Happy Easter!

  May you have enough material wealth

to meet your needs,

while never forgetting that the real treasures of life

are the loved ones and friends

who are invaluable to the end.

Easter is a time of love,
of family, and of peace.
It is a time when we say
a quiet thanks for all
that we have and for all
that the future holds.

Happy Easter to every and each of you!

Player Run Event

What is a PRE?

PRE stands for Player Run Event. Some who are unfamiliar with the unofficial avenues of tournament play may ask what a player run event is. A player run event is a tournament that is held by players typically in a designated chat room every week that is sponsored by a bot or bot chain. Entry to the event is free which draws in quite a large group of players. Prizes are awarded to tournament winners in the form of credit on a sponsoring bot.

How Does Sponsoring a PRE Help You?

Sponsoring a PRE costs you tickets and cards so how can it help you in the long run? The idea is that you bring new customers to your bot as well as create a relationship of trust and dependence with the event participants and community. Repeat customers are a huge part of a successful bot and getting your brands name out there as a supporter of the community can be your golden ticket to success.

The Costs of Sponsorship

You will have to put down tickets and cards to sponsor the event. In a typical situation you have the tournament winner payout, the payment for the individual hosting the event and any door prizes you wish to hand out. 

Different Levels of Sponsorship

Each of us is at a different place with what our bots are capable of and how large we have grown. With that said it’s not always wisest for the little guys to be sponsoring a weekly event if it costs them more than they can afford to lose. However there are different levels of participation. 

Mid-level Sponsorship

You don’t have to be responsible for payouts of an event to contribute and get your name out there. Those of us who cannot outright sponsor an event have the option to partner up with another chain of similar ability to contribute. Instead of paying 20 credits yourself every week you could pay 10 each with another sponsor.

Pauper-level Sponsorship

For those who cannot or do not wish to pay out quite so much but still wish to sponsor also have the option to perform small giveaways. Some giveaway ideas include door prizes (Giving out rare cards to random participants), Trivia (Showing up a half hour before the event starts and giving out credits for answering trivia questions) and/or offering special deals with your chain to those who participate.

Sponsoring PREs is a great way to give back to the community. It can be very emotionally and financially fulfilling  as you set yourself apart from other bot chains who do not engage socially.

CSI: MTGOL (Part 2 of 2)

Last time I wrote about a customer who purchased four (4) copies of a single card but never received them.  I asked how I knew that this was a legitimate request and how could a trade occur on MTGO and cards not be transferred.

In this case, I made an instinctual decision to refund the purchase price.  I later conclusively proved that my instincts were correct.  How?  By looking at the collection count before and after the trade.  I had five (5) copies of this particular card after the trade.  I only keep eight (8) copies of this card on that bot.  If the trade occurred, I would have had to have nine (9) cards; something which would not occur under normal circumstances.  (No special transfers, inventory or collection transfers.)

Another method of verification is the total number of cards in the collection.  It should have decreased by three (3).  (Four cards taken plus one ticket added.) 

Since a ticket was exchanged, I also have that piece of information.  I never received the ticket from the transaction, therefore, I knew that this was a phantom trade.

So this begs the question: how does this happen in the first place?

There is a bug in MTGO which trades occur but do not happen.  Fortunately, it is not a frequent occurrence,  In the years that I have been botting with Library, I have only heard a handful of complaints from customers stating this.

So what is the bottom line?  Botting is safe but be aware that these things do occur and you can use such customer complaints to provide excellent customer service.

New Bot owner survival guide.

Hello fellow botters,

Today I am going to discuss 'How to make it through the first few weeks' of botting on Magic Online. It is easy to get discouraged due to lack of trades or configuring your bot to your standards. This guide will get you through those first though weeks so you can make it to your botting goal.

When I am signing up people they always ask me the same questions, so here is the Q&A.


