Kuro's Botting Journal: Prologue

Hello and welcome to my series on botting. This series will follow me as I learn my way around MLbot, as well as create and run my own bot. I will basically be going through my experiences with MLbot, and botting in general. This prologue is just to give a little overview of the steps I am taking in order to get ti the point where I am starting my very first MTGO bot. I hope you enjoy the read and follow me every step of the way!

My reasoning for wanting to start a bot is simple: I want to make tickets and sustain my MTGO spending. Botting help achieves this by allowing me to make tickets through the bot, and also by cutting down on my actual spending by taking the time to work on the bot. Anyway, enough of the backstory, let’s start talking about what I had to do in order to run a bot. As I originally no idea where to even start I began seeking help in MTGSalvation and later on BotRunners. After meeting a few people and asking a LOT of questions (asking questions is the key to success), I finally had an idea in my head for the direction I wanted to take my endeavours. As MLbot is the only commercially available bot, that was my first and only choice. Now, before even starting the bot, I spent a few hours every day for about a week and a half just reading up on botting and the different methods. One of the best sources I found was on this blogspot in the form of ArchBot’s “Comprehensive Guide for the Aspiring Botter” which I highly suggest you google and read. There are also a ton of useful resources on the blog if you look at the “startup”, “new to botting”, and “advice” sections.  After all of the reading, I had finally decided that it was time to start setting up my laptop for use with the bot. This involved downloading and setting up a VM, creating an MLbot account and making another MTGO account to be my bot account. First off, let’s talk about the VM very quickly.  

The VM you choose is completely up to you, but in case you were wondering, I chose VirtualBox simply because I heard it started up faster and took up only a little bit of resources. After getting it set up to run Windows XP SP3 (there are many guides on the internet depending on which program you used) I installed a few things:

• ·         Google Chrome (because IE sucks)
• ·         .Net Framework 2.0/3.5/4
• ·         MTGO Software (current client not beta)
• ·         MLbot Software

I had originally only had .Net Framework 4 installed but through troubleshooting had to download 2.0 and 3.5. The .Net Frameworks will need to be installed in order (2.0 then 3.5 then 4). Then when you install the MTGO software you will need to go into the install directory and install the DirectX file located in the folder. After installing everything and restarting the VM, you should be able to run MTGO with no problems. I have compiled the required .Net Framework files here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xigzbhozfjui5kx/SDiAUcGDI3 to make it easier. After this the rest is easy. Create your new MTGO account and create an MLbot account for it. 

Well that is all for my “little” prologue to my series. I hope that you guys will enjoy reading up on my adventures in botting. I will be writing things down as I go but the series will most likely be a weekly sort of thing so my future posts may be sectioned into different days. I want to end this prologue off by suggestion that everyone reading this check out botrunners.net and get involved in the community. Even if you are just a little bit interested in starting a bot, it is a great place to start. I have to say that without meeting some of the people I met on there, I would not be here. These people pushed me past “what if I started a bot” into “I am starting a bot” and I am truly thankful for all their help up until now and for all their help I’m sure I’ll receive in the future.