MTGO Library Bot 11.24 - update required

Last Wednesday (6th July) Wizards of the Coast updated MTGO and changed a couple of minor internal things. We had to release a bot update (version 11.24) to cope with the changes. Previous bot versions have been disabled and now you cannot use them.

If your bot is experiencing problem, here you are the exact step to follow to restore it:

1. locate the bot folder and erase all the files in the "/log" folder. These are log files the bot created, and probably they filled the whole hard drive. You have to erase them to free some space.
2. empty the Windows Recycle bin to confirm the space
3. download the bot installer from www.mtgolibrary.com . The current version is 11.24. Any version superior to 11.24 is fine. Do not let the bot update by itself, use the installer.
4. install the bot again. Choose as destination folder the folder of the current bot folder. The installer will overwrite all the bot files but not your settings and your price.
5. the bot is now able to work again and can handle the new version of mtgo!

We'll be on LiveChat if you need help, please contact us

MTGO Library Bot 11.00

We released ML Bot 11.00 some minutes ago. The new version improves a number of things. Among these:

• ML Bot has been compiled with Net 4.5.2 to offer a better compatibility with Mtgo.
• Some weeks ago, WotC updated Mtgo and broke the "blinking" of the submit button in trade. As result, the bot was unable to detect the submit and needed an explicit "done" command in the chat to finalize the trade. We fixed the problem by changing the way the bot detects the submit and now typing "done" is no more necessary.
• Opening trade with other bots is now faster and more reliable.
• We fixed some DKA cards with wrong names

Weekly recap email

Starting this week you will receive every Saturday morning a weekly recap email. The email contains a number of useful information condensed in a unique place, such as number of trades, profit, Return On Investment, suggestions and advises. The information is available on the Online Control Panel (the email contains the links for it) but having them clearly stated in a unique place every week is useful.

What are the data you usually look for? If you think there is something we are missing, please let us know. Below an example email :

Spike Protection Tool

Have you ever been in this situation: a card spikes in price, and your bot buys at the new high price just as the card drops back down? You end up losing money because your bot's been tricked by a temporary spike in value.

Spikes are quite common on MTGO and we know that they pose a big risk for botters.

To protect our customers, we are introducing the new “Spike Tool”.

The Spike Tool uses a heuristic to spot sudden increases in price on cards valued over .5 tix. When a card spikes in price, the bot will keep the buy price at the lower pre-spike price.

A similar safety net will be applied if a card spikes DOWN in price. The bot will keep the sell price at the higher pre-spike price.

The Spike Tool will be automatically activated on all bots starting today. We've initialized the tool with some light parameters. We recommend that you keep it active for the next few days and adjust it as needed.

Extended sell & buy price consistency

Yesterday we updated the server to handle the Sell (and Buy) price consistency "over" the maximum protection values of 100%. You can now choose 110% and 105% . What does this mean?

Setting a value higher than 100% (for example 105% or 110%) results in trades with a profit. Please note that if your protection percentage is set too high for too long you risk not selling the card, and therefore not re-buying it at the market value. This may result in a lower than normal inventory rotation and an overall loss in profits. Remember that some cards fall in price and if you don't keep up with the market you may be holding onto the card for too long.

For the original article about price consistency (introduced one year ago), please read here: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/04/price-consistency-feature.html
For the manual, please read here: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/11/control-panel-v4-buysell-consistencey.html

Coming soon: Prices and Margin Tab

In two weeks we will be making some changes to our pricing structure, this will include a format change of the official pricelist CardsMTGO.txt and the addition of a brand new tab to the Bot UI (Prices and Margins tab). You have to do nothing, no action is required from you.

First lets talk about the format change of the CardsMTGO.txt file. We will be removing the buy prices. Example of the current cardsmtgo.txt file.

20678#20679#000#0001#5DN#C#Abuna's Chant#0.008#0.026#0.002#0.008

20878#20879#000#0002#5DN#C#Armed Response#0.008#0.026#0.002#0.008

this is what it will look it will look like when we release the new feature:

20678#20679#000#0001#5DN#C#Abuna's Chant#0.008#0.026

20878#20879#000#0002#5DN#C#Armed Response#0.008#0.026

CardsMTGO.txt will just include non-Foil and Foil selling prices. This is part of the new margin concept we will be explaining in the next section.


New Prices and margins tab introduction:

Currently in the Price adjustment tab you are able to adjust the CardsMTGO.txt files selling prices and buying prices.

This works fine, but there are some problems. For example: what is your profit? Are you now selling your Tarmogoyf for 50 and buying for 35 or selling for 55 and buying for 40? Since there is no way for you to control the official buying price, you simply don't know.

Next week the Price Adjustment tab will retire and will be replaced by an easier to understand tab, named "Prices and Margins". The tool will allow you to define the correction of the selling price over the official sell price contained in CardsMTGO.txt  and the buying price as margin parallel to the selling price in percent.

