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.

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MTGO Library Bot 6.75 - revised make 4x tradable for large collections

Few days ago we released ML Bot 6.74 (article here: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/04/mtgo-library-bot-674-make-4x-tradable.html), able to mark your cards tradable to 4.
Today we release ML Bot 6.75, overcoming the problems 6.74 had with large collections (collections with more than 2500 unique items).

Please note that:

• ML Bot will mark all your cards tradable to a certain amount 'X', where 'X' can be 1,2,3,4,10,32. If you have more than 2500 different items, due to the MTGO limits in handling the collections, you first need to mark all your cards tradable to 'X' manually, by yourself, and then ML Bot will adjust the selection, trade after trade. If you don't mark your cards tradable to 'X' before and you have a collection with more than 2500 different items, ML Bot won't able to perform the task.

• If you are using the 'Balance' Autotransfer mode you may want to switch to 'Refill' since Balance mode moves the cards using the quantity for trade (and here the donor bot hides some cards). The other autotransfer modes work as intented

• Tixs are automatically made all tradable

Improved Oversell Protection

We have just deployed an oversell protection improvement (see here for the original article).

The Oversell Protection let you choose the names of the bots that will be affected, as well the "width" of the oversell threshold: "4x of a card among all the bots", or "just among the chain?". You can now easily destroy a rule by clicking on the "delete" link or remove a single bot by clicking the "x" close to each name.

The concept of "active/unactive" rule has also been removed and now all the listed rules are active - this should make the page easier to read, especially when multiple rules are created. Having the bot name listed makes also clear who is affected, and by which rules.

ML Bot Webshop Automation

Last week I found two interesting examples of webshops based on ML Bot and mtgolibrary.com. These are interesting because the owners found a way to interact with ML Bot and expand it beyond its original features. I'll talk about jbmtgo.com (a shop to buy cards online) and mtgotickets.com (a place to sell and buy tixs). Please visit them to get an idea.

• JB Mtgo Shop (click on the image to visit it)

Jbmtgo.com is a shop selling mtgo cards. You place the order, you pay with paypal, you go online on mtgo, contact the accont of the owner and you get the cards immediately. I tried it and it's very efficient. Technically speaking, the shop parses the file "cardsNeededAndCollection.txt", originally designed for debug purposes (and not documented on the manual). The files contains a list of all cards in the collection and their prices, so the shop can populate the inventory. One could do the same by parsing the csv of the collection, a file named .csv located in the C:\ folder (where "some_strange_characters" is a random string with numbers and letters such as hd67c2msd13d02p.csv).

• Mtgotickets (click on the image to visit it)

The other shop, mtgotickets.com is even more interesting. It just sells and buys tixs but it is more automated than jbstore. To buy tickets, just click on the orange button, choose the amount of tixs you want and then pay with PayPal. Right after the payment your account will be credited. This works more or less like this: when you send a payment, PayPal sends an email to the owner of the shop. A script on his server looks for new emails every 5 seconds and when one is founds it sends an SMS. The owner will connect, possibly via mobile, and adjust the credit on the Online Control Panel, so you can take the tixs in 1-2 minutes.

Prices change with time. Yesterday the price was 1.03 usd per tixs, today it is 1.02. I asked the owner if he has some sort of automatic updater to adapt the price with the market , like mtgotraders, but he didn't answer the question.

On mtgotickets.com you can also sell tixs. There is no automation here since the payment is manually sent via "gift" payment to save the fees. If the shop would have sent regular payments instead of gift payments, this side could have been automated too: the shop would have parsed the Tradelog on the Online Control Panel and once a "deposit" is found, a PayPal payment (via the PayPal REST Api) is sent.


Do you own a service like the ones above? Do you know / use one? Please write us (staff@mtgolibrary.com) and we'll talk about it!

MTGO Library Bot 6.22

In versions 6.20 (http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2013/11/mtgo-library-620.html) and 6.21 (http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2013/11/mtgo-library-bot-621.html) we introduced a new connection mode, more reliable, available just for few selected bots. ML Bot 6.22 extends the new connection to all the bots, resulting in faster downloads/uploads.

We also saw that some bots were unable to connect to the server after some days of activity: this is now fixed (some of you may have received an email saying "Hey, can you please restart the bot? It has a problem with the connection").

Finally, ML Bot 6.21 helps the new users with better "default settings". A newcomer can now just click "Launch" and leave all the settings as they are. In particular, the new defaults download the pricelist every 6 hours, buy cards just from the Standard sets (no foils) and adjust the other settings exactly as I would do if I had to open a new bot with just few tickets.

Psychological pricing vs Float Pricing

What is Psychological Pricing?

