MTGO Library Bot 9.91

We released a couple of updates in close succession in the last few days. These updates include minor fixes but we thought it was necessary to release them immediately because they improve the stability of the client.

Most notably we fixed a problem with reading the commands from the chat, a MTGO crash at the login screen, a problem with the classified messages resulting in posted selling prices instead of buying price (and viceversa: buying prices posted, instead of selling prices) and a problem in loading the collection.

As you can see, these are small and "not core" issues but we preferred to release them immediately instead of waiting the next big update.

MTGO Library Bot 8.83

With ML Bot 8.83 we fixed some bugs. In particular:

• fixed a problem at the beginning of the trades causing the bot to withdraw if mtgo is slow.
• fixed a problem causing empty classified messages to be displayed, with no card replacements.
• opening trade with an autotransfer bot is now more reliable and does not paste the bot name in the Classified area. On previous versions this was caused by a misclick
• added the message "type the corresponding number to remove a card" when a customer buys cards

MTGO Library Bot 8.65

With ML Bot 8.65 we slightly changed the automatic OPEN | BUSY messages to better uniform them with the Classified standards.

The new OPEN | BUSY messages now look like these:

using the forest and the fireball symbol to make the bot status more prominent.
Please note that you can create your customized OPEN | BUSY message simply by unchecking the option "automatically prefix BUSY | OPEN " in the "Messages Tab".

We also changed the messages given in a trade, working especially on the card list to make everything more readable and less verbose

MTGO Library Bot 8.62

ML Bot 8.62 has just been released. It fixes:

• a sync problem with wikiprice, causing solo-seller bots to display as buyers (while they do not buy any card)
• a more robust OPEN / BUSY Classified message handling. Previous versions sometimes fail to update the message from "BUSY" to "OPEN" at the end of the trades, resulting in a neverending BUSY status

MTGO Library Bot 6.81

ML Bot 6.81 is a maintenance build for 6.80.

• It fixes a problem with the "Trading" mode that was not picking all the cards needed
• It implements a better heuristic engine to shorten the name of the cards in the #shortname# command

MTGO Library Bot 6.80

ML Bot 6.80 has just been released and it is available for download.

• we added a new command for the Classifed messages, the #shortname# command. #shortname# will replace the name of the card with a shorter / friendly name so you can save space and customers will still be able to search for cards. For example, "Brimaz, King of Oreskos" becomes "Brimaz", and "Phenax, God of Deception" becomes simply "Phenax". It's important to note that you don't have to define any "translation file" - the bot already knows how to translate the card names and will do everything by itself.

• fixed a problem in autotransfer modes causing the bot to pick more cards than necessary, using both the wishlist and the collection reading mode

• more robust handshake for autotransfer, with slighly changed messages

• larger input box for the Classified Message.

Trades are low these days, don't kill your margins

Mtgo economy is a bit slow this week, there is a significant drop of trades among all the bots, ML Bots and not ML bots. I checked online the main chains (see attached screenshot) and I found them at least 60% less frenzy than usual.

Don't cut your margin just because this is a slow week: keep your prices and resist the temptation. Release Events are just 2 weeks ahead.

.

MTGO Library Bot 6.55

ML Bot 6.55 is a major release improving a number of aspects. The most important changes are:

• fixed a bug in the Buying mode causing the bot to purchase more cards than necessary from the TD0 set.
• fixed a bug in the Buying mode causing Mtgo to "freeze". The bot clicked too fast and Mtgo used to freeze. 
• The loading of the wishlist is now faster and sends less clicks to the Mtgo client.
• fixed a minor problem with the ocr, sometimes not reading the first line of the "You Give" column. This resulted in aborted trades.
• to save CPU, we put the name of the bot in the "Search" text field in the Classified. This drops Mtgo CPU usage from 30% to 1%. We suspect the high-cpu usage is due to Mtgo constantly refreshing the board 
• the bot is now able to handle the "Already Logged in" window in the Login screen

MTGO Library Bot 6.42

With ML Bot 6.42 we continue the path started with versions 6.40 and 6.41, further increasing the operational speed and the reactivity of the bot. In details we rewrote the Csv creation and the Classifed opening phases. These phases used to take 30-40 seconds, while now takes 2-3 seconds. The opening of the Classified Board now clicks on "Home" and then "Trade" rather than using the "Menu"

We also fixed a minor bug regarding the launch of MTGO. The bot looks for the MTGO "Launch" buttons in three different locations on the screen and, if ML Bot is not minimized, the bot can click on its own interface and alter the settings.

