Friday, February 17, 2012

Confessions of a Botter, Part 3

In this series, I've been recapping a conversation I had a friend about stepping into the world of botting.

Bottom line, how much is this gonna cost me and how quickly can I see a profit?” he asks.

Let's see. $10 for a bot name. Relatively insignificant. A computer, which you have in droves. We'll start you off on a pay-as-you-go fee until your bot gets enough customers to warrant the other fee. The biggest expense you will have is obtaining the collection. Depending on the size of the collection, it could easily be a few hundred dollars.

As far as how quickly you will see a profit, it really depends on how large your collection is. The more unique cards you have, the more potential sales you will get. It also depends on the bot itself.”

As in a catchy name?” he jumps in.

Not so much a name as players are not affected by that per se. But if you get lucky and can buy bots from someone leaving the bot business, you can shave a lot of time as the bot will have its previous reputation. Of course, this assumes that the previous owner did not do anything to sabotage that aspect.”

So when can we get started?”

How about right now?” I counter.

And so begins my friend's journey into botting. As it was around 23:00 on a Friday evening when we reached this point, I thought I would give him some tasks to do to prepare for this:

[1] Pick a machine, wipe its drive and install Windows. Apply all patches as need. Avoid putting unnecessary programs on this machine.

[2] Purchase a name for the bot.

[3] Download .NET and Magic Online and log into MTGO.

[4] Visit MTGOLibrary and register your bot there.

I visited him later that weekend and helped him polish off some things and gave him some excess inventory to get started and thus he began his botting journey.

Next time, I am going to travel down a side road of this conversation. It got me thinking on something we do not discuss so I will discuss that next time.

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