Why would people choose my bot over someone elses?
Honestly it's a mystery, humans are sporadic and we all think different and what makes them choose one bot over the other is mostly unknown, but there are a few common things that influence people buy or sell with your bot such as:

• Great, clean, and easy to read advertisement in the classifieds.
•  Low selling prices, High buying prices.
• Adding an email to your bot account.
• Promote your new bot to clan mates.

It has been 2 weeks and I have not seen many trades, what do I do?
It's ok! You have to give it time. Hard to say, but you cannot build a business in 2 weeks, it takes months, if not years to make a profitable business. For instance the cable sports network ESPN began in 1979, and did not turn a profit until 1985. There are few other things you can do to help though:

• Adjust your prices, maybe you are buying to low or selling to high
• Contact support via Skype @ mtgolibrary.support : they can help you with questions or concerns you may have.
• Don't get discouraged, remember the bot is not really costing you anything to run you don't paying anything unless you make money.

I started with 1 bot less than a year ago now I run 14 profitable bots, it just takes time, patience and a little faith.  I am going to end this blog a quote from a childhood movie I used to love and from a former U.S president.
"If you build it, he will come" - Disembodied  voice from the movie Field of Dreams
"If you build it, they will come" - Teddy Roosevelt 


Happy Botting!
Modo handle: Teamstoge

Trade Limit to 400 - official support from ML Bot coming 2nd April

After the downtime of today, Magic Online will be able to process trades up to 400 items. The current limit of 75 items will thus be raised to 400. 

ML Bot is already able to handle 400 cards in a single trade, but we want to keep this feature off until 2nd April, because we want a few extra days to monitor the market and evaluate some tunings.

Here at mtgolibrary.com we are very pleased about the rise of the limit and we think this will increase the sales. For instance it will remove the burden of purchasing high-value cards such as Force of Will and it will accelerate the autotransfers between bots.
Another example of good effect is the buying mode: customers are more willing to sell cards for 1+ tixs (because the will *take* some tixs) than 0.8 tixs. Reaching a 1+ tixs value in a single trade will be easier with 400 cards.

MTGO Library Bot 5.71 is out

Hello,

we have just release ML Bot 5.71.

As most of you probably know, after tomorrow downtime the trade limit will be raised to 400 cards. We took the change to introduce a number of tunings and tweaks on the server and on the bot itself.

5.71 contains a couple of bug fixes as well, over all a more robust management of the chats at the final confirm window (older version sometimes resulted in floating chats all around the screen).

New Features for MTGO Library V4 (Part2)

In these series I will share my wishes (and yours) of new features that we want on MTGO Library V4. Some of these have been 'promised', others are yet to be revealed and 'requested'. Feel free to share  your ideas about these new features discussed or to give new ones for the next posts. Thank you.

Improved Auto-Transfers

What can be improved?

• Improvements on Start/End time: Allow to set the auto transfer for less than 1 hour. Such as starting at 1PM and finish at 1:15PM for example.
• Automatic Stop: if after 3 or 4 trades the bot is no longer transferring cards (just cancels trade) the bot could stop the auto-transfer until the next start time.
• Ability to Mark cards tradable at the start time, or, request the target bot to mark all tradable.
• Different picking up card methods: Such as using the "buying cards" methods, scanning the collection or wishlist (and picking 3 of a card if you need 3 and not 1 of each needed card per trade).

Is it possible?

Start and End times with 15 minutes or 30 minutes intervals should be "easy" to implement.

Ability to mark cards tradable should also be easy and the ability to ask another bot to mark tradable already exists (markalltradable) yet is not implemented into the auto transfers as it is just an admin command.

The buying scan methods are already coded so this could just be a new command such as "OBWhatYouBuy" (example)

The automatic stop might be a bit harder to setup as this would be a void to the "end time", but only the MTGO Library staff can reply to that one. 

Pros and Cons? 

Smaller auto transfer intervals are ideal for small bot chains which could benefit from more regular short auto-transfer intervals (such as 15 min every 4 hours) instead of longer and less regular intervals (such as 1 hour every day), no cons on this one.