ML Bot 6.42 inserts also a "system freeze" timer: if the whole system freezes, ML Bot tries to recover it

MTGO Library Bot 6.40

We are happy to deliver the first major update of the year, ML Bot 6.40. What is new ?

•  First of all, we increased the overall speed of the bot and in particular the accepting trade phase. Now the bot will be able to setup the trading interface and be ready for accepting a trade in 5 seconds (it used to took 10-15 seconds). This results in a better customer experience (and possibly a returning customer).

• We also coded a couple of smart "withdraws" to save time when a trade cannot be performed. This happens, for example, when a buddy opens trade and has no credit and no cards available for the trade: the bot will prompt a nice message and abort the trade some seconds later: "I cannot find any card tradable. Please make more tradable and REOPEN trade". Analogously the bot withdraws when it cannot find any interesting cards for sale and it is a "solo buyer" - it won't go back to the main menu but it will directly abort the trade.

• We also reduced the number of advertisement messages. Older versions used to adv mtgowikiprice and mtgolibrary.com: we saw this was too much and now the bot will show zero or one message.

MTGO Library Bot 6.26

MTGO Library Bot 6.26 is a major release with many improvements and bug fixes.

• fixed a crash when erasing .dek files from the C:\ drive
• fixed a problem when switching from PRO to LITE, causing ML Bot to uncheck the 3 checkboxes related to price download (see image). This was a problem when switching from PRO to LITE, and then again from LITE to PRO.
• handled a teamviewer message in German language
• trade duration is now logged also for AutoTransfer and Balance trades
• posting messages in the Classified and in the Trading boards is now instantaneous. When using many commands (for example #sell# commands), ML Bot used to take 3-4 seconds before posting the message. This was a problem especially for the "BUSY" classified message because it is performed right at the beginning of the trade and could results in an unresponsive behaviour
• the csv creation phase has been greatly mproved and it is now much faster
• removed unnecessary % corrections from the dropdown menus in the Correction Tab, for example a -80% correction in Mythic Buying: none used it and it just took space

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (Classifieds Advertisement Part 2) Part 19

Classifieds Advertisement Part 2 (Formatting):

Last week I talked a bit about Keywords you should use (and not use) in your Classifieds ad. This time I'm going to talk a little about how many bot owners choose to format their messages.

Classified ads vary a lot from bot to bot but a lot of them follow a pattern similar to this for Pro bots:
(|Open|)(Icon)(Header)(Icon) (BUYING)/(SELLING): (Card|Price| (Card|Price| Card|Price|....)
And something along the lines of this for Lite bots:
(|Open|)(Icon)(Header)(Icon) (BUYING): (X Common/X Uncommon/X Rare for 1 Tix) (SELLING): (X Common/X Uncommon/X Rare for 1 Tix)
(Ignore the Parentheses , these are to split the message up for the example)

Status Prefix:
The |BUSY|/|OPEN| prefix is automatically included if you check the box called "Automatically prefix | BUSY|/|OPEN| to the Classified message." inside the Messages Tab of the bot interface.
I prefer not to use this setting and have written my own (Busy Trading) message in the "Busy Class. message" Box in the bot UI instead. I'm not sure what's the best way to go about this but I find it unnecessary to waste your limited characters (255 max) on writing |OPEN|. If your bot isn't busy and a classified message is posted it should be fairly clear that it's open. But this is all up to you. It might be good to use simply because most bot's do, for the sake of consistency. But then again, it's always good to stick out from the crowd.

The Header:
The "Header" is replaced by the name of your chain. Often surrounded by (icons)(I'll explain how to use these later) to make it stand out from the crowd and also lets people easily know which bots are part of the same chain, and therefore shares credits.
It might not be very important if you have consistent names like BotBot, BotBot2, BotBot3 and so on. But it's very important for chains that don't, like the Supernova chain for example that have completely random bot names.

