Over the past few weeks we’ve kept you all in suspense. If you’ve been paying attention, then you know by now that TSM4 is coming. Here, we’ll go into a bit more detail on what TSM4 will bring.
Making TSM Better for Everyone
The main focus with TSM4 is to make TSM less intimidating and easier to use for newcomers and experienced goblins alike. To this end, we’ve completely rebuilt the UI from the ground up to be simpler and more intuitive to navigate. Even though ease of use was one of our main goals, we’ve not forgotten about our power users, and have plenty of goodies in store for them as well!
The first thing that you will notice when opening up the core TSM4 window is a beautiful new dashboard where you can see a summary of your gold making and catch up on TSM news. The dashboard will show you how you’re doing with your gold-making and help you decide at a glance what to do next. The graph within the dashboard is highly interactive and allows you to quickly and easily track your gold on hand over time as you pursue your gold-making goals.
One of the major hurdles new TSM users face is setting up meaningful groups and operations. In TSM3, we introduced the “Quick Post from Bags” feature, which gives easy-access to the powerful functionality of TSM_Auctioning to post items on the auction house without having to create groups and operations. With TSM4, we’ve taken that a step further with the new “Base Group” which lives at the top of the group tree. This group automatically contains any item which is not in another group, and comes pre-loaded with powerful default operations for more than just Auctioning. We’ve also completely reimagined how group management works in TSM4 to make it easier to move groups around, rename them, and manage the items and operations which they are tied to.
One of the most popular features of TSM is its sniper feature. This feature allows you to snatch up deals the second they are posted on the auction house. With TSM4, we’ve integrated all the great feedback we’ve received on the sniper feature to make it easier to use and even more powerful. The sniper settings have been simplified into new dedicated sniper operations, including a default operation which comes pre-loaded in the addon. Once you start the sniper scan in TSM4, you’ll notice that the results are now ordered conveniently with the most recent results shown at the top, along with a special icon to clearly call-out the newest results. We’ve also made it much simpler to buy items as quickly as possible by getting rid of the confirmation window and replacing it with a single buyout button. Because we know people like to run sniper in the background for long periods of times, we’ve also added a new way to quickly remove things which you’re not interested in from the results, or restart the search completely to clear all the results and start fresh.
TradeSkillMaster has always had extremely powerful features to help advanced goblins make gold as efficiently as possible, and TSM4 is no different. Complex custom prices have become a staple of any mature TSM setup, so we are very excited to announce that TSM4 brings many new functions and data sources to custom prices. This includes everything from new, advanced logic functions, to being able to use things like sale rate and inventory quantities in your custom prices. We can’t wait to see how people take advantage of these new custom price features!
In summary, TradeSkillMaster 4 brings powerful gold-making features to experienced goblins and causal gold-makers alike. The entire addon has been rewritten from the ground up to be a joy to use, and to drastically lower the barrier to entry into the world of gold-making. This is evidenced in everything from the new Base Group and Dashboard features to the cleaner, yet more powerful sniper UI which we showed here. We also didn’t forget about our most advanced users and TSM4 brings powerful new features to them as well with the new custom price functions and sources.
Join the Beta
We’re sure you’re super excited about TSM4, and are dying to know when you can try it for yourself. We share your excitement, and in that light, we’d like to announce that the TSM4 beta is to be expected in late November. We know it’s still a while away, but we promise it’ll be well worth the wait! Upgrading to TSM4 will be a smooth and completely painless process, with all your important TSM settings being preserved. If you want to ensure you get into the beta as soon as possible, you can go ahead and sign up for an invite here. If you like what we do and want to support the continued development of TradeSkillMaster and also be first in line for the TSM4 beta, please consider becoming a TSM Premium user.
Stay Tuned!
Between today and the TSM4 beta, we’ll be diving deeper into the countless changes TSM4 will bring, so stay tuned for future blog posts. If you don’t want to miss any, you can sign up for our mailing list here. These deep-dives will cover various topics, from the new custom price functions and data sources to the new TSM4 design, and much more that we couldn’t fit into this post!
If you’re dying to learn more about TSM4, Sapu, TSM’s lead developer and project manager, will be doing an AMA over on the /r/woweconomy subreddit at 11AM PDT. The AMA has ended! The thread, named “TradeSkillMaster 4 Announced plus Lead Developer Sapu Q&A!”, is still available for you to read through!