When to Cash Out (Part 6)

In our continuing series of When to Cash Out, we are discussing a test case, namely myself. I had given a history until MTGO 3.0 came out. I waited around for YATBot 3 to come out and became dissuaded when it became apparent that there would be no YATBot 3 coming out anytime soon.

So, being an amateur programmer, I decided to try and write my own YATBot. Since I have a full time job, this would have to be literally a weekend project.

So I began a schedule of tweaking routines during the week and getting new routines done during the weekend. This was quite difficult as I needed two (2) computers running MTGO. While it is true I could have used VMware for this, I needed to see how my bot would appear from a customer's perspective.

So I wrote a login routine and that worked. I wrote an initial trade request and that worked. I even got the bot to acknowledge the customer by name and could even have custom messages sent to the individual customer. A neat little feature I thought. Since I was using YATBot as a guide, I attempted to program my bot like YATBot. So a customer had to enter which rarity they wanted to select. I got the picking of the cards down. In short, I was making good progress.

But my wife had a baby. My employer canceled my paternity leave. So time to work on the bot was decreasing. So progress was slowing down. People had already given up on YATBot 3.0 being released. I too was secretly hoping it would be released as this bot was taxing my skill set.

The kicker though was what WotC did: They decided to hamper development of bots by moving the message window around the screen from trade to trade. Yes, I was able to discern the pattern of where the chat box would be, but it also told me that one simple little change could wreck my bot. If the change occurred early in the week, I would be unable to make changes, even assuming I could, until I had sufficient time to repair the bot. By the way, this week's EULA screen change would not have helped matters.

Let this be a lesson: I had failed to plan for the contingency of YATBot 3.0 not being created. As a result, several months were lost with idle inventory and lost profits.

However, I did find MTGO Library and that was a smart business move. We'll go into those happy details next time.