Prices For Pro Bots:
Pro bots usually include Individual card buying or selling prices prefixed with a "BUYING:" or "SELLING:" in their Classifieds ad.
These prices can be automatically inserted by the bot using different macros that I will go more in depth about next week.

Price For Lite Bots:
Lite bots often include "BUYING:" followed by the amount of each rarity your bot buys for one(1) ticket. And then "SELLING:" followed by the amount of each rarity your bot sells for one(1) ticket.

You don't have to include all information you want your customers to know though, as you can write messages in the message tab that the bot can post when a trade is initiated instead.

That's all I had for today, next week I'll talk some more about Classifieds advertisement.

Until then, have fun botting!

-Tom (Sitrec)
Archbot MTGO Store: ArchBot, ArchBot2, ArchBot3, ArchBot4 & ArchBot5

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (Classifieds Advertisement Part1) Part 18

Classifieds Advertisement Part 1 (Keywords):

In my last post I explained how you can use the PersonalPrices.txt file to set personal prices for individual cards. This week I'll talk about what you should think about when customizing your Classifieds ads.

First thing you need to know is that this ad is your face towards customers.
Some more experienced users will use the wikiprice site to find bots but most will just search the Classifieds, so it's crucial that you write a good ad that includes the right keywords so new customers can find you.

Keywords:
Keywords are words that you should use in your bot's Classifieds message that are words people often search for. As far as I know Wizards haven't released any statistics on this so we'll have to guess which words these are.

Good keyword usage:
Some words are pretty obvious, words like "Buying", "Selling", "Common", "Uncommon", "Rare", "Bulk", "(Popular card's names)" and so on.

These are words you should try to include in your bot's Classifieds messages where they fit.
For example: Rarities and "Bulk" only applies to Lite bots and "(popular card's names)" mostly applies to Pro bots. I would suggest writing real messages like "Now buying Theros" instead of just cramping them in randomly.

A different approach:
Some bot owners choose to include a bunch of random keywords at the end without spaces, just to cramp in as many as possible.
Example: uncommonraremythicbulktherosthsfoilstandard

While this definitely will yield more search hits it looks very messy and a bit unprofessional. I prefer writing real messages containing keywords since I think it looks better and more personal, but it's up to each of you how you want your chain to be perceived.

Bad keyword usage:
Some people choose to include keywords that doesn't even relate to their bot just to get more hits.
For example bots using the keyword "Casual" or "Human" which are usually reserved for humans wanting to sell or trade cards using the classified by hand and not use a bot.

Some even include names of other big chains to pop up when people search for these.
For example search for "Supernova" which is one of the larger bot chains on MTGO and your search will yield something around 120 hits even though the Supernova chain only consists of eight(8) bots.

This looks very unprofessional and I would never deal with a bot that uses this kind of strategy but it's definitely going to yield more searches that picks up their bots.

So it's all up to you how you want to use keywords. You should never underestimate how powerful these are and how much traffic they can yield, but always remember that your bot might come off as unprofessional and even shady if you use the "wrong" ones.

Next week I'll talk more about Classifieds messages and until then, happy botting!

-Tom (Sitrec)
Archbot MTGO Store: ArchBot, ArchBot2, ArchBot3, ArchBot4 & ArchBot5

MTGO Library Bot 5.94 and wikiprice

ML Bot 5.94 has been released. It offers more frequent refreshes on wikiprice: 2 hours vs 6 hours of versions 5.93.

We also sligthly changed wikiprice results and now we filter out all the prices older than 6 hours. This was necessary because older entries often result in false positive searches (and, if your bot is running properly, 6 hours are enough to update wikiprice with newer data).

The ultimate goal is always the same: eliminate all the false positive results and make wikiprice a 100% reliable tool.

New wikiprice is online

The new wikiprice is officially available online now. Please visit it here: http://mtgowikiprice.com/

Wikiprice offers now faster searches (the average search takes less than 2 seconds) and more frequent updates - a total update takes 6 hours while the old version took 24 hours. Under the hood there is a technology able to go real time - right after a trade wikiprice will update and will reflect the changes in the collection.
The times where you found an item on wikiprice and the listed bots didn't have it are going to finish soon. 