The ability to stop automatically also sounds great to any bot owner, giving the freedom to set a 1 or 2 hour interval without worrying that the bot will be endlessly opening and cancelling trades, yet this would have to be set up as 2 or 3 trades in a row without cards as a "trigger" to auto-stop, as the first trade might have no cards at all (in the case of relying on the mark all tradable feature).

The ability to request or mark all the cards tradable at the start of transfer time is my personal favorite as my bots don't automatically mark cards tradable after every trade and this is something I currently have to do manually, yet, I cannot see any "cons" for this one aswell.

The buying cards picking up method would also speed up the auto transfer process (specially on wishlist mode), but this would have some a flaw, which is when the bot picks 75 cards (wishlist mode) that he needs but happen to be from different sets and remove them (not picking the ones he would actually need due to the small current trade limit), I don't think I could fault it on scanning mode.

Will this feature be in the MTGO V4?

I haven't requested anything like this for MTGO Library v4, but if you are interested in any of these features, please comment and give your ideas, because if this is on many of us, bot owners, wishlist I'm sure Albert will have a go at implementing these exciting features.

What are your thoughts on these features? Will they have any use for your bots? Any new features you would like to see discussed for next part? Leave a comment bellow!

Next feature Hint: Pricelist

You Make The Card 4

Three times in the past, Wotc allowed the Magic community to come together to collectively design a Magic card in a process called "You Make the Card". And You Make the Card returns once again!

In first week we could voted on card type and in total over 88,700 votes were casted. Land received 26,56 % votes to 26,53 % Enchentment. The vote was extremely close, almost a tie between land and enchantment. Because the vote was so close, WotC did a runoff vote between the two highest vote-getters. We don't know the results yet. In future votes, the top vote-getters are within two percentage points from each other, WotC will conduct a similar run-off vote. Soon we will find out whether either Land or Enchentment goes to the next round. Then, another poll will be conducted until the card is created.

In previous editions of You Make The Cards players created:
Forgotten Ancient, printed in Scourage
Crucible of Worlds, first appearing in Fifth Dawn
Vanish into Memory, in Coldsnap

CSI:MTGOL (Part 1 of 2)

I am playing my favorite MMO game when my email client, Thunderbird, dinged.  Upon reading the header, the message is coming into one of my bot’s email accounts.

I just traded with your bot and never received the cards.  Can you send me the cards or refund my credits?

Curious, I moved my character to a safe place and investigated further.  The trade was for four (4) cards, costing .84 tickets.  My spider sense has not tingled yet.  I look up the card in question and it doesn’t look like something many players would want, much less more than four (4) copies.

I decided to trust this individual and went into the Library dashboard and refunded his credits.  I then sent an email to the customer informing him his credits were refunded.  I then resumed playing my MMO.

About ten (10) minutes later, Thunderbird dinged again.  This time it was from my aggregate bot account where all trades are filtered to and it showed that this customer again traded with the bot and the same four (4) cards were traded.  Since I did not hear back from this person, I am safely assuming that there has been no further problems, all costing me a little bit of MMO playing time.

So, how do I know the customer was not trying to rip me off?  ML Bot has a lot of little-known debug tools to verify if a trade really happened, despite things like the connection down, or Mtgo giving a false message, or the crash of the laptop hosting the bot.  How can a transaction be completed and cards not be transferred?  I’ll answer those questions next time.

The true value of Commons and Uncommons

 Hello fellow botters,

Today I am going to talk about the value of commons and un-commons in the botting world. I truly believe that they are the puzzle piece in botting that everyone is just not quite sure where to place. The truth is they yield the highest profit percentage than any other rarity, last month alone I made over $500 on just commons and uncommons.


Lets start off by answering some questions that I get daily:




Should I even buy and sell Commons/Uncommon?

Yes. They can yield up to 2000% profit. Even if you buy 10,000 commons at .002 it cost you 20 tickets there is no reason not to. Its such a small investment for such large profit percentages. Ex. I buy Ultimate price  for about 2 cents and sell for 12 I buy and sell almost 10 a day, potentially that could be 30 tickets a month from just 1 card.


