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I just started a Twitter account (@mtgolibrary), please follow me. I will tweet there news and infos. Twitter will be a great channel for real time feeds

Welcome to botrunners.net

www.botrunners.net is a friend forum mainly focused on business and on ML Bot. The forum launched one week ago, it's still pretty new but promizing: let's make it grow! Bot users in fact do not have a dedicated place to discuss, to know each other and possibly have business together.

I strongly think it will be wonderful to have a place where you can post suggestions, ask for advices, post your "hey, I sell tixs" advertisement and this kind of things. The official WotC forums are so moderated that you cannot even talk about bot, business and tixs - we bot owners deserve more.

Visit it daily, write there something - at first it will be boring because you will be "alone" but in 1-2 months the ML Bot user and business men will have a new powerful tool strapped on their
belt.

Feedback

Last time Albert has asked for suggestions for what should be added features for Library v4, with an emphasis on features to make the bot more self-sufficient.  At the time of this writing, the requested features seem to fall into the following categories:

Auto-transfer: The ability to move product from one bot to another.  Features here include micro-sessions, conditional transferring based on collection status, and the ability to refill after trade sessions. 

Pricing: Currently, the pricing model is static.  You want card X, it costs Y, in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion.  This model is evolving.  You see it in retail stores, where if a customer has a loyalty card, there is a percentage discount applied to all purchases.  Why can’t Library have such a feature?  This could allow for partnerships with clans.

Another feature is to adjust the price based on the number of cards on the bot or collection.  This feature can adjust itself to rapid fluctuations in the market that might not be reflected in the wikiprice.  A card which has 32 copies in the collection would be priced differently than if there are only 2 copies of said card available.

Remote administration: This is a feature which I would like to see expanded.  This feature would allow the user to administer changes to the bot through the web portal rather than going into the bot itself, shutting it down, while making changes, be they large or as simple as ticking a check box to allow for trading cards from a new set.  This would have the advantage of more uptime for the bot, it also allows for server-side backup of settings so recovering a bot from a crash or upgrading a machine is painless.

These are wonderful features and need a total rewrite to implement.  These are not things which can be added by adding a dozen lines of code.

I’ve been one of the writers of this blog for about two years now and I would like to know what topics would my audience like for me to discuss on these pages.  Do you want some theory or practical articles?  Do you wish more articles based on LITE or PRO versions?  Please leave your suggestions in the comments field and please set me know how many and what types of bot you run.

For those who wish to contact me through email, I can be reached at MTGOthrillskibot@gmail.com.

Customer's care

You have just set up your bot at best, fine tuned the prices and build a ram of workstations to run your 8 bots family at best. Still, you are probably understimating the importance of a good customer care. Luckly this is pretty easy to achieve in Magic Online. 


First of all remember to insert your email address in the welcome messages and in the final confirm messages. If someone has a problem, will most likely contact you. 
Then, daily check your inbox in Magic Online for new messages. The bot closes the inbox automatically, so you have open it manually once a while. 


Then, support your customers at best, and they will return. Someone is angry? Well, that's the scenario I prefer: be extra friendly and helpful with him and he will change his mood and shop at your bot again. Mysteries of the human beings, but this is 100% guarantee. An angry customer is just a customer that need "attention", willing to shop with you again BUT with an issue to be solved

Pro Vs Lite

The only difference between Pro and Lite versions of ML Bot is the pricing system.

The Lite bot will let you choose a unique price for "category". For example, all the common foils will cost 0.5 tixs, all the regular mythics will cost 2 tixs (and so on). There are 20 categories of cards.

The Pro bot uses instead a pricelist, and prices each card it own "real" price. For example Flameshot will cost 0.080 and  Rhystic Scrying 0.073.

Consolidate the accounts

If you have a large family of bots maybe you would want to "consolidate" all of them, i.d. to view them in the same Online Control Panel - under a unique login and without relogging every time.

To do that just choose for them the same email address and the same password. If you already chose them, you have to change them from the Online Control Panel, by clicking on the "change email" and "change password" links in the right side bar, after login.

Once done, just logout and relog (with one of your accounts, which one does not matter): you will see all your bot listed in the dropdown menu.

Q & A #1, part 2 of 2

So x4dow has two (2) PRO bots, one selling and one buying. He has accumulated some excess bulk cards and wants to sell the excess on a LITE bot and wants some advice as to the specifics.

Here is one opinion from the mana-ball shooting gallery.

He does not mention how much bulk is indeed bulk and what type they are. So I am going to assume that you have at least twenty four (24) copies of most commons.

The other question I have that you do not answer clearly is what is the purpose of the LITE bot, except that you want advice. This will affect the prices that you set.

The bottom line is that you are still going to have two (2) bots which sell cards.

So what price do you set? This is going to depend on how much profit/loss you are willing to take. If the goal is mainly to reduce inventory, then offer more cards per ticket. If you wish to maximize profit, offer less cards per ticket.

In either case, I recommend using a simple amount per ticket, whether it is five (5), eight (8), ten (10), etc. Do not use “weird” numbers like seven (7), thirteen (13), or seventy-seven (77). Anything which isn't cleanly divisible and would carry a credit. This is especially true for new bots which customers may not trust beyond the initial trade..

I would not recommend having more than eight (8) available cards on any bot at any given time. Why? Let's look at this from the customer perspective: If you are a new player and are just sifting through cards, if you see 427 Serpent Warriors for sale, are you going to conclude that it is a good card or a bad card? Now if you see just 3 of the same card, you might come to a different conclusion.

Q & A #1

x4dow- Hi, I am a new bot owner, running 2 pro bots; 1 buying and 1 selling. Through the course of these first few months, I have acquired a pretty significant amount of bulk. This has inspired me to explore the possibility of opening a 3rd bot which would be a lite bulk selling bot. I have questions about it though, would you mind giving me a little insight as to how much product, proper prices, general start-up advice on setting up a lite bulk seller? Thank you so much, in advance!

This little comment was left in the comment section recently and I thought I would take a look at his dilemma. I also want to thank x4dow for asking that question and I wish to encourage all my readers to submit questions and comments. This is how I know how I am doing. It also lets me write about what interests you, my readers.

(It also makes my job easier in that I do not have to come up with topics which may or may not be of interest, but I'm not supposed to discuss that.)

But I am digressing. Rather than shortchange x4dow with a partial answer which I will end up recapping next time, I will leave it to the readers to post their advice in the comment section and next time I will review those comments and add my own. And hopefully this can become a regular feature here.