A problem of the old wikiprice was the unreliable update algorithm: some bots weren't able to update properly and after 48 hours their inventories rotated out. The update mechanism has been totally redesigned and the issue won't repeat.

Still not perfect, I am sure you will fall in love and get addicted soon :)

MTGO Library Bot 5.91 is online!

Hello,

we are glad to announce ML Bot 5.91, the first bot to fully exploit the new wikiprice, available online in one day ! More info will follow... for now just upgrade and your business will thank you :-)

Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 2) Part 11

MTGO Library Bot part 2:

Last time I talked about some basic preparations and basic information about ML Bot.
This time I'm going through the settings tabs of MTGO Library Bot.

Getting started:
First of all you should register your own account on mtgolibrary.com and then log in and click "Register new bot" and register your first bot. If you're going to run more than one bot, go into "Sharing credits" with each bot and add them to the same chain. This ensures that your customers can use any leftover credits on each of your bots.

General Tab:
Now start MTGO Library Bot and insert your bot's name into "Username" and the bot account's password into "MTGO Password" and lastly the password you use on the mtgolibrary site in "Bot Password"

I would recommend setting it to restart every 2 hours or so as MTGO can get a bit sluggish.
Mtgo also has a bug where it believes you're in a trade even though you're not, which will give potential customers a message that states that you're busy even though you're not when they try to trade.
A restart fixes this.

Make sure to uncheck "Make all tradeable". It automatically makes all cards you own tradeable which means your Lite bots will be selling valuable cards at bulk prices.

"Free download mtgolibrary.com prices at update" should always be checked as even Lite bots use the pricelist for certain things, otherwise it won't be able to buy new sets that gets released.

Also make sure to set the Bot type to whatever you're planning on using it for. Some people prefer to have one bot that buys and one that sells, in that case set the selling bot to only be a "Seller" and vice versa.
A "Trader" is a bot that allows a user to both sell to your bot and purchase at the same time.

Most bots have all these checked at the same time and that's what I would recommend.

Collection Tab: 
Here you can choose which sets to buy and how many of each rarity within each set to purchase.
For a Pro bot that is just starting out without a huge collection I would recommend buying only Standard and only 4 of each Common, Uncommon, Rare and Mythic. Foil is something I would recommend buying further down the road, the same goes for other sets. I would also recommend you to not buy basic lands or boosters in the beginning.

You can select set-categories in the "Quick selection" box and then choose rarities and quantities and lastly hit "Submit to collection". This is great for changing a lot of collection settings at once.

Buyer Tab: 
I wouldn't recommend you to change anything here except for maybe "Buyer Search Order", for example if you're not buying Foil you might as well move them down to prioritizing stuff you're actually buying.


Prices Tab:  This one differs depending on which bot type you're using and I'll go through this one for each type in upcoming posts.

Administrator Tab:
Here you can set your own account as Administrator which gives you privileges to execute commands for certain bot tasks as well as setting up automatic transferring of cards between your bots.

I wouldn't really recommend you to use the auto transfer as it's not very good at the moment and I think you're better off spending maybe 5 minutes every day to transfer them by hand.

Messages Tab:
"1st welcome message": Is the message your bot will greet a new customer with.

"General welcome message": Is the message your bot will post to returning customers upon opening of a new trade.

"Additional info message 1,2 and 3": These can be used for anything you would like to tell your customers. For example an email address where they can reach you on, or which bots are part of your chain.

"End of trade message": This message will be posted when a trade is completed.

"Display WIKI price message at the beginning of trade": This one should be checked. It will advertise the wikiprice site where they can find bot prices, but it also reduces the fee you'll have to pay to MTGO Library for each transaction from 3.5% to 2.5%.

"Classified message": This is the message the bot will post in the classifieds tab in MTGO. A good idea is to write either your bulk prices here or advertise cards you have for sale.

"Buy class. message": here you can set if you want to use a different message when your bot is busy. For example you could put (Busy Trading) or something similar in front of your normal classified message.

"Trading room message": this determines what your bot will post in the trading room.

Store and Accounts Tab:
Here you can find some licensing information about your bot.

