Friday, March 22, 2013

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.

9 comments:

  1. Thanks for dealing with the topic. Sometimes I got emails from bot owners trying to understand if a trade happened / not happened. And every time it's a little pain to describe all the things they can check...

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  2. its a MTGO Bug not MTGOLibrary. if a player is taking cards from a bot vs nothing(credit) and cancels on 2nd confirmation window, the bot will get the ok message "TRADE COMPLETED".

    Just check the bot stock and make sure u have the same quantity of those cards before giving the credits back.

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  3. What about the bot fee you got charged for each of those trades? Just gotta eat it as a cost of doing business?

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    Replies
    1. When this happens, just email me at staff@mtgolibrary.com and I will charge back the fee of the trade

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    2. Hopefully mtgo v4 will fix this

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    3. When this happens, just email me at staff@mtgolibrary.com and I will charge back the fee of the trade

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    4. Thanks for clearing it up Albert, that's what I figured.

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  4. true. a 80+ tix trade is at least 2-3 tix fee.

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  5. there's a guy claiming that bots are disconnecting when completing trades and he's missing his tix etc.
    Be aware.

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