Saturday, August 11, 2012

Cherry Pickers (Part 5)



In our series on cherry pickers and how to effectively deal with them, we’ve discussed a variety of methods which we can use to deal with them.  However, all the methods mentioned so far are either “after the fact” or require time and effort for limited results at bestX4dow hinted at one solution which we will discuss today: Let the bot to do this for you.

That’s right, why do something yourself when you can have a computer do it for you?

This feature is present in MTGO Library, although it is somewhat buried in the bowels of features.  You’ll also have to spend a little time configuring and tweaking the settings, but once done, it is set and forget.

So how does it work?  In the Administrator tab section of the bot, on the bottom half of the page, you’ll see a section to trade with other bots. See enclosed screenshot.  From here, it is relatively simple.  Select which bot/account you wish the bot to trade with; when to make these trades, and most importantly, what kind of trades you wish to make. 

There are a plethora of options here so you should familiarize yourself with these if you have not browsed this area in awhile. But for our purposes, we’ll just select the “give cards which cost more than X to the other account.”  (Just make certain that each bot is on the other bot’s buddy list.)

The prices and details are totally up to you and what you feel comfortable doing.  If you sell normally sell 10 rares for a ticket, you may make your threshold as tight as .1 or maybe you’re more forgiving and do not mind rares valued at .2 tickets being left behind.

The other point of consideration is when to actually make these trades.  Since MTGO is available 24/7 minus downtime, it is imperative to choose a time where there would as little of a hit as possible.  Going through your trade logs and charting when these trades occur should give you a nice idea of when would be the best time to do this transfer.

Finally, you’ll need to give this a few days so the initial batches can get transferred and to settle into a groove.  Of the options discussed so far, this one has the best balance of time involved (initially some time is needed, but after that, only maintenance) and a good reward (cards can still be cherry picked, but generally speaking, the good cards will be moved to another account without human intervention.

3 comments:

  1. Does the litebot have any sort of option as to only make cards tradable if they have a value below X? So if you have a 10-1 rare bot for trading, you could just set it to not mark anything above .2 (or whatever) tradable. And then give all those cards away to another one of your bots.

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  2. @roy7, No the lite bot doesn't have that functionality. Neither does the pro bot.

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  3. The limit here is Magic Online itself: there is no direct way to make tradable only specific cards, thus the bot should scan all the cards (one by one) and make each tradable/untradable ... a waste of time and a procedure prone to bugs

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