Psychological pricing or price ending or charm pricing is a marketing practice based on the theory that certain prices have a psychological impact. The retail prices are often expressed as "odd prices": a little less than a round number, e.g. $19.99 or £2.98. Consumers tend to perceive “odd prices” as being significantly lower than they actually are, tending to round to the next lowest monetary unit. Thus, prices such as $1.99 is associated with spending $1 rather than $2. The theory that drives this is that lower pricing such as this institutes greater demand than if consumers were perfectly rational. Psychological pricing is one cause of price points. (Source)

This Pricing does not only gives the false idea that something is cheaper than normal but also means your will be undercutting competition that are selling a Magic Online card for the "same" (0.01 more) price. This also means that your bot will be listed first on wikiprice when sorting by price and so on.

(Example of Psycological pricing on a well known bot chain, Buy on left, Sell on right.)

This sounds like a straight foward better option when it comes to pricing cards, but there are many situations where "float pricing" can be used in your advantage; Specially on Magic Online.

Float Pricing

Float pricing is a pricing method that takes advantage of the credit system in Magic the Gathering:Online. Pricing a card at 15.01 will benefit a regular customer with saved credit (against a newcomer) as they are likely to be able to take the card for just 15 Event Tickets (plus 1 cent credit). The main advantage of this are the extra sales you will make with this technique with new customers and the reduced amount of "raiding" trades. The same can be done to buying prices (ending on .99).

The way this method helps against raiding is quite simple. If a card is worth between $11.75 and 12.25 and you have it priced at 11, the chances are that you will sell it very quickly to a non regular customer for 11 that will never come back. Having that card at 11.01 means that you will either sell it to a regular customer for 11 Event tickets (while a raider with no saved credits wouldn't take it); or, with a bit of luck, will result in a trade like the one I had bellow last month. 

(on this example you can see one of the big advantages of the float pricing method)

While the trade above was happening I was lucky enough to watch the whole process. The Customer started by picking up the Polukranos, World Eater card, which I had manually priced at 11.01 Event Tickets.

on this specific day that card value spiked up to over 13 Event Tickets

 The Customer had no credits so the bot quoted 45 tix (saving 0.96 credit). If the card was priced at 11.00 the trade would be over within seconds and this person would probably never use my bots again unless he found another great deal in the future.

What happened was completely the opposite to the typical "raiding trade", the customer after a minute or two, started picking other cards trying to round things up to 45.0 so he wouldn't leave 0.96 credit. All the other cards he needed were worth between $2 and $5, meaning that the end result would never be near the 45.0 mark.

On the end this Customer ended up picking up all his needs from my bot resulting in a overall small profit (even though the Polukranos, World Eater were sold quite under the fair price). 

Needless to say that all the other bots that sold the card via "psychological pricing" at 10.99 and even at 11.99 on that day, made a worse deal than me selling this whole package.

This person is now a regular happy Customer... :D

Please comment or share your success stories!

The "Five" types of bots

Often I get asked the same question "What is the best way to price a card?" as easy as this might sound, all will depend on how much money you are willing to invest into the game and how much risk you're ready to take.

I will start by showing this generalized bots with different price strategies:

We all already know that some bots buy cheap to sell cheap and others buy high and sell reasonable cheap, but many fail to understand that trying to be the cheapest seller and highest buyer at the same time, often leads to massive losses.

BOT 1: "The Cheap Seller"

This kind of bot is quite simple, it involves very little to no risk at all and while not getting the most visits a day, when it does buy something good, often sells it quickly and for a good profit.

It seems like a good easy way to make money, but this kind of pricing will make the supplying customers feel ripped off (when they realize how cheaply you buy) and the buying customers hardly will become regulars, as they might just be buying cards for the sake of being so cheap (or to sell them back to BOT 4/5).

BOT 2: MTGO Library Default Pricelist

This pricing is what I would recommend a new bot, while having a good decent profit margin to be called "risk free",this often falls in the trap of still being a bot that "doesn't buy quite as high as the others". Theres a chance of making some regulars, but with time they might move on into bots like BOT3/4 as they seem to have the 3 things regulars like: Higher buying prices; Cheaper selling prices; Bigger stock.

BOT3: "Average Bot"

While I would recommend the default pricelist to a new bot, once you start getting a few customers and regulars, you should slowly edge a bit the buying prices forward, this will keep your regulars happy. This bot will always pick a bunch of cards from what you are trying to sell, and also likely to have a lot of cards that you need. This is the perfect bot for attracting many constructed players, while having a decent profit margin.

BOT4: "Minimal Profit Bot"

This kind of bot might seem a smart way of making profit. Many would be fooled that this bot will make much more profit than BOT3 simply because it will sell and buy the same card more often, but this bot hasa few downfalls. Firstly a very short gap on profit margins often mean that you will not get profit in a few specific cards, possibility big losses. The reason for this is because you will sell a newly popular card before you have time to increase the price, or the opposite, you will be the first to buy a card when it gets banned before you can reduce the price. To cover the loss caused on "not so good" trades, you will need to make many "regular" ones to break even.