Next time I'll go through how you can set up your first Lite bot and start botting for real.
Until next time, have fun!

-Tom (Sitrec)
Archbot MTGO Store: ArchBot, ArchBot2, ArchBot3, ArchBot4 & ArchBot5 

Your store on Magic Online

We host the first of a series of articles from our friends blog http://www.mtgeconomist.com , a top blog dealing with mtg and mtgo economics.
You can read the original article here: 
http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/tu-tienda-en-magic-online-parte-5/



In the previous chapter I showed the three main profiles for the Magic Online users: the drafters, constructed players and collectors. Besides, I finished saying that all profiles had a common goal: trading cards for a profit without effort. This process can be achieved by creating a Magic Online store, which can be managed personally or by a bot, a tireless worker which makes trades at any time of the day.

What is a Magic Online store?

A Magic Online store can be as simple as a user which offers buying and selling cards. Unlike the official store, you may open a store at Magic Online to trade your own cards and get your profit. Any user can create a store but it should have at least the following elements:

• A Magic Online account
• A card stock and/or sealed product
• An ad on the classifieds section
• Time and a dedicated computer

The first requirement has no discussion. The second one is essential if you want to attract customers interested in your cards. The third one is needed if you want visibility and let people know that you offer cards for buy/sell. Finally, the computer seems obvious but in following chapters of this seres you’ll notice that this element requires an special attention.

The main advantage of having a store at Magic Online is that you can make a profit from every transaction. Each time you buy a card to the purchase price and then sell it to its selling you get a profit percentage. If you repeat this process you can go on infinite profit. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

You may ask yourself why people would sell you a card at a cheaper price that you could sell it. The main reason is because you are offering a service: to be continuously present at Magic Online and accumulate a stock that you offer to the public.

However, there is another even more important reason. Drafters open boosters with cards that they usually don’t want because they prefer to play another draft, so they try to sell them as soon as possible. You, as a store at Magic Online, buy them those cards at a lower price because you know they have the urge to sell. On the other hand, constructed players search cards for their decks, so you can sell them at a slightly higher rate than you bought because you are saving them time to search those cards.

This way, the loop of buy/sell a card is closed and now you know where the profit comes from. However, there are still some problems we have to solve. Let’s see how.

The problem of payments

The first problem that appears when you open a store at Magic Online is how to charge your customers. As I said in a previous article, the currency of the game is the Event Ticket. However, this coin is indivisible, so you could not buy a card with a value, for example, of 0.4 tickets. Therefore it is necessary to track the credit of each client. Thus, if you sell a card of 0.4 tickets to a customer, he would give you 1 ticket and you should record him 0.6 credits for future trades.

The second big problem relies on the necessity to be in front of your computer at all times if you want to get customers. As you can imagine, this would be a huge amount of work for only one person who owns a store at Magic Online. This way, it is not strange that your store is not directly managed by you, but by a bot.

What is a bot?

A bot is a sophisticated special software that manages all purchases and sales of your store at Magic Online. You may think of it as a tireless shopkeeper which replaces you when doing all the tasks required by your store, works 2
4 hours a day and asks you nothing in return. To give you an idea, I introduce you a list of tasks managed by a bot:

• Continuous update of your inventory status, after each buy/sell or whenever you personally change your inventory.
• Track credit of each customer.
• Check the status of the Magic Online client.
• Automatic update of your ad with latest prices, state of the bot (open/busy)
• Notify customers the prices of the cards selected by them for purchase.
• Refresh the price list of all cards on your store inventory.

Although you can add more tasks, the previous list summarizes the most relevant ones. For many of them, the robot needs to move the mouse, send clicks and keyboard commands. For this reason, an operating system that uses a robot should not be used for any other task and must be only running your store at Magic Online. Fortunately, this problem has a solution that will be discuss in a future article of this series.

Which bot should I use?

Although there are some bots for Magic Online over the net, undoubtedly the most famous is MTGO Library. This software has the advantage of allowing you to customize almost any behavior you want for your store at Magic Online. Therefore, I would suggest you this software as the best choice to start with your first store. In the next chapter I will explain how this application works and what chances you have to create your store on Magic Online.