The buying price will be computed no more as % of the official buying price, but as % of the official selling price. The official buying price will disappear from CardMTGO.txt since it will be no more necessary. As said above, the new CardsMTGO.txt will be like this:

MM2#M#Tarmogoyf#55.160#55.020

and, with -7% and a margin of 10%, you will sell Tarmogoyf at 51.298 and buy it for 46.10 , Having the selling price at 51.298 and the buying at 46.10 means that your margin is 10%.

The migration to the new format will happen automatically: the bot will translate your current settings into the new settings, keeping your prices unaltered, exactly as they are now.

ML Bot for Mtgo v4 switchover

Hello botters,

As you probably already know, mtgo v3 will be retired soon and mtgo v4 will be the only official mtgo client. The announcement from Chris Kiritz can be found here and gives July as a date, right before the release of M15.

Our plan is to release the ML Bot client for mtgo v4 two weeks before the switchover so everyone will have the time to update their bots. This will not be a "beta", testing is no more required - this will be the official "first version" of the bot for mtgo v4.

In order to make the transaction smooth, we will be online 24/7 on LiveChat and on Skype (our account is "mtgolibrary.support"). You will probably need to add more ram to your virtual machines because Mtgo v4 needs more ram than v3 (2gb per machine are recommended). We will provide some virtual machines in case you need a good starting point. Please make sure you can install and launch Mtgo v4 on your machines and that it runs without crashes - we are in fact aware of some users unable to load Mtgo v4 properly.

We will run some v4 bots next week (we'll give the names), feel free to trade with them and write us the feedback.

Profits! How to calculate them.

Hello Fellow Botters,


Today I will talk about calculating profits. Everyday, about 3 times a day I get and email, Pm, or Skype message asking me "how do you calculate profits"? I have been thinking about it for sometime now and I came up with a way to figure this out by combing a few tools already available to us.

Before we get started you will need to download MTGO Tool that was created by Sebastian B. a few months back. You can download that (Click here). Next you will need to download and excel file calculator that I created you can down load that (Click here).

This profit calculator takes into account price fluctuations and it will give you a total profit dollar amount for your chains (up to 6 bots per chain)

Ok so lets get started:

Step 1:  Download your CSV file from your Magic Online bot account.
Go to collection -----> Select all -----> Right click and export.

Step 2:  Open the MTGO Tool (Run in administrator)
Load your current CardsMTGO3 file and load your CSV file you download in step 1.
You will use the results of this in step 3.

Step 3: Input data into ProfitCalc.xls
Use the chart below to help you.

A). Input data from your Csv file using the MTGO Tool (step 2) week 1
B). Put any price corrections you use with your bots
C). Input data from your Csv file using the MTGO Tool (step 2) week 2
D). Put any price corrections you use with your bots.
E). Total profit between week 1 and week 2 ( keep in mind it might not all be in actual tickets, some could be in collection growth)
F). Input the (+/-) difference from base amount of tickets in the bot/chain. What I mean by this, each bot should have a base amount of tickets that you want on it at all times, for instance you might want 500 actual tickets on there at all times, 500 would be your base. So if you go to your bot during this profit calculation and 550 tickets are on there then you would insert 50 in this field and take 50 tickets from your bot. So basically reset your bot to your base ticket amount and insert the difference here.

You can do this once a day, once a week, once a month, or once a year, just keep in mind you need the beginning information and the end information for what ever your duration you choose.


This takes about 10 minutes to complete with a single bot or 30 minutes for 5 bots. I made a calculator for single bots and for chains up to 6 bots.


I hope this helps everyone.

Have any questions email me: jason@mtgolibrary.com
Skype: mtgolibrary.support
Mtgo handle: teamstoge

Unlimited Pricelist Downloads ends tomorrow

Just a quick reminder for those who forgot about it.

Tomorrow will be the last day we'll be offering the Unlimited Pricelist Downloads at 8usd/month.

Starting from Saturday, the price will be 12 usd/month or 15 tixs/month. (the increase will thus be +50%).

Don't miss the chance to subscribe at this exceptional price!

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.

CSI:MTGOL (Part 1 of 2)

I am playing my favorite MMO game when my email client, Thunderbird, dinged.  Upon reading the header, the message is coming into one of my bot’s email accounts.

I just traded with your bot and never received the cards.  Can you send me the cards or refund my credits?

Curious, I moved my character to a safe place and investigated further.  The trade was for four (4) cards, costing .84 tickets.  My spider sense has not tingled yet.  I look up the card in question and it doesn’t look like something many players would want, much less more than four (4) copies.

I decided to trust this individual and went into the Library dashboard and refunded his credits.  I then sent an email to the customer informing him his credits were refunded.  I then resumed playing my MMO.