What should uncommon and commons be priced at?

Buy low, sell normal.  I buy my commons and Uncommons between -30% and -80% and sell at even or -5%. I believe setting great buying prices on your rares and mythics will attract people to your bots, but they may also dump off some good c/un to you as well.


People like one stop shops, if you only sell rares and mythics then they have to use another bot. This could stop them from coming back to your bot, not to mention loss of profit for you if you don't supply them. Keep in mind you don't need to buy more than 4 of each card, there are 984 commons and uncommons in standard, if you bought them at an average of .012 x 4 of each that is only and investment of 43.23 tickets.

You could use personal prices to narrow it down to only buy the playable commons/uncommons. Either way there is no reason not to buy them because at the end of the day they are what's  really putting food on the table.

If you have any other questions about Commons and Uncommons write a comment on this blog or email me at Teamstoge@gmail.com


Also I asked Albert if he would throw in a Lifetime Lite bot offer for me for this blog. From now till March 30th, 2013 lifetime Lite bots are only $130. Email me for details.

Modo handle: Teamstoge

New Features for MTGO Library V4 (Part1)

In these series I will share my wishes (and yours) of new features that we want on MTGO Library V4. Some of these have been 'promised', others are yet to be revealed and 'requested'. Feel free to share  your ideas about these new features discussed or to give new ones for the next posts. Thank you.

Clan Members / Buddy discounts 

Is it possible?

This feature is very much possible on the current MTGO V3, as the game as both a special icon for Clan members and Buddy.

The process of giving extra % on buying and a % discount on selling 'seems' also easy to code, would just be another percentage adjustment on top of ML Bot correction, personal percentages, etc.

It is likely that MTGO V4 will also have some form of indication of a clan member or buddy so this feature seems to be very much possible to add.

Pros and Cons?

This feature would benefit in some ways, such as getting your regular customer "stuck" into just using your bots, would also give long lasting loyal customers a reward. Between the "profitable" reasons you also have the help of boosting your clan's number of members and position on clans leader-board (which in a way, is free advertising).

Its not all good news, as this would also mean that Non-clan/non-buddy customers would feel left out if they knew someone else gets extra tix for their cards on your bot, resulting in the 'loss' of some potential new customers. This would also mean that a clan member seeing the bot's prices advertised on classifieds or Wikiprice will not see the real price he will get, Making him choose to get a certain card on other bot for 41tix because you bot sells for 42, unaware that with the discount would just be 40 or less. 

 Will this feature be in the MTGO V4?

As far as conversations about this gone with Albert (the maker of MTGOLibrary bots) it seems to be a very likely scenario that this feature will be present in MTGO Library V4 bots. 

What are your thoughts on this feature? Will it have any use for your bots? Any new features you would like to see discussed for next part? Leave a comment bellow!

Next feature Hint: Auto-Transfers

Percentage Correction evaluator III

Hi Gents,

here's the new Excel sheet for calculation bot prices. I've also added a few other things I believe will be helpful.

The first tab, "settings" is where the users start out. After they have copied the "CardsMTGO3.txt" file to the root directory, they are ready to hit the "Process Prices" button. This sets the file up for everything else. After doing that, the users can select different percentages from the drop down menu's until he is satisfied.

The users can then proceed to the "prices" tab. From here (direction on tab as well), they can enter card information and results based on the choices in the "settings" sheet. This is all recalculated if any changes are made to the settings sheet, so when they go back, the new prices will be reflected. The users can copy and paste the price data directly from the "CardsMTGO3" tab that was generated after clicking the "Process Prices" button.

 The final addition, because I became weary of continually editing my PersonalPercentages.txt file (the ; were enough to drive me mad), I created the "PersonalPercentages" tab. The users can now choose from the drop-downs on the left and the rest is calculated for them, again based on what they entered into the "settings" tab. Then all they have to do is copy the cells to the right (clearly marked by green cell at top) and paste them into their "PersonalPercentages.txt" file.

