MTGO Library Bot 6.62 - improved Oversell Protection

ML Bot 6.62 is a major update adding a new feature: the Oversell Protection "Customerless".

We introduced the Oversell Protection in version 6.46 (January 26th). Briefly summarizing, the oversell protection is a set of rules that apply to customers that buy more than "x" copies of a certain card in a 24 hour period. It can be useful to protect your bots from someone buying all the copies of a certain card (for example to speculate on it). A user buying all the copies of a card is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want an always stocked chain this could be annoying, especially when the prices of the cards move fast (such as during the Release Events).

Now, what happens if a customer has many accounts and simply change them to circumvent the protection? This is where the new option "customerless" comes into play.
You can basically tell your bot to sell a maximum of "X" copies of a certain card in 24h, regardless of the customers. This helps, for example, if you mispriced a card or if a sudden market change increase the value of a card and you are now selling it for cheap money.

Just pay attention that this mode can reduce your trades, so you may want to use but not ABUSE it :-) Sometimes it is just good to sell a card for cheap money, take a small profit and rotate the inventory than keeping the card in stock in the hope to sell it at its maximum price.

ML Bot 6.62 fixes also a minor problem with the Classified Message, a problem introduced in 6.61. The bot could post wrong cards on the first message (just the first time, the other messages are fine).

We also fixed a login problem happening on Windows XP - the bot could not recognize the "disconnect" message during the login.

Buying Big, Selling Big - In Conjunction with Limits

Buying Big, Selling Big

When you are a very small bot looking to make leaps and bounds in growth then you need to be very aware of how you buy and sell high value cards. Last time I spoke about minimizing risks with big cards in an article about what MLBot provides us here. In this article I'd like to discuss what you as a user can do to minimize these risks.

If you run one bot with email reminders and habitually check each trade for continuity and unusual patterns then you’re already in a great position to make money back or even profit on cards you aren’t ready to hold in your bots inventory.

Expanding your horizons

I propose to attentive individuals that instead of limiting your bot to purchase only cards you can afford to retain in inventory that you expand and purchase cards of even the highest value.

Why would you do such a thing? Because big money cards are an easy sell. Suppose your bot buys a card for 20 tickets. You are still a new bot and have very little inventory and the bots purchase ate up your last 20 tickets. You may not want to invest everything in a single card. What if it takes months to sell? Maybe it never sells? What if in the time it takes for you to sell the price drops and you’re actually losing money on that trade? As is often said, never put all your eggs in one basket.

Using your limitations to your advantage

 

Instead of limiting the bot to making only affordable purchases (which will reduce opportunities and possible profits) you expand your limits to encompass all kinds of trades. It can be scary but if you check your trades at least once a day you shouldn’t have to worry about loss.

You don’t want to hold on to the money cards just yet but that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase them. When you make a purchase you are uncomfortable holding onto you may want to assess whether or not the card is in high demand and if you will sell it very quickly. If it’s a card everyone is scrambling to buy up you should be safe to leave it on your bot and expect a trade within hours or days. However, if you anticipate that the card will drop in value or is not flying off the shelves you have another option. You are not the only bot on MTGO and if you are uncomfortable holding onto high value inventory then you are probably not the bot paying the most for money cards.

Instead of purchasing a card and placing it into your bots inventory you can take that card into your own hands and sell it to another bot or another player in the classifieds. Larger bot chains usually are willing to pay more for cards than you would be and they have the buying power and audience to sell cards you wouldn’t normally be able to.

Pros

• Minimize the risks you take in purchasing high value cards.
• You can easily make a small profit by selling to other players or bots directly for very little effort.
• You benefit both your own bot (by increasing the number of tickets you have to buy more cards) as well as benefit larger bot chains who desire to hold such high value cards

Cons

• If someone comes to your bot looking for high value cards they will be disappointed and you may lose a customer

Buying Small, Selling Big - The Limits Tab

Buying Small, Selling Big

Sometimes when you are getting started with a small investment you can be afraid to devote all of your tickets to big money cards. Cards can plummet in price and when you need to make profits on every trade to expand it can be scary holding onto a card worth 20 tickets or more. ML bot gives us options to deal with this and allow us to do some things to minimize the risk and/or even make a profit on high value trades.