BOT5: "Top Buyer, Expensive Seller"

This is the bot which every drafter will have on their buddy list. Very popular for top buying prices, this is the first spot where drafters will try and unload their cards. The downside is that, in order to buy this high, you will have to sell the previous bought copies of that card at high prices. This means that while a drafter might be excited that you are paying top dollar for 2 of his cards, he will be quite disappointed that it hasn't picked any other of his 10.000 tradable cards. This bot requires "rich" regular buying customers that want a fully stocked bot and don't mind paying extra for having it all under one roof.

Where do you think your bot fits? Currently my BestDeal bot is somewhere between BOT4 and BOT5, then each of the other bots on the chain sell slightly cheaper and buy slightly lower.

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 8) Part 17

Personal Prices:

In my previous post I talked about the PersonalPercentages.txt file.
This week I'll talk about the PersonalPrices.txt file that you can use to customize individual prices for cards.
In this file you can specify selling and buying prices for each individual card, and also buying quantity which will override your settings in the tabs for each specified card you add to this list.

You format this file as followed:
SETNAME;CARDNAME;SELLING PRICE;FOIL SELLING PRICE;BUYING PRICE;FOIL BUYING PRICE;BUYING QUANTITY REGULAR;BUYING QUANTITY FOIL

Example:
5DN;Stasis Cocoon;0.024;0.028;0.003;0.006;8;4

This will make your bot sell the regular 5Th edition(5ED) Stasis Cocoon for 0.024 tickets, the foil version for 0.028 and buy max 8 regular for 0.003 tickets each and 4 foil for 0.006.

Even if you have set your bot to only purchase 4 of each card from the 5th edition(5ED), your bot will now purchase 8 of only Stasis Cocoon as this files overrides everything else.

This is a great way to, for example setting your bot to purchase more of the most popular cards that you will sell all the time. Or maybe adjusting prices that you think fits better than the ones of the CardsMTGO3.txt file.

All you need to do is to add each card you manually want to adjust in a separate line.

Example:
5DN;Stasis Cocoon;0.024;0.028;0.003;0.006;8;4
M13;Bloodhunter Bat;0.034;0.039;0.004;0.008;4;0
AVR;Angel of Jubilation;0.084;0.1;;4;

As you can see you don't have to fill in every part of it. If you leave for example buying price empty, your bot will buy the card for whatever other settings is set inside of the bot interface and/or PersonalPercentages.txt.

Also, remember that if you write "//" before something it turns into a comment which won't be read by the bot. So you can use this to write categories for your own information to make it easier to keep track of your custom prices.

To use PersonalPrices.txt just check the checkbox in the "General" tab of the bot UI.

That's all for this time! I'll be back next week.

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

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 7) Part 16

Personal Percentages:

Last week we talked about how you can turn a Pro bot into a "Hybrid" bot that buys for bulk prices like a Lite bot and sells for individual prices like a Pro bot. This week I'll go into a little more advanced settings of Pro bots and how you can use them to fine tune your bot's prices.

I've already talked about how you can set your Pro bot's corrections in a previous post.
The corrections tab is a great way of adjusting your prices but there are ways of customizing them even further.
For example you might want to buy Standard cards at +10% since they sell quickly, then you start buying Extended and realize that you don't want to pay as generously for these older sets as there isn't as much demand for these compared to Standard. So, what do you do now?
The answer is PersonalPercentages.txt.

PersonalPercentages.txt and how to use it:
In this file you can specify individual correction percentages for each card and also each set and rarity which is a great way of dealing with the problem I just described.

If you open the PersonalPercentages.txt file that is located in your MTGO library folder, you'll see that it describes how to set it up.

You can write the instructions in this file following this format:
SETNAME;CARDNAME;SELLING PRICE CORRECTION; FOIL SELLING CORRECTION;BUYING CORRECTION;FOIL BUYING CORRECTION

Put to use it'll look something like this.
Example: M13;Elvish Visionary;+30%;+35;-30%;-45%

This will make your bot sell the M13 Elvish Visionary for CardsMTGO3.txt(Pricelist) prices +Corrections%(Corrections Tab) +30%(PersonalPercentages.txt).
So keep in mind that it doesn't override the Corrections Tab's percentages, it adds(or subtracts) to them.


Also note that if you don't want to set a personal value in one of the fields you just leave that one blank.
Example: M13;Murder;-30%;;-30%;

You can also set correctional percentages for each set by switching out the card name to a rarity.
Example: ISD;Uncommon;+10%;+15%;-20%;-30%;

This will affect all Uncommons in the Innistrad(ISD) set and is a great way of tackling the problem I described earlier in this post.

You could use this to stay safe and not buy sets that are soon going to rotate out of Standard for too high prices, as the prices sinks rapidly when everyone wants to get rid of these sets to purchase cards from the next block that rolls into standard.