Hope you guys like/enjoy. 
Cheers, 
James 

PS: Carlos, I did try to get it so that the user could select from left to right the Set and then Rarity so as to provide a "filtered" list of possible card choices ...Unfortunately Excel limits array sizes and it is too small to do this...It broke after 1439 items :(

Magic Online promo codes

"As Magic continues to grow, we are constantly looking for additional ways to engage our audience and provide ways that we can integrate the paper and online experiences. We are pleased to announce that on March 13 we will be launching the Magic Online Promotional Code program. This program will provide new ways to unite paper and digital Magic experiences and give us another way we can reward our player for a variety of different brand interactions.

While we will be rolling out the Promotional Code program slowly; eventually, we will be able to offer our players many different ways to earn promo codes for digital objects in Magic Online, whether by purchasing specific products, attending events and conventions, or even just interacting with us through social media.

Players will be able to redeem any promo codes they have earned by going to the Magic Online Store, entering the code in the Promo Code field, and clicking Submit. Please note, however, that the promo code entry will only be available in the Wide Beta version of Magic Online, which you can download now."

In other words, you get a code and redeem it to receive cards online. Allegedly, there will be few ways to get such code. I could see these being added to booster packs, perhaps on the advertisement cards. It would provide added value and encourage more players to try MTGO. Here is a code for the Thursday Night Magic Online Promo version of Avacyn's Pilgrim: "MTGOCodeLaunch"

However, the offer is valid for redemption by account holders whose billing address is located in the United States only.

Four Hundred

400.

400 is 20 squared.
400 is a Devlali Number.

400 is a Harshad number.

While these are interesting facts to those who study mathematics, it has a more potent use for us bot owners: the trade cap will increase from the current standard of 75 to 400.

This has quite a few implications and natural consequences.

First of all, collection and bulk transfers will be done in fewer trades.  What used to take five (5) trades can now be done in one.  This makes the tedious process of moving inventory from one bot to another easier to handle.

Secondly, customers will be able to do more impulsive purchases since no longer will they remove cards, cards they desire but deselect, because of the arbitrary 400 card limit.  This is good for us.

But there is something we all should consider: some bot owners have very short trade windows, five (5) minutes or less.  For some, this is necessary.  However, with a limit of 400 cards, a customer would need more time when making a purchase.  

Bonus tip: You may want to consider educating your customers about the 400 card limit.  I know that I have a few customers who still think the limit is 32 and their trade logs prove it.

Cardlog and Tradelog, blazing fast

Probably unnoticed, last week we introduced the CardLog tool. It allows to search for a specific card and compare the buying and selling prices over time. The CardLog renders statistics and displays the average and total profit.
I personally think this is an amazing tool, much more powerful than the old one we were used to on the old website.

We also worked a lot on the Tradelog and made it faster: you can now search in all your trades in few seconds, making it much faster. The graphs are also rendered after the page has loaded, improving responsiveness.

Expanding your bot business

 Hello fellow botters,

Today we are going to talk about expanding your current bot business, from hardware to software and setup to pricing and more.

It's simple more bots equals more profits. The time is now, with MTGOv4 releasing in July the amount of bots on Magic Online will be cut in half. This means that your current bot business could potentially double.

With your possible expansion you will need to know a few things that will get you headed in the right direction. You will need to run virtual machines, you can find articles on setting them up here.


Hardware:

Hardware is the main thing that could hold you back. You want to make sure that your bots are fast and smooth. See the chart below to configure your machine for your expansion. All processors should be 3.0ghz or faster.

I currently Run 11 bots on one machine.  AMD 8 core 4.0Ghz with 32gb of ram and they are all fast and smooth. I know that upgrades can be expensive, keep in mind that you can always just expand to your current hardware's capabilities.

Setup:

Whether you are have 1 bot and want to expand to 2 or 5 bots  and want to expand to 20 there is a correct path to take. You should expand on the current bot name that you have such as MTGOLibrary1  then MTGOLibrary2 then MTGOLibrary3 and so forth.

