Thursday, May 26, 2011

Recent new MTGO Library Bot features


ML Bot has been gaining abilities at an amazing pace for a bot which was already so well-established, so it can be quite easy to go without noticing something. If you've been using the program for awhile and don't recall many new features, give a read, because you've probably missed some.

I'll start with perhaps the most comforting new feature of all: buyer/seller price consistency checks. On the main panel of the bot's interface, you have the option of enabling the bot to check all your prices to make sure you are charging more than you pay for each card. If your bot were willing to pay two tickets for a card it sells for one ticket, someone could buy them from you and sell them back to you until the bot has nothing left. Even if you ran out of tickets, they could then use the credit to take your cards. Everyone should have this enabled on at LEAST one bot.

Many people mark every card in their collection for trade when selling to bots, which can cause the bot to take a long time to scan their entire collection. The bot now has the ability to recognize if it is only interested in cards from the T2 or extended formats, and if so, filter any sellers' collections so as to only display those cards. Depending on how much old stuff someone has, this can cut the time spent selecting cards from minutes to seconds. The bot automatically employs this practice when applicable, but it is up to you to limit the bot to only buying from those formats if you so desire.

MLBot is now capable of restocking itself. Under the administrator panel of the interface, you can configure your bots to open trade with each other and either give, take, or both give and take cards that they are in need of. If you employ separate buy-bots and sell-bots, one of the keys to maximizing profit is getting the cards you buy up for sale as soon as possible... and keeping a sell-bot as fully stocked as possible at all times is not a bad idea either. You can even set up a bot specifically for the purpose of restocking the others if you so choose.

You can set the bot to display “BUSY” or “OPEN” at the beginning of your classifieds message, which isn't so new, but you can now also set the bot to display an entirely different advertisement when it's busy. The default secondary message of ''Buying and Selling all Cards'' should definitely be changed, at a minimum, to be the same as your standard classifieds message. To go beyond that, you might choose to advertise different cards when busy, or buy-prices when busy with sell-prices when open. For the latter suggestcreate an advertisement for youion, you might want to advertise the same exact cards. If someone found your ad by searching a cardname, and is waiting for your bot to become open, but the searched card isn't listed in the message displayed when your bot is open... the ad will disappear when the bot becomes available. Ouch. Speaking of advertisement messages, the website now has a panel from which you can remotely set the messages across all of your bots.

Another time-saving feature has recently come to fruition: you can set the bot to create an advertisement for you. I won't waste time teaching the specifics here, click the ''learn more'' button on the messages tab of the interface to learn the formatting used to have the bot generate an advertisement for you. You can be as lazy as to tell it to advertise the prices of 7 completely random cards... or as specific as you want, telling it the exact cardnames you want it to advertise, and how many decimal places you want used in the price it lists.

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