About ten (10) minutes later, Thunderbird dinged again.  This time it was from my aggregate bot account where all trades are filtered to and it showed that this customer again traded with the bot and the same four (4) cards were traded.  Since I did not hear back from this person, I am safely assuming that there has been no further problems, all costing me a little bit of MMO playing time.

So, how do I know the customer was not trying to rip me off?  ML Bot has a lot of little-known debug tools to verify if a trade really happened, despite things like the connection down, or Mtgo giving a false message, or the crash of the laptop hosting the bot.  How can a transaction be completed and cards not be transferred?  I’ll answer those questions next time.

Percentage Correction evaluator III

Hi Gents,

here's the new Excel sheet for calculation bot prices. I've also added a few other things I believe will be helpful.

The first tab, "settings" is where the users start out. After they have copied the "CardsMTGO3.txt" file to the root directory, they are ready to hit the "Process Prices" button. This sets the file up for everything else. After doing that, the users can select different percentages from the drop down menu's until he is satisfied.

The users can then proceed to the "prices" tab. From here (direction on tab as well), they can enter card information and results based on the choices in the "settings" sheet. This is all recalculated if any changes are made to the settings sheet, so when they go back, the new prices will be reflected. The users can copy and paste the price data directly from the "CardsMTGO3" tab that was generated after clicking the "Process Prices" button.

 The final addition, because I became weary of continually editing my PersonalPercentages.txt file (the ; were enough to drive me mad), I created the "PersonalPercentages" tab. The users can now choose from the drop-downs on the left and the rest is calculated for them, again based on what they entered into the "settings" tab. Then all they have to do is copy the cells to the right (clearly marked by green cell at top) and paste them into their "PersonalPercentages.txt" file.

Hope you guys like/enjoy. 
Cheers, 
James 

PS: Carlos, I did try to get it so that the user could select from left to right the Set and then Rarity so as to provide a "filtered" list of possible card choices ...Unfortunately Excel limits array sizes and it is too small to do this...It broke after 1439 items :(

Cardlog and Tradelog, blazing fast

Probably unnoticed, last week we introduced the CardLog tool. It allows to search for a specific card and compare the buying and selling prices over time. The CardLog renders statistics and displays the average and total profit.
I personally think this is an amazing tool, much more powerful than the old one we were used to on the old website.

We also worked a lot on the Tradelog and made it faster: you can now search in all your trades in few seconds, making it much faster. The graphs are also rendered after the page has loaded, improving responsiveness.

MTGO Bot Tool 0.0.13

As requested from the community, the possibility of loading personalprices.txt has now been added.
Though the complete list of cards may be a bit bugged at the moment. I will be looking into this for the next release.
As usual, full changelog available here and also included in the installer that can be downloaded from here.

*2013-02-21 - v0.0.13
-Changes
-Changed how the sets are loaded. Installing new version does not cause the old sets to load list to get replaced.

-New features
-Added possibility to set correction rates
-Added possibility to load all cards from CardsMTGO3.txt (Pretty useless at the moment, will be for the functionality to edit personalprices.txt)
-Added possibility for loading personalprices.txt into the general card list. Just reading the list at the moment.

As usual, if you find any bugs or got any request, send me an email on mtgoswebot@gmail.com or contact me in game, username: Klixxer

MTGO Tool 0.0.12 released

To those who missed the last post about this. I'm creating a MTGO Tool for ML Bot users mainly. Because at the moment you need your "CardsMTGO3.txt" pricelist file from ML Bot to actually use the software.In the future I will probably make it possible to be used without pricing aswell.

At the moment the tool is still in beta since I have only been working on it the past week.

The tool can be downloaded from here. Also the changelog is available here. To run it you need to have an active internet connection. Why do you need an internet connection to run it?
On startup I connect to my server validating that the beta is still active. This is because in the future I want to have the possibility to inactivate the beta versions.


Changelog 2013-02-13 - v0.0.12 (Full changelog avaiable inside installer and here)
-New features
     -Possibility to load unlimited .csv files from external .txt file. Check myCollections.txt for details how to.
     -Added setting to select to load all cards or just cards marked for trade.
     -Added a ticket count to the overview tab. Ticket value is not included in collection value.
-Notes:
     -Due to some setup changes the new version is 0.0.12 instead of 0.12.

If you have installed this program previously you will have to uninstall the previous version and then install this.


Features planned for next release:
-Collection comparision.

Got any suggestions for user input parameters for such a feature? Send me an email! Also suggestions for how the output should look like would  be nice.


If you have any questions, suggestions or bug reports, send me an email at mtgoswebot@gmail.com.
As I'm currently doing this for free, donations are more then welcome in all forms, cards, tickets, paypal and even just a bit of feedback would be nice. And you will get your MTGO name listed in the donors menu. (I have not created this yet). Don't forget to check comments for further details!

Regards,
Sebastian