400: Now what?

It’s been a week since the trade limit went from 75 items per trade to 400 items for trade.  So what has been your experience?  Have you experienced more trades or fewer trades?  Have you traded more cards or fewer cards?  Have your profits increased or decreased?  Do you even know the answer?

I’m not saying that you should have a card-by-card exchange report ready at a push of a button.  If you are running the bot part time or as a way to play MTGO without too much effort and just run the bot on auto-pilot, then this does not apply to you.

For many of us, running a bot chain is a business.  As a CEO of your business, you should be intimately aware of general trends happening to your livelihood.  While we know the trade limit has been increased, after a week, you should be able to ascertain trends…be they increasing something, decreasing something, or having no effect at all, which in of itself should ask questions.

I wrote a spreadsheet for each bot which was designed to handle trade logs.  Basically it counted the number of trades in a day, the number of rarities trades and in the case of my LITE bots, profit per day. 

Using this as a template, let’s say that for the month prior to the increased trade limit, I would average 10 trades a day encompassing 450 cards.

If after a week, I noted that I average 6 trades a day encompassing 450 cards, then I can say that the switchover means fewer trades for me.  But since the amount of items has stayed constant, it means more uptime for the store.

If I notice 10 trades but encompassing 750 cards, then I would deduce the switchover has helped my business because the increase has led to more cards being traded.  This is a good thing.

If I notice no change, then I would deduce that few, if any, of my trades are draft dumps (buying mode) or set gatherers (selling mode).  I could then analyze my bot and see why I am not transacting any large quantity trades.  Inventory too low?  Not enough tickets?  Too restrictive in card selecting?

The point is that no matter which answer applies to you, you gain information which you then can act on; but you can only act on that information if you actually have that information.