Shady Dealings

In today’s article I’d like to point out a few things you should never do with your online card trading business. It seems to have become common practice these days to use the classified in many shady ways to deceive and cheat potential customers. While it might get you a few extra trades in the short run you will end up alienating the community and gain a reputation as a bad dealer.

The Human Bot

The first and most frequent thing I notice in terms of bot owners abusing the classifieds is setting up a classified message that includes the word “Human” in an attempt to deceive players who prefer to deal with other players.  When building a classified message it’s important to include certain key words that individuals search frequently so that you’ll get noticed, but lying to a potential customer and doing so blatantly is going to do a considerable amount of damage to your reputation as a dealer. Nothing sets me on fire as a buyer quite like searching for a card and seeing a score of bots who even include bot in their username advertising that they are humans buying or selling a card.

Spamming Classifieds

Another popular shady tactic that many people have turned to is polluting search classified search results with dozens of bots all buying chase rares with the same classified message. For example you search for Sphinx’s Revelation and seeing GenericBot1, GenericBot2 all the way up to GenericBot41 all with the same classified message saying they will pay a modest price. 

This clouds searches with dozens of results and make sorting through the classifieds for someone actually selling a card a difficult task to achieve. Being the most obnoxious person in the room isn't the best approach to making a sale.

Deceitful Advertisement

I’ve encountered frequently bots that advertise they are selling a card in a classified ad but do not actually have the card to sell. This can be very frustrating because it wastes their time as well as wastes valuable trade time your bot may have with someone who wants what you have instead of what you claimed to have had. On top of that your reputation can be tarnished as easily as a single bad experience and having a customer open a trade expecting to make a purchase to find out you are out of stock (or were lying entirely) will make a very sour affair.

Likewise, Advertising at a price that you aren’t selling at is a great way to turn people away from your service. On several occasions I have seen a bot advertising a sale price of 1 ticket when in reality the card when selected costs a ticket and change. It may seem like a great idea to get people in the door but $1.00 at the door can incite a lot of confusion and aggression from customers who feel cheated when it suddenly costs $1.99 at the register.

In For The Long Haul

If you are playing the short game you may scrape up a few bucks with dirty tricks and a disregard for your reputation. For those of us in it for the long haul dodgy methods of making sales can ultimately cost you more than they are worth. Weigh your decisions heavily and remember that repeat customers are the heart of your business.

How do I Attract more customers?

Hello fellow ML bot owners,

       I recently was talking to a new bot owner and the first thing he said to me was "I  hardly have any trades, how do I get more customers?" I really think this is the question we all ask ourselves. So I thought about it and have come up with 5 things that I believe help attract more customers.

1). Classifieds

Make sure your classified advertisement is clean to the point and easy to read. Bots that have janky advertisement, use other bots names, and do not display prices are easily skipped over.



MTGOLibrary Bots

2). Wiki Prices

Wikiprice  is  a spot basically for customers to search for card that you are selling. Yes this can attract bot raiders but we are not here to discuss that, click here for that post. It also attracts good customers that need cards for their deck. You don't have to be the cheapest either, people need quantity, if your bot has four of a certain card and a cheaper bot has only one most likely they will use your bot. You can also look and see how you compare to other bots and adjust prices accordingly.

3). Time

You have to give it time! It took 3 months for me to get close to the number of traders that I would like and its growing everyday. You must keep your bots up 24/7, Customers tend to use the same bots over and over again mainly because of credits, but also because humans are creatures of habit. If your bot is down for any reason guess what? You just lost a sale, but more important you may have lost a customer.

4). Pricing

Lower prices sell your cards fast, yes this is true. I have found that not being the lowest pays off more because you tend to have stock and get you that little bit of edge on profits, also helps protect you from sudden price increases or decreases. Below is an example of where you should be on the wiki.

Wiki Prices

5). Clan Support

There was a great article recently written by Peter about this, click here for that article. You have to build a clan or join a strong clan and be active. You building a business, clan members are a great customer pool and will keep loyalties to your bots even if they pay a little more.

I hope this helps all the new bot owners that we have joining us and for all you veterans out there I would love to hear what has worked for you.

Modo handle: Teamstoge