Wednesday, March 27, 2013

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



13 comments:

  1. Jason, it's a great post! I discussed the topic some times ago! Here:
    http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.it/2011/05/i-want-to-share-with-you-wonderful.html

    Just keep it hard, good things come when you go for them:
    http://www.motivationalmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Good-Things.jpg

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  2. Don't get discouraged, remember the bot is not really costing you anything to run you don't paying anything unless you make money.

    not exactly true. a PC costs about $2 a day on electricity alone to run 24.7

    $700 per year

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    Replies
    1. $700 a year? I would go with a new electric company. There is a good article here: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/2404 . its about 30 bucks a month. But if you are using VMware and your computer is going to be on anyways, then its more like 10 bucks a month.

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  3. Carlos very true and accurate.
    However, you have to keep in mind that you would use your pc otherwise anyways if you just run the bots on VMs

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  4. I just ran some calculations. Based on electricity cost of ~ 600 Dollar per Year and a profit Margin of ~ 3 % for break-even a rough turnover of 21.000 tickets is required.

    Any fellow botters out there who reach that number?
    I'm just starting out with 3 bots, but this seems quite high

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    Replies
    1. 3% profit margin is quite low. buying for 10 to sell for 10.3 will result in loads of "trade for loss" on mythics etc.

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    2. Yes I am well over those numbers, and my average profit is about 45% when average in all the hugh 1000% profits on commons and uncommon.

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    3. How do you factor in falling cards prices? Your bots will definitely buy cards that fall in price afterwards from time to time.
      Also profit on commons / uncommons is much higher but turnover compared to Rares / mythics is much lower?

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  5. (and this is not counting initial investment costs for PC)

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  6. For sure electricy is important, but.... 600 dollars/year? I spend and additional 20 usd/month, that is 240 usd/year. Luckily for the majority of us electricity is not a big deal. And you just need a single pc to run 4-6 bots

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  8. I would also be really interested where you guys get your cards price from? :)
    Do you use the MTGO Library prices? How often do you update the prices? Doesn't is get quite expensive after some time?

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  9. We have an algorithm to compute the prices that takes in account a lot of things, such as the "paper" prices and the amount of cards in all the collections. We update the prices every 2 hours, 24/7. We have a server to do that

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