ML Bot 10.80, tide protected

We released ML Bot 10.80, implementing "tide protection".

As many of you probably remember, Jan 16th WotC updated the banned card list. The list included valuable cards like Splinter Twin. The banning affected the value of several other cards. The value of some decks decreased and the cards in these decks followed the same sort. Splinter Twin  and Keranos, God of Storms are two notable examples.

The banning had a bad impact on the bots - in few hours they bought a large quantity of these cards. The prices dropped in the following 2 days and so the bots had a neat loss. Basically the players used the bots to drop off all their copies before the price went down.

We worked very hard to implement a protection system which has now been tested and deployed tested successfully. The protection system is automatically active on all the bots, monitors the market and stops buying certain card when conditions are met. The trigger is very reactive, meaning that 1-2 hours after the banning the protection already "senses" the problem and automatically stops the bots from buying the card.

The system, which we internally named "flood protection system", is similar to the one implemented on mtgotraders and cardbot. On Jan 16h, if you tried to sell Splinter Twin and Keranos, they did not buy them even if they website said the opposite. Mtgotraders and cardbot had already a protection system to prevent the flood and we are guess it worked pretty well - we were unable to sell them any banned card nor any other card whose price was going down.

Don't expect the protection to apply in normal market conditions. The system is tuned to almost never trigger, except in exceptional cases like the ones of Jan 16th.