After you have set up your PersonalPercentages.txt just save it and set the bot in the General Tab to
"Use PersonalPercentages.txt".

Next week I'll go through the PersonalPrices.txt file and how to use it, until then, have fun botting!
-Tom (Sitrec)
Archbot MTGO Store: ArchBot, ArchBot2, ArchBot3, ArchBot4 & ArchBot5

MTGO Library Bot 5.99

ML Bot 5.99 is another great update, introducing "Special Buddies".
Who are the "special buddies"? These are persons you want to encourage / discourage from trading with your bot by adjusting their selling and buying prices.
An example: you can give a discount to your friends, or to the members of your clan. You can make cards more expensive for cherry pickers.

ML Bot 5.99 is now also able to recover from a "generic crash" (see image below). This is useful, for example, if Explorer (or some other software) crashes and blocks Mtgo.

Finally, the new version features a better mtgo-launching procedure and has a timer that will automatically restart the launch after waiting 3 hours without errors or feedback of any sort.

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 6) Part 15

The "Hybrid" bot and how to set it up:

Last week we talked about the Pro bot and some very basic settings.
This week I'll talk about something called a "Hybrid" bot.

A "Hybrid" bot is actually not a version of MTGO Library Bot, like Pro or Lite.
It's a Pro bot that runs with special settings making it buy for bulk prices like any Lite bot but sell using the pricelist just like a Pro bot.

This can be very useful when you want to build your collection and want to have some easily manageable prices so you can stay safe and not waste too much tickets by buying junk for pricelist prices.
At the same time it lets you sell the cards you purchase for their actual value which makes it easy to manage and a great way to start out if you don't want to start with one Pro and one Lite.

A "Hybrid" or a Lite bot will usually not yield you a lot of valuable rares (unless you have very high buy prices) but it will stock you up with the junk for prices you can afford and also occasionally brings in some more valuable Uncommon and Common cards like Young Pyromancer and the like.
The only downside with the "Hybrid" bot is that it's not common and therefore might confuse customers, so make sure to explain that it buys for bulk prices and sells for individual prices.

Setting up a "Hybrid" bot:

• Start up ML Bot and set it to Pro.

• Set up all the settings in the General, Collection,
   Buyer, Administrator and Messages tab.
   (I've explained how to do this in previous posts.)

• Go into the Corrections tab and set it to whatever
   corrections you want in the "selling" fields
   and +100% in the buying fields (yes you read
   that right, 100%).

 •  Lastly go into the Limits tab and set your 
    "Buying price limits" to the prices you want to    
     bulk purchase cards for. For example 0.005 for
     commons (200 per ticket) and so on.

That's it, now your bot will buy cards for the prices you set in the limits tab and sell according to your corrections and pricelist.




That's all I had for today, I'll be back with a new post next week, until then, happy botting and good luck!

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

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 5) Part 14

The Pro bot and it's secrets (Part 2 of 2):

Last week I posted the first part of this post about the Pro version of the ML Bot.
Here's the second part where I'll go through how corrections work and then give a "safe" example of settings a new botter could try.

Corrections explanation:

In the "Prices" tab you can find corrections you can set. In here you can set your bot to buy and sell a certain percentage higher or lower than the price list.

Here's an example:
In the pricelist the Blood Artist from Avacyn Restored have a sell price of: 0.249 and a buy price of: 0.137
If you set the corrections of Uncommon to buy them for +100% your bot will buy Blood Artist for 0.274 (0.137 + 100%) and if you set the bot to sell them for -50% your bot will sell it for ~0.124 (0.249 - 50%).

You can set these prices by hand, individually for each card in the PersonalPrices.txt file or individual percentages in the PersonalPercentages.txt in the bot's folder (I'll go more in depth into this in later posts), but the pricelist is pretty accurate and a great way of starting out.

Recommended corrections:
I would suggest you to start out "safe", buy for low prices and sell for fairly low.
Here's some settings you could try and some pointers to keep in mind.

Buy Mythic and Rare for between +10% to -10% and slowly work your way up as you build your collection.

Don't rush it or you will end up depleting your tickets.
No one wants to do business with a bot that doesn't have any tickets. As your collection gets bigger and your ticket count grows you can start buying for higher prices.

Buy Commons and Uncommons for around 0% to -20%. Most people won't care much about commons as there aren't many of really high value, especially not in Standard and will just buy or sell them for whatever not too crazy price your bot suggests.

It's the good prices on Mythics and Rares that will bring people to your bot with the help of the http://mtgowikiprice.com site and your classified advertisement.

Sell Rares and Mythics for between 0% to -10%. In the beginning it's important to start building a customer base so you don't want to be too expensive. Later on when you have built up a big collection and you've increased your buy prices you can increase your sell prices as well.
A lot of people won't mind buying a bit more expensive if the bot they're dealing with have everything they need rather than have to scavenge tons of bots for each card.