To minimize our risk of losing on big money cards that have a sudden drop in value or investing everything we have in a single card and retaining a very small inventory MLBot provides Pro users with the limits tab. The limits tab is used to set the maximum buying and minimum selling price for commons, uncommons, rares, mythics and booster/avatars.

Red – Selling Limit

Selling limits dictate the minimum price your bot will let a card go for. This is a very useful way to make sure that everything within a card rarity is sold for at least a decent price.

Blue – Buying Limit

Buying limit is the maximum your bot will offer for any card in a particular rarity. So if a card is valued at 100 and you set your max to 20 you will only offer 20 tickets for that particular card. Some users might not appreciate such a low ball offer for their valuable cards but it can prevent you from buying something you don’t want or might be mistakenly priced.

Green – Booster/Avatar Limits

Similar to the selling limit and buying limit for cards these options will dictate the maximum and minimum prices your bot will buy and sell avatars and boosters at.

Orange – Do Not Buy For More

This section allows you to specify if you are even willing to buy a card that is of greater or lower value than what is specified. This is very useful to prevent your bot from buying junk cards that will never sell.

Pros

• You very much reduce the possibility of spending all of your capital on a few expensive cards

Cons

• You likely will not end up paying fair value for high value cards and customers may feel cheated
•  You may pass up opportunities to buy cards because of your settings

Grocery Magic Online

Often I compare the Magic Online bot business to the 'real' world businesses, and I always find a lot of "things" that are much better in Mtgo.

This morning I was at the grocery store, and I realized that the merchant pays a huge rental fee to store the products. The larger inventory he wants to keep, the more space he needs and the higher the rental fees. 

At the opposite, in Magic online you can store a collection as large as you want, and none will ever complaint or make you pay more because you "take room". Furthermore, a real store has to face the aging of the products. Depending on the type of products, aging can be as fast as a day (food) or a year (clothes). It is true that when a new Magic Online set comes out, the previous set decreases its value, but this is the only drop in value and, in general, it's plenty of "old" cards still very valuable and with minimal or zero decrease in value.

This is for Professionals Only.

One of the biggest advantages of Magic Library is that you can simply install it, spend five (5) minutes customizing it, and setting it loose without any fear that you will be ripped off or after five (5) days, will have yet to make a trade.

In our continuing series on little known bot features, we're going to look at a feature found only in the Professional Version. (Lite Users are free to skip this article so long as you resume next time.) The feature in question is the Limits Tab.

This is a totally optional feature. It is not needed for the bot to operate normally. However, spending a little time here can definitely increase profits and/or decrease expenses, so we're going to spend a few moments looking over this easily overlooked feature.

As the name implies, this tab is where you set the limits. The limits are the MINIMUM the bot will sell a card for and the MAXIMUM the bot will pay to purchase a card. Let's look at an example:

Let's assume that there is a Mythic Rare which sells for four (4) tickets and will be bought for three (3) tickets. Normally the bot will handle this card like any other card.

Now let's add the caveat that you are just starting out and have a limited about of tickets which you can devote to increase your inventory. Using this tab, you can set limits so that you can purchase more cards instead of using your limited amount of capital on a few high-valued objects.

So we can set the tab to never spend more than one (1) ticket for a Mythic. This way, the bot will use THIS setting instead of the market price for the bot. The bot will still purchase the inexpensive Mythics, even at the market price. But by setting this tab, you won't be using all your tickets on a few select cards.

It may sound simplistic and it may sound like a useless feature. However, I've found this a very useful tool when I started using MTGO Library from Yatbot. It allowed me to increase my inventory without running out of tickets.

Next time, we're going to discuss a Go-Go song.