You always want to make sure you bots are full with tickets to buy and stock to sell.  So my suggestion is to expand 1 bot at a time, maybe open 1 new bot a week. First set a goal on how many bots that you want or the amount money that you would like to make. If you are making 100 a week on your current bot and want to make 700 a week you are going to want open at least 6 more bots.

With more bots you can buy and sell on each bot at different prices, some high, some low, some midrange this way you will always be in the current market.

All bots should be buying, selling, and trading bots. Buying is harder to do than selling so you should have 60% of your bots advertising buying prices and 40% advertising selling prices.

Future of botting:

Magic the Gathering is doing great, in paper they have recently had their largest turn out in history at  GP Charlotte 2013 with 2,693 competitors (this is where I currently live) what does this mean for Magic Online? With the recent increase of redemption and Magic Online promotions cards will become cheaper which will intrigue more paper players to goldfish on MODO. Also as stated before with MTGOv4 releasing in July 2013 Ns5 and Belbot will not be coding the new bot, this leaves only ML bots you do the math.


I am currently in the process of expanding from 14 bots to 24, I hope you use this article can help you do the same. There is a 200k + a month market out there on Magic Online, Be sure to get your share!

If you have anymore questions about this article or about anything in the world of botting Mtgolibrary.com is opening a live chat service starting 3/18/2013 via Skype, You can contact them at "Mtgolibrary.Support".



Modo handle: Teamstoge

MTGO Library Bot 5.70 is out

The lastest update of ML Bot, version 5.70, includes a number of small fixes. Notably, 5.70 fixes a problem with 'making all cards tradable', a problem partially fixed in the previous versions of the bot but still showing problems with particular collections.

ML Bot 5.70 implements also a more reliable connection with the server, resulting in a more stable behavior and less frequent messages like 'ml bot is unable to connect to the server, please wait'

Buying Big, Selling Big - In Conjunction with Limits

Buying Big, Selling Big

When you are a very small bot looking to make leaps and bounds in growth then you need to be very aware of how you buy and sell high value cards. Last time I spoke about minimizing risks with big cards in an article about what MLBot provides us here. In this article I'd like to discuss what you as a user can do to minimize these risks.

If you run one bot with email reminders and habitually check each trade for continuity and unusual patterns then you’re already in a great position to make money back or even profit on cards you aren’t ready to hold in your bots inventory.

Expanding your horizons

I propose to attentive individuals that instead of limiting your bot to purchase only cards you can afford to retain in inventory that you expand and purchase cards of even the highest value.

Why would you do such a thing? Because big money cards are an easy sell. Suppose your bot buys a card for 20 tickets. You are still a new bot and have very little inventory and the bots purchase ate up your last 20 tickets. You may not want to invest everything in a single card. What if it takes months to sell? Maybe it never sells? What if in the time it takes for you to sell the price drops and you’re actually losing money on that trade? As is often said, never put all your eggs in one basket.

Using your limitations to your advantage

 

Instead of limiting the bot to making only affordable purchases (which will reduce opportunities and possible profits) you expand your limits to encompass all kinds of trades. It can be scary but if you check your trades at least once a day you shouldn’t have to worry about loss.

You don’t want to hold on to the money cards just yet but that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase them. When you make a purchase you are uncomfortable holding onto you may want to assess whether or not the card is in high demand and if you will sell it very quickly. If it’s a card everyone is scrambling to buy up you should be safe to leave it on your bot and expect a trade within hours or days. However, if you anticipate that the card will drop in value or is not flying off the shelves you have another option. You are not the only bot on MTGO and if you are uncomfortable holding onto high value inventory then you are probably not the bot paying the most for money cards.

Instead of purchasing a card and placing it into your bots inventory you can take that card into your own hands and sell it to another bot or another player in the classifieds. Larger bot chains usually are willing to pay more for cards than you would be and they have the buying power and audience to sell cards you wouldn’t normally be able to.