Sell Commons and Uncommons for 0% possibly slightly lower.

Limits tab: 
You can use this tab to set a limit so your bot won't buy (or sell) over (or bellow) a certain price.

It might be a good idea in the beginning to limit buying prices so your bot doesn't buy a playset of Voice of Resurgence for 28.14 tickets each which might leave you without tickets to buy other cards for.

That's all for this week, next week I'll talk about the "Hybrid" bot which is a mix between Lite and Pro.


Until next time, have fun botting!

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

Cheaper than running yourself?

Renting a Server?

I upgraded my PC recently, and yet I am thinking of remaking a PC all together with more attention to energy efficiency.

As all of you know, to get into the botting world of MTGO, many of us are required to do some investments in hardware and waste many man-hours setting all up.
Most Botters PCs electricity usage range between 200 and 400 watt. This is because most of us did not build our pc's exclusively for botting and more likely upgraded our "everyday use" Gaming desktops into accepting (more) bots.

As Albert explained earlier in late August, building a Desktop to run bot(s) can cost between $500 to $1250+, depending on how many bots you wish to run. You might be mistaken that spending $500 on a PC to run, lets say, 2 Bots is a good idea, but there is a cheaper option.

A PC which is not designed to be energy efficient, running 2 bots, usually draws on average about 200-250w (average bots constant low load) while the monitor(s) are off, possibly up to 300-400w while they're on (depending if you dual monitor, screen size, etc). This means that, depending on wattage and your location, a Botting PC will use between $1 to $2 electricity a DAY. Might not sound much, but this is $30-60 on electricity a month, just to run 1-2 bots, which is definitely a number to consider, specially for newer bots with a very little amount of trades.

I am considering building powerful, energy efficient PCs to run more bots, but while I don't have enough capital to invest into a whole new card collection I was wondering if I could use my hardware/PC Building knowledge and software tweaking skills into something new and mutual benefit of me and other botters.

This is when I had the idea of possibly renting Virtual Machines exclusively for MTGO Library botting somewhere around $15 a month or less (while you would have full access to the PC remotely, to pause bot, edit personal prices, etc). This would remove a lot of weight of your shoulders, not having to worry about configuring Virtual Machines, not being able to play games on your PC while bots are running, having to sort out bot updates or quick adjustments while on holiday and so on.

While this is surely not great news for those who already run 6+ bots from 1 PC, but, it can be for the botters out there that run 1-3 bots on their personal PCs(with power hungry graphics cards or so).

Please share your thoughts and let me know if you would be the kind of person that would like to be involved in something like this.

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 4) Part 13

The Pro bot and it's secrets (Part 1 of 2):

Last week I wrote about some basic Lite bot settings, and as promised, here's the first part of two about the Pro version, next part will be posted next week.

Pro bots buy and sell cards using a price list that you can download for a fee from MTGO Library.
This list is updated every 2 hours and is a good way of making sure your prices are up to date with the current value of cards as it can dip and rise in a very short time.
In the bot's interface you can set it to buy and sell a certain percentage higher or lower than the price list.
You don't want to buy too high, but you also at the same time must have competitive prices so people actually want to use your bot.

What to buy:
I would recommend starting out with buying only from the sets that are currently in Standard in the beginning unless you have tons of tickets to invest.
Standard cards will be bought very frequently and it's easy to find buyers for those high value cards that will deplete your tickets fast.

Older sets however might take longer sell and while it's still worth selling you might want to wait to buy these sets until later on.

You can set which sets you want to buy in the "Collection" tab in the MLBot Interface.

Remember that you can still sell cards that you haven't chosen in the "Collection" tab, for example cards your Lite bot supply your Pro bot with.

If you want to buy Foil cards I would suggest buying only standard and for a very low price in the beginning for the same reasons why I recommend not buying anything else than standard when you're starting out.

Basic lands can easily deplete your tickets so only buy these extremely cheap if you want to purchase them.

Profit from Boosters are mainly in the form of "Float", which is the leftover credits that users don't end up spending on your bot. Boosters are bought with a very small margin and sell prices are almost identical to the buy prices. I wouldn't recommend buying them in the beginning unless you buy them very cheaply.

Avatars aren't worth much and only a few are actually worth buying for any decent price. The Momir Vig, Simic Visionary Avatar is used for the Momir Basic format and is frequently bought but most of the other ones are rubbish.

This was all for today, next time I'll post the second part of this post where I go through some basic settings.

Cya then!

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

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 3) Part 12

The Lite bot and you:

In the last article I described some basics of the ML Bot interface and settings. In this blogpost I'll talk about some simple, basic strategies for botting with ML Bot and how to get your first bot(s) running.

I'm planning on going a little more in-depth(but still very basic) into each basic bot type, Pro, Lite and "hybrid" and I'll start off with a post about the Lite bot, the most simple one. I'll explain the differences and how you can set one up with some simple, easy and safe settings to begin with. More advanced tactics and settings will be covered in the future. Just make sure to read and follow the advice I gave in the previous post before you start with these settings.

