Monday, June 3, 2013

Shady Dealings



In today’s article I’d like to point out a few things you should never do with your online card trading business. It seems to have become common practice these days to use the classified in many shady ways to deceive and cheat potential customers. While it might get you a few extra trades in the short run you will end up alienating the community and gain a reputation as a bad dealer.

The Human Bot
The first and most frequent thing I notice in terms of bot owners abusing the classifieds is setting up a classified message that includes the word “Human” in an attempt to deceive players who prefer to deal with other players.  When building a classified message it’s important to include certain key words that individuals search frequently so that you’ll get noticed, but lying to a potential customer and doing so blatantly is going to do a considerable amount of damage to your reputation as a dealer. Nothing sets me on fire as a buyer quite like searching for a card and seeing a score of bots who even include bot in their username advertising that they are humans buying or selling a card.

Spamming Classifieds
Another popular shady tactic that many people have turned to is polluting search classified search results with dozens of bots all buying chase rares with the same classified message. For example you search for Sphinx’s Revelation and seeing GenericBot1, GenericBot2 all the way up to GenericBot41 all with the same classified message saying they will pay a modest price. 
This clouds searches with dozens of results and make sorting through the classifieds for someone actually selling a card a difficult task to achieve. Being the most obnoxious person in the room isn't the best approach to making a sale.

Deceitful Advertisement
I’ve encountered frequently bots that advertise they are selling a card in a classified ad but do not actually have the card to sell. This can be very frustrating because it wastes their time as well as wastes valuable trade time your bot may have with someone who wants what you have instead of what you claimed to have had. On top of that your reputation can be tarnished as easily as a single bad experience and having a customer open a trade expecting to make a purchase to find out you are out of stock (or were lying entirely) will make a very sour affair.

Likewise, Advertising at a price that you aren’t selling at is a great way to turn people away from your service. On several occasions I have seen a bot advertising a sale price of 1 ticket when in reality the card when selected costs a ticket and change. It may seem like a great idea to get people in the door but $1.00 at the door can incite a lot of confusion and aggression from customers who feel cheated when it suddenly costs $1.99 at the register.

In For The Long Haul
If you are playing the short game you may scrape up a few bucks with dirty tricks and a disregard for your reputation. For those of us in it for the long haul dodgy methods of making sales can ultimately cost you more than they are worth. Weigh your decisions heavily and remember that repeat customers are the heart of your business.

18 comments:

  1. many of those 200+ bots chains belong to well known reputable bot chains which i will not name here.

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  2. I imagine they do belong to big chains because they have the money to buy, but that doesn't make it ethical. If people could connect the spam with the chain perhaps they wouldn't by quite as "reputable".

    They know what they are doing is shady so they don't advertise that they are spamming in the name of X bot chain. The classified ads are hard enough to navigate and stuff like that pollutes search results. It's equivalent to the practices of those spam emails occupying your junk mail folder.

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  3. Carlos do you speak spanish ? i sent you a private message via google+ can u read it please ?

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  4. StoreShop284... o_0?? Oh god

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  5. They are bots that spam the classified ads. There seems to be quite a few different "chains" of these spam bots but they all have the same attack plan. List chase rares, copy and paste across dozens or more accounts.

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  6. How do u think certain chains have 5 bots constantly selling and 1 giving cards for free with just 2 "not so busy" buybots ?

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    1. Perfect examples of the "human" keyword and MASSIVE spam listings here.

      Glad to see that none of them are MTGOLibrary users :)

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    2. theres a few MTGOLibrary bots that have that "human" tag on them

      Delete
  8. MTGOLibrary needs to come with coding which doesnt allow us to write stuff like "human" "mtgotraders" "supernova" etc etc etc. or at least allow those "companies" to pay in a small fee to not allow them to do that.

    Id pay to not allow no1 to use BestDeal on their classifieds message. for example. (not that i have any at the moment for example).

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. Yea. This really irritates me. To see some fellow bot owners purposely misleading folks with their names :(

      I wonder if Albert would be willing to implement a "Not Allowed" list; similar to the list that MTG0 uses to filter out certain key words. For those that don't know what I'm talking about, check out your MTGO directory file located at "C:\Program Files\Wizards of the Coast\Magic Online\Data\censorlist.dat" with something like notepad. :)

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  9. hmm Interesting I'll pay to not allow anyone else to be able to list 'Voice of Resurgence' and 'Stomping Ground' and... ;)

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  10. Carlos,

    Funny that your the top commenter on this as you are the shadiest person i know with a bot.

    Want to know what is really shady, different pricing on different bots in the same chain. Seriously how many people got screwed by not trading with each of your bots in the correct order over the years. You know its true its the only reason to have such a fail ass pricing system so that newbs will trade with lower paying bots to make you more money.

    But you cant do anything wrong can you shithead, everything you do even what you condemn others for doing thats ok. You are a hypocrite and a scammer of the highest level.

    Oh and to try and call out a legit chain for something that you made up in your fantasy land head of yours thats funny... Seriously who is more likely the scammer the chain that buys and sells for consistant rates accross all their bots while posting their prices online or the shithead (you carlos) that wants to be removed from wikiprice so no one can see his prices and pays different amounts on each bot, come on who you kidding with this crap.

    BOYCOTT BESTDEAL

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  11. Post free classified ads on AdsRoad, the largest free classifieds site to sell your stuff reach millions of buyers looking for ads like yours.
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    ReplyDelete