the features in TSM 2 that you'll really look foward to.

* reasonable markup

Resetting the Glyph Market: Does it work?

TL;DR Yes, yes it does.

I recently posted Twitchie's Guide to Resetting Markets and my case study was my reset of the [Living Steel Belt Buckle] market. It was easy to see the results quickly because the market has only one product, and it is an item any self respecting active player will purchase regularly (if you have time to level, you have time to buckle).

One of my readers warned about the dangers of resetting the glyph market, to which I replied:

Oh I do this with Glyphs all the time! Just like with the glyph market in general, there's a different set of expectations. For resetting belt buckles, I can see the results in a day. However, with glyphs it can take a lot longer.

The other major difference with glyphs is that the margins are a LOT higher. I will buy 20 glyphs hoping for the result that one sells at the reset price and I make a profit.

There are also some pitfalls with glyph resets, in that common leveling glyphs will constantly have their price driven into the ground, as people make 5 of them and dump them at any price. When a glyph is less than 5g though, there really isn't that much risk. TSM is great for solving this problem, since once you have a stockpile of 40+ , it's probably not worth trying to keep resetting that particular glyph in the future.

There are different challenges for resetting in different markets, so I might go through some of my data for other examples, particularly glyphs.

The major difference between the buckle example and glyphs is that there lots of different glyphs. When I post buckles, I expect to sell some buckles. However, when I post a glyph I only expect that it might sell 1 in 10 times I post it, maybe less. The point is though, when I post over 400 different glyphs, 40 of them might sell and that's a fantastic result. The demand for each glyph is a lot lower (everyone needs a belt buckle, but every non-Paladin won't buy any Paladin glyphs) so you want to get as much coverage of the market as you can.

Glyphs is posting, mailbox and inventory intensive, and that alone is enough to turn many people away from the market. I suspect that the other major reason people leave the glyph market (aside from rabid competition) is that they don't commit heavily enough to get a return on their initial investment. Glyphs seems to be an all or nothing market, and until you retrieve those solid blocks of sales in your mailbox it can't seem worth the time.

The same is true for resets. In order to feel like resetting glyphs is productive, you don't want to try it on one glyph and wait for the coin to start rolling in. Rather than cherry pick one piece of low hanging fruit, get out your hedge trimmer and just lop off the whole low end of the market. Add those glyphs to your inventory and keep going with your normal posting cycle. Give it some time before you come back to assess. Or don't. You can take my approach and just assume that it works really well... until today.

After posting the reply, I decided to have a quick look at how well my glyph resetting works for the last month or two. For quick numbers, my first port of call is always to TradeSkillMaster. So open up /tsm and head to the accounting module, and hopefully you'll get results like mine:

• Predator: Bingo! 3 glyphs bought for a less than 15g for a return of more than 500g. Right here, is what resetting markets are all about. Relieving impatient and frustrated people of their undervalued goods, and selling them all the way back up at your fall back
• Pillar of Frost: 17 glyphs bought, only 2 sold. I mentioned that the glyph business is inventory intensive right? If you have the stomach for it, you can delete as many of the excess glyphs as you like and you've still made a tidy profit. What is most important isn't the number of glyphs you buy, as the total cost of the reset (in this case over 60g) and the likely return on investment. If you're worried about the inventory issue, or the time it will take to recoup your investment, the glyph market in general is probably not for you.
• Shred: 10 glyphs bought for 59g31s, one glyph sold for 59g25s. While you can think about this as a cheap way to gain 9 glyphs you can resell later, it isn't a great result. The data here is at least a months worth, and I spent time buying glyphs, storing and posting glyphs to make no gold? Bah! So keep in mind that every glyph you reset won't be a winner. Same goes for consecration, but it's a little different because the one Paladin that paid over 50g for a glyph instead of 2g makes it worth it.

The other important note is that there will be glyphs that I attempted to reset, where I didn't see any sales, which won't be on that list. What matters is that overall the process of resetting the glyph market is profitable for you and worth your time, rather than taking each glyph as a victory or failure.