The Lite bot basics:
A Lite bot buys in bulk. It buys for a set price per rarity, for example: 500 Common, 200 Uncommon or 30 Rares for 1 ticket. These can be set to anything you feel like.
It's not buying strictly 500 commons, it could be for example 250 commons and 100 uncommon. These numbers are mainly to give an example. In the bot's settings you don't set it to buy 500 common, you set it to buy commons for 0.002 tickets each, which adds up to 500 commons per ticket.

It's a good idea to keep these numbers fairly clean, at least with commons and uncommons.
It's not as important when it comes to rares as these aren't sold as much in bulk as junk commons, and pricing is more crucial as it's easier to make the mistake of buying these too high which will make people fill your bot with junk-rares that you overpay for. 
It's best to start off buying rares at around 40/ticket and after you fill up with crap like Search The City and the like, you can decrease it to 30 or so to make people more tempted to sell them to you.

Lite bots are mainly used to fill a Pro bot with stock. You buy cheap cards for bulk prices and then fill your Pro bot so it always has at least 4 of each.
You can of course still use it to sell cards as well and it's a great way of getting rid of junk commons.
Sometimes people will sell valuable cards to your Lite bot(s) with cheap buying prices so make sure to transfer all valuable cards to a Pro or "hybrid" bot that will sell them for what they're worth.
This is easily done by making a deck-file or "wishlist" containing valuable cards to use when transferring valuables.
Lite bot settings:
Decide which sets you want to start buying.
When using a cheap Lite bot I'd say it's worth buying every set while a Pro bot is better off buying only standard in the beginning. Although this totally depends on how many tickets you can afford to spend to build a stock.
You can set this in the "Collection" tab by simply selecting the sets you want to buy and set the amount of each category you want to purchase.
I would recommend not buying Foils in the beginning, or only very cheaply, just very slightly above non-foil. The same goes for basic lands as long as you're not buying extremely low. I would also recommend only buying 4 of each card in the beginning or maybe 8 if you have a big stock of tickets, as you're better off with a large variety of cards than tons of the same one.

I would recommend settings along these lines:
   • Common buy: 0.002
   • Common sell: 0.005
   • Uncommon buy: 0.0555
   • Uncommon sell: 0.01
   • Rare buy: 0.025
   • Rare sell: 0.0333
   • Mythic buy: 0.03
   • Mythic sell: You don't really want to sell these on your Lite bot.

When you've set up your prices make sure to write a fitting classified message your bot will post that advertises your prices and then you're ready to go.

Next time I'll go through how you can set up your first Pro bot.

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

Why So Sad Hybrid? (Part 1 of 2)

There is a Chinese proverb; a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  There is a similar saying when it comes to the speed of computers; its speed is determined by its slowest component.  In the past, the bottleneck would be the CPU itself.  It has also been the bus or pathway between various components.  Today, the slowest component is the hard drive. 

While other components are chugging along at the speed of light, hard drives have to wait while a spinning platter reaches its proper placement so a magnetic thingamajig can read some random 1’s and 0’s and attempt to make sense of it.  Various strategies have been developed in an attempt to solve this problem.  One attempt is to use multiple hard drives and combine them into one monster hard drive which while it increases the storage capacity linearly, the read and seek times increase geometrically.  But this RAID solution is fairly expensive and not really applicable in small servers, desktops or personal machines.  It’s just not cost-effective.

So you can imagine the cries of joy when flash memory was developed.  Not quite ROM (Read-Only Memory) and not quite RAM, but a memory which would hold its state like ROM but can be written to and hold its state, like RAM, and can hold its state without the need for constant electricity.  It is best known as USB drives, thumb drives or flash drives.  By whatever name it is known, this type of memory is found in all of these portable drives, and has allowed for the explosion of growth in the tablet market.

The next logical place for this memory is to try and make an entire hard drive based on this flash memory.  The technology is fairly simple.  RAM disks were popular in the early days on the personal computer and one could really detect the performance increase.  While no one really expected to replicate the performance increase, people did expect to see a performance increase when this type of flash technology was made into a stand-alone hard drive or even its cousin, the hybrid drive, a drive with an SSD partition as well as a traditional platter for additional storage.

Billions of dollars have been spent in infrastructure to build the drives that experts said there would be a demand for.  Yet SSD drives and hybrid drives have not really taken off.  It is not the cost of these drives, although that is a small factor.  It is not the performance as every independent test shows that these drives perform as advertised.   Why haven’t flash memory drives taken off and more importantly, how does this affect us bot owners?  I’ll discuss that next time.

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 

Finally! ESXi Finale

Last time we wrapped up the virtual machine requirements that are needed to optimally run Library.  What we have not discussed so far as how does it perform?  What has my experience been like?  What advice do I have for others who wish to delve into this?