Pros

• Minimize the risks you take in purchasing high value cards.
• You can easily make a small profit by selling to other players or bots directly for very little effort.
• You benefit both your own bot (by increasing the number of tickets you have to buy more cards) as well as benefit larger bot chains who desire to hold such high value cards

Cons

• If someone comes to your bot looking for high value cards they will be disappointed and you may lose a customer

Trade limits increase!

MtGO used to have limit of 32 items per trade, then it was extended to 75 items per trade, but still it was not enough. Especially for moving bulk cards from one account to another. However, at the end of 2012, WotC was exploring what effects raising the current trade limit might have on the general health of the Magic Online ecosystem. After reviewing the risks, WotC decided to raise the trade limit in a single trade transaction from 75 items to 400 items. The changes enter into force on March 27.

Its incredible news. Great majority of players didn't know about such trade limits. I remember the countless situations when someone sold me 75 cards, but didn't open the second trade because he thought it is all what my bot needed from him. The same with selling mode, someone picking cards worth over 75 Event Tickets and typing done. Bot took up to 75 Event Tickets and stucked, not proceeding further. It usually ended up writing in chat window by customer 'stupid bot' etc. Fortunately, no more confusion!

Buying Small, Selling Big - The Limits Tab

Buying Small, Selling Big

Sometimes when you are getting started with a small investment you can be afraid to devote all of your tickets to big money cards. Cards can plummet in price and when you need to make profits on every trade to expand it can be scary holding onto a card worth 20 tickets or more. ML bot gives us options to deal with this and allow us to do some things to minimize the risk and/or even make a profit on high value trades.

To minimize our risk of losing on big money cards that have a sudden drop in value or investing everything we have in a single card and retaining a very small inventory MLBot provides Pro users with the limits tab. The limits tab is used to set the maximum buying and minimum selling price for commons, uncommons, rares, mythics and booster/avatars.

Red – Selling Limit

Selling limits dictate the minimum price your bot will let a card go for. This is a very useful way to make sure that everything within a card rarity is sold for at least a decent price.

Blue – Buying Limit

Buying limit is the maximum your bot will offer for any card in a particular rarity. So if a card is valued at 100 and you set your max to 20 you will only offer 20 tickets for that particular card. Some users might not appreciate such a low ball offer for their valuable cards but it can prevent you from buying something you don’t want or might be mistakenly priced.

Green – Booster/Avatar Limits

Similar to the selling limit and buying limit for cards these options will dictate the maximum and minimum prices your bot will buy and sell avatars and boosters at.

Orange – Do Not Buy For More

This section allows you to specify if you are even willing to buy a card that is of greater or lower value than what is specified. This is very useful to prevent your bot from buying junk cards that will never sell.

Pros

• You very much reduce the possibility of spending all of your capital on a few expensive cards

Cons

• You likely will not end up paying fair value for high value cards and customers may feel cheated
•  You may pass up opportunities to buy cards because of your settings

Comments on Uptime Bar & Blacklist

The website got two (2) new features this week; an uptime meter and a global blacklist.  What are they and more importantly, why would you want them?

The uptime meter shows how often your bot has been up during the previous two (2) days.  It’s not so much the bar itself, but the information it can deliver, especially when used in conjunction with the dashboard.  Now that the website is optimized for phones and tablets, it is much easier to keep an eye on what your bots are doing.  It is especially convenient to quickly cycle through your bots and if one of them is down, you can immediately see the problem and if you have a VPN program installed on the same machine as the bot, can remote into that machine and fix the problem.  (If there is enough interest in this, let me know and I’ll write an article about that procedure.)

The other much discussed detail is the global blacklist.  The procedure itself is not too difficult; click on the tab, enter the person to be blocked and from that time forward, whenever that person opens a trade with your bot, the bot will withdraw the trade.

But why would you want to do this? 

If you notice that someone has taken twelve copies of a card from a LITE bot you run, you might consider blacklisting that person.

If you notice a person opens a trade and does nothing for the entire trade window and consistently does this, you might consider blacklisting that person.  (This used to be a problem several years ago when there were not so many bots, but nowadays, this happens quite rarely.)