What glyph resetting does for me is it allows me to be a stabilising force in the glyph market. It helps to make sure that glyphs are not too cheap, not to expensive, but just right. You're welcome, Goldilocks.

January 2012 Glyph Sales - Lightbringer

Here is my glyph sales graph for my brand new character on a new server, Lightbringer-US after joining the <Power Word Guild>.

The most important thing to note, is this is a graph of a glypher starting from scratch! Plonked down in Gilneas, fighting his way to Darnassus to start up his inscription business, with only a trusty puppy for a pet and a bag of freshly picked herbs he picked himself.

Stats:

• Total Glyph Sales: 18,733g
• Total Glyphs Sold: 489
• Average Price: 38g31s

One of the highlights was the second day of sales, and while you think I might have gotten lucky with a big ticket glyph (presumably from my first minor research) there's 43 sales on that day. That was just massive for a glypher just starting out, and allowed me to invest so much coin back into herbs and inks.

I made an effort to get to level 20 very quickly (I got there on the first day my glyph sales started rolling in) in order to have the largest selection of glyphs in the shortest possible time. Leveling from 1 to 20 is much, much quicker than from 20 to 35, which is the next milestone for leveling a profession. To this day (a month later) my hutner is still only level 28.

As the month progressed, I collected more recipes through research and had enough gold to make every profitable glyph that I knew and list it on the AH. For a low level character, low level glyphing is a lucrative and steady income. The number of sales varied quite a lot depending on the competition. Lightbringer-US is a large server and the glyph market is generally quite saturated.

The giant spike towarsd the end of the month coincides with the release of a new version of Tradeskill Master (or TSM as we lovinly know it). The new feature, Reset Auctions, allows you to scan your auctioning groups for opportunities to reset the price for under priced items. The paramaters you can set are sophisticated enough to really target bargains and reduce the risk. Here's how I set mine up for glyphs.

• Max reset cost: 100g
• Min reset profit: 50g
• Max price per item: 20g
• Max quantity to buy: 10

What this means is I'll pay at most 100g total to buy out ALL the glyphs required to reset the price, and the reset profit of 50g ensures that at worst case, I need to sell two of those glyphs to break even. In practise, the reset profit I'm usually targeting is between 100 and 200g so as long as I get a sale, I'm profiting even if the price immediately plummets back down.

I won't pay more than 20g for a glyph to reset it, as that is close enough to the cost price of making the glyph in the first place, with a little extra thrown in since I'm saving time not making the glyph (or milling the herbs and making the inks). The 20g/100g options mean that I effectively won't buy more than 5 glyphs at my maximum price.

The "Max quantity to buy" option is set at 10 to reduce the likelihood I'll buy leveling glyphs that are constantly dumped on the auction house for dirt cheap prices. The other thing I check manually (well it's in the tooltip, so it's very quick) is how many of that glyph I have on hand. I don't like to have more than a stack of any particular glyph, since it is usually those leveling glyphs that are available in large quantities. I've considered that it might be profitable to keep buying the super cheap glyphs  and destroying them to keep the price high, but that feels like destroying surplus oranges while people are starving, just to turn a buck.

So for example, there are [Glyph of Warlock Awesomeness] on the AH for 7g, 8g, 10g, 10g, 15g and 99g. Reset Auctions will find it and allow me to quickly buy out the first 5 glyphs for a total of 50g, and when I repost after collecting them from my mail box, I sell one for 98g. I just made 48g on my initial investment and have 4 more glyphs to sell.

In short the Reset Auctions function allowed me to greatly expand my selection of glyphs far wider than I can hope to make as a level 28 scribe.

I had a little oopsie with the reset function that I'll talk more about later, and I'm currently getting stuck into the new improved options for dealing with posting (randomly enchanted) transmogrification items in TSM as well. If you are reading this post, use the auction house to sell things and don't have TSM, grab it now! It requires a little setup, but there are fantastic resources available to help you on your way, like Faid's TSM Videos - A Beginner's Guide.