What has my experience been like?  It’s been better than I had hoped for.  Not only have I been able to remove the virtual machines from my wife’s desktop and place them on their own dedicated server; something I have been meaning to do for quite awhile now; management of the bots is much easier.  With VMware, whenever I need to make a change to one of the bots, I need to physically go to the machine and peer inside each window and make the changes.  With the VSphere tool, I can remotely do those functions.  This has the benefit of being able to run my bots in a “headless” fashion.  By headless, I mean without a monitor.  I could also run it without a keyboard theoretically.

What advice would I give to others?  First off, get a license key.  There are various free and paid versions of VMware products.  For some reason the key I had would not work with this version of ESXi. 

Tip: Get a 64-bit version of ESXi.  I am running the 32 bit version and there is a maximum of 3.5 Gigabytes which can be allocated.  This is enough to run two (2) bots.  The hardware I received can not be expanded so this is not a problem for me.  But for those who have twenty bot amalgamations and can build a 24 Gigabyte machine to house their bots, 32 bit will not be sufficient.

Tip: Make certain your hardware is compatible with ESXi.  The first time we attempted this project, ESXi did not like the network card we were using and the only network card which was compatible with ESXi and the motherboard we were using cost over $150 US.  Since money was tight at the time, this was an expense I was not willing to incur, especially on donated and unknown hardware. 

Conclusion: This has been a worthwhile project for us.  We’ve learned a lot and this will help us professionally.  While ESXi is not exceedingly difficult to install or use, it can be daunting for those who are uncomfortable with installing and configuring operating systems or get squeamish whenever things do not go as planned.

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics) Part 10

MTGO Library Bot:

Last week we talked about VMware and how to set it up. This week we'll start talking about some basic ML Bot information and preparations.
I'll start off with some very basics about MTGO Library Bot and then in later blogposts I'll go through more in-depth stuff.

Bot Versions: 
The MTGO Library Bot has two different versions, Pro and Lite.
The difference between these two is that the Pro bot can buy and/or sell cards with individual prices that it fetches from either a pricelist you can download for a fee, or your own home-made one.

While the Lite bot only buys and/or sells with set prices per rarity. For example 0.002 tickets per Common (1 ticket per 500 commons). These are called Bulk Bots because they buy and/or sell in bulk and don't individually price each card.

Then there's a third basic option other than Pro and Lite known as "Hybrid" which is usually a Pro bot that buys for bulk prices and sells for individual card prices. I'll go through how you can set up one of these later.

These are all completely free to use and will only charge you a 3.5%(2.5% if you accept to advertise the Wikiprice site) of each transaction's value every time someone either buys, sells or trades with you.

There are however licenses to purchase for those that would prefer to pay for a one time or subscription based license to get rid of the small fee.
This is something that might be interesting in the future when you're selling a lot and the overall fee in any not so distant future cost you more than a license would.

Which version to choose:
When starting out I would recommend starting with either one Pro and One Lite bot, or if you prefer to start with just one bot I would recommend a Hybrid(Pro) bot, as it will ensure you don't spend all your tickets on expensive cards in the beginning and still sell them for the right prices instead of bulk like a Lite bot would.

Basic Windows preparations for the bot:

Of course first you need to have the bot and MTGO installed. 
After this you should set the screen resolution to 1280x1024. 
Do this by right-clicking your desktop background and click "Screen resolution", then use the drop-down list to choose 1280x1024 and then click "Apply".

Next you need to go to the "Start Menu" of Windows, then go to the "Control Panel" and then click "Mouse".
When in Mouse Properties click the "Wheel" tab and change "The following number of lines at a time:" to 4.

Now it's time to change some settings in MTGO:
First start up Magic The Gathering Online and log on with any account then click the "Menu" tab in the bottom. Then click "Settings" and lastly "Game Play", in there click "Disable Card Tooltips".

Next click "Menu", "Settings" and "Game Play" again then click the "Speed vs. Quality" tab and choose "Prefer Speed".

Lastly go to "Menu", "Settings" then "Display and Sounds" and click "Software rendering".

Now your computer and MTGO is ready to run a bot.
Next time I'll start talking about tactics and how you can customize your bot's settings.

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

Remote Control of the ML Bot

We host a series of articles from our friends blog http://www.mtgeconomist.com , a blog dealing with mtg and mtgo economics.

You can read the original article here: 

http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/mtgo-library-control-remoto-del-bot-parte-6-3/


Previously we took a look at all the settings of the bot. The main problem is that you have to be in front of the computer which is running the bot in order to make any changes in their behavior. To solve it, in this article I will explain how to view the status of your robot, statistics from sales/purchases and even how to make a remote control of the bot.

Control panel on the web

MTGO Library provides an additional service to the software that controls our digital cards store. This control panel can be accessed through our session on the bot website. Upon entering, you will see a page like the capture below.

