R&D Challenge

WotC is giving away easy booster packs. On Friday, April 12 players will have opportunity to challenge Magic Resaerch & Development team at their own game. Bring the Standard legal deck and play against current and former R&D members, including Mark Globus, Erik Lauer, Tom LaPille, and Ryan Spain. You may be paired with one of them. Score 9, 12, 15 match points to get 5, 9, 18 Return to Ravnica booster packs, respectively. If you have some spare time at 12:00 PM (PDT) on Friday, April 12 participate in this event.

Unlimited free pricelists - avalaible now !

Mtgolibrary.com is launching a new tool, the Unlimited Pricelists.

- The current situation

Before today, one had to pay 0.200 tixs for each download of the pricelist. For example, if one has 3 bots and each bot updates the prices every 6 hours, the account globally downloads a total of 360 pricelists per month. At 0.2 tixs / download, it's 72 tixs / month, a lot of money. To prevent the expense one can adopt a number of strategies, for example reducing the numbers of download per day (1 per day instead of  4) or switch some bots from PRO to LITE.
In fact all the solutions are suboptimal, and I have to admit this has been a big problem so far.

- Unlimited pricelists
From today, you can now sign for Unlimited Pricelists. What is it? In a nutshell it's a subscription that allows the download of the pricelist for free. The subscription applies to all your bots, regardless of the number, even to bots you will add in the future.

The cost, valid till next Friday,  is 8 usd/month or 12 tixs/month: in the majority of the cases this is much less than the sum of the 0.2 downloads mentioned above.
*** UPDATE: Just a quick note, because I received many emails with the same question: the Unlimited Pricelist applies also to the automatic downloads from the bot. ***

- Benefits for the botter
The benefits for the botter are mainly economical - paying less for more pricelists. Having a bot always updated with the prices means a better market for the collection.
I won't talk more about this, I think every botter could explain the benefits better than me.
.
- Benefits for mtgolibrary.com
Altough -economically speaking- the Unlimited Pricelists seems a non-sense for mtgolibrary.com, we don't think so. We discussed a lot before the launch, and the general feeling is that we can offer a better product and that having "bots more updated on the market" will benefit us indirectly (for examples with more trades, or more PRO licenses subscriptions).

- Single downloads
Of course the old 0.2 downloads still hold. We don't force you at this, just think to Unlimited Pricelists as a new tool strapped on your belt.

New Features for MTGO Library V4 (Part3)

In these series I will share my wishes (and yours) of new features that we want on MTGO Library V4. Some of these have been 'promised', others are yet to be revealed and 'requested'. Feel free to share  your ideas about these new features discussed or to give new ones for the next posts. Thank you.

Pricelist

What can be improved?

• Removal of the Buying Prices from price list
• Buying price becoming a set fraction of the selling price.

Is it possible?

 It would be easy to implement and to code. For example if Auriok Champion is priced at 11.67 and you had a buying price of 80% (-20%) , your bot would offer 9.336 for that card.

Pros and Cons? 

As pros we have the fact that would be easier to configure and understand the profit margins of your bot.

The bad side would be the cards that require bigger or smaller profit margins. Cards that have a more regular and stable value, for example, a card that as been always worth around 10 event tickets, is likely to have a buying price of 8 and sell price of 10.0, while a card that as a inconstant value will have a bigger margin like buying for 6 and selling for 10.

Will this feature be in the MTGO V4?

 I have no idea as this feature would bring both advantages and disadvantages.

What are your thoughts on this feature? Would it have any use for your bots? Any new features you would like to see discussed for next part? Leave a comment bellow!

Next feature Hint: Type of Buyer(Wishlist vs Reading Collection)

New feature: Unlimited Price Updates.

Hello fellow botters,

I have a great announcement to make, starting April 5th (tomorrow) ML Bot will be offering unlimited downloads of the pricelist, for all your bots, at one fixed price. No more worrying about old prices or struggling trying to balance the number of downloads to keep competitive: you can have all your bots download the pricelist as often as you want.


The unlimited price list applies to all your bots, including future ones and regardless of the number.
The price you are wondering? 12 usd a month or 15 tickets a month, but there will be an introductory price for the first week (from April 05th till April 12th) of just 8 usd or 10 tixs.

How does this help me?

This new feature will allow you to download prices every hour unlimited, therefore keep your card prices in the current market. This will keep you safe from sudden price fluctuations that can potentially cost you money. 

Is it cost efficient?  

Yes, for  92% of ML bots this is a better option than individual price updates. I created a chart for pricing that shows you what you would pay without Unlimited price updates! (the chart refers to 12 usd, not the initial 8 usd price).
  

To me this is a no brainer, April 5th I will be signing up my account for this new great feature and gain the peace of mind. Have any questions? Email me. 


Modo handle: Teamstoge
Teamstoge@gmail.com

Happy Botting!

MTGO Library Bot 5.73 has been released

ML Bot v.5.73 has just been released, supporing the new set DDK (Duel Decks: Sorin vs Tibalt).

As usual, the updated pricelist is available for free in the update process and/or available in the installer.

Eye-Cloud

Last month, the hard drive which powers my bot chain decided to physically fail.  As you might expect, this was not a fun experience for me.  Fortunately for me, I run my bots in a virtual machine and had recently taken a backup.  So while it was time-consuming to create a host machine and configure the virtual machine host, the bots themselves were unaffected.

This got me thinking… what if I had not had a recent backup?  Not only would I have had to install a host machine, I would also have had to install each and every bot.  This is not the most exciting task to be doing.

Even if one starts from a Master Bot virtual machine, one must go inside each virtual machine and configure each one individually.  Yes, Library makes this task a little easier.  The server holds the advertising messages so I can retrieve them.  Library also makes a backup of its settings which is very useful, just not so useful in cases where the hard drive physically fails.  How could I use the backups that Library creates so that I can retrieve them when I need to?

If one is willing to spend a little time tweaking and has a little bit of programming skills, one can solve this problem using the Cloud.  For purposes of this discussion, the cloud refers to online storage.

Many companies offers a base level, typically five (5) gigabytes from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, and a lesser amount, but more than enough for our purposes, from a plethora of smaller companies.  So how do you do it?

You choose a service you like and sign up.
Install their drive synchronization program.
Select the MTGO directory and configure as needed.

Once this is done, the synchronization program will update whenever there is a change, be it from Library itself or whenever you change Library’s settings, like prices or number of cards to collect.

So once you have a backup, how do you restore?   After all, a backup is useless if you can not do a proper restore.

Restore the Windows Library runs on, be it a virtual machine or a physical machine.   Make certain to include MTGO.
Install the drive synchronization program.
Copy the files from the Cloud drive to your local drive.
Launch Library as normal and you’ll be back online.

MTGO Library Bot 5.72 supports 400 cards

I hope you spent a good holiday and had an happy Easter!

As announced on Friday, today we release ML Bot 5.72, officially supporting trades up to 400 cards.

We took the change to improve a lot of small things, first of all the speed of reading the 'You Get'/'You Give' columns. We also improved the quality of the OCR because it sometimes failed (and so the bot had to read everything again....).

We also slightly changed the "card list" messages the bot prompts while trading (messages like |2x Watery Grave 3.00) to make them more readable. We changed the way the bot alternates the blue and black colors and the usage of the symbols. All this was necessary because a huge list with 400 items can quickly became un-readable.

ML Bot 5.72 fixes also a minor problem with the bot GUI, sometimes not saving correctly the "free download pricelist at updates" checkbox.

Hope you enjoy this update, and welcome to the new 400-cards limit!