This section is the “Dashboard” or main desktop where you can access to all available information remotely. As you can see there are 3 different areas:

• Top menu: Access to all bot updates and its price list, as well as the renewal of the licenses (Lite and Pro). 
• Side menu: Mainly displays performance statistics of the bot, however you can also make some changes from here. These options will be discussed in a future chapter because it is more related to strategies when creating your own chain of bots. 
• Main section: Here it is shown the corresponding section selected from one of the previously commented menus. 

Within the left side menu options, firstly there is a series of display options with both, bot information and statistical data:

• Dashboard: Displays a screen capture with the operating system of the bot. Below it is a bar with connection status of that computer. On the right side you can see a summary of the following information from bot: bot status (online/offline and if it is with a customer); status of the Magic Online client (online/offline); 
• Transaction fee or commission due to the bot transactions; date and type of the last transaction; license type (Free/Lite/Pro) and expiration date; and the total value of the collection managed by the bot.
• Trades log: on ​​top of this page there are diagrams with the latest sales statistics representing the total value of trades, number of trades of the most frequent customers, percentage of buyings against sales… Afterwards, there is an advanced search engine transaction, and below there is a list of the transactions for the last 24 hours. In the summary of each transaction you can see its mode (buy/sell/trade), total value, customer name and its date. If you want to see the details, you just have to click on the bar of the transaction to see the following information: 
• List of cards exchanged with their individual price 
• Total value and the value without the customer accumulated credit 
• Tickets received 
• Previous and current customer credits 
• Tickets available on the store after this transaction 
• Fee generated by this transaction 
• Total fees after this transaction (debit to MTGO Library) 
• Links to screenshots generated just when the bot confirms the transaction

• Cards Log: This section is very useful when you want to track the benefits of a specific card. After searching a card, this section shows all its buys and sales with their values attached. The site also summarizes the profit or loss made by this card. Thus, by using this information you can decide, for example, to change the prices of a particular card. 
• Collection History: Summary of the total value of your collection divided by rarity. It is updated every 24/48 hours and, although it is useful to get an idea of ​the value for your stock, often these data are not very accurate. For example, there are some days that I have had almost no sales and my collection changed its value around +-200 tickets. 
• Transaction Fee: List with each renting fee generated and deducted by one of the official MTGO Library accounts. These accounts remove fees by taking tickets from your store every time its the renting fee exceeds the value of 1 ticket. 
• Multimonitor: Current screenshot from each of your bots. It also shows their online status and the commission generated by each one independently. Remember that for every bot you have to pay the fees generated by their respective transactions.

Below these statistics options there are some sections which modify the data the bot works with:

• Credits: Displays the available credits for each client who has done transactions in your store. Each customer on the list offers an option to show all his transactions, as well as the possibility to edit their credits for any reason. 
• Messages: Allows you to change the text of the advertisement shown in the “classifieds” section on Magic Online. This option is very useful if you want to remotely change your advertising. Changes are made every hour, so it may take you a bit to see the update of your advertisement. 
• Sharing Credits: If you have more than one bot, from here you can make to share the credit between themselves. This means that a customer will have available the same credits in your entire chain of bots. 
• Blacklist: Finally, your session on MTGO Library website allows you to add users to a blacklist. Thus, a client on the blacklist cannot trade cards with your bots. You must be very sure to add someone here, and you should only do this if that customer has persistently abused from your stores. This explanation covers all the options you can handle from MTGO Library site to control your stores without being in front of the computer which runs the bots.

How to make a remote access to your bot

As you can see, although the control panel of MTGO Library website has many functions, it may happen that you wish to directly manage any of your bots for pausing, restarting, changing the custom price of a card… There are many methods to solve this problem, however I will explain in detail the one I use: LogMeIn.

Why I use this service? There are many reasons, but the most important are:

• Its basic version is offered for free 
• Very fast and easy-to-use interface 
• Easily manages a lot of computers from a single place. It may be used from different platforms (PC Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad) 

The last point is very important for me, as it allows the remote control of the bot from your phone when you are far from home (obviously you should have an internet connection).
The steps to start using LogMeIn on the computer you install your bot are the following:

1. Create an account at LogMeIn
2. Login to your account on their website and, from the “Home” section, select “add computer” 
3. Download their application (Free version) and install it on the computer which runs the bot. It will ask you the computer name and if you use a proxy for your connection. 
4. That’s it! In order to use the remote control of your bot, go again to your “Home” section and you will see your computer on the list. Click over it and type the username and password of the user of that computer. 

Conclusions

With these tools you have a complete remote control system for your bot, so you can manage its behavior at any time. This feature is very important because sometimes you have to fix prices of cards, pause the bot, perform maintenance tasks, know the sales/purchases of your store…

The next chapter of this series will show you some of the most common strategies to create your own chain of bots.