Improved Inventory - Part II

This afternoon we deployed a major update to the Inventory (launched 16th March http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/03/inventory.html and improved a first time 18th March http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/03/improved-inventory.html).

Now all the cards are grouped - you can check the details by clicking on the name of a card and a submenu will open. The prices are grouped in brackets like [2.0 - 3.0] 2.7] where the first number is the minimum price among your bots, the second is the max and the third one is the weighted average.
Prices are grayed out if your don't own the card or you don'y buy it.

Profit, number and value of trades

Yesterday we introduced a tool on the Online Control Panel showing the profit, the number and the value of the trades grouped by day, week and month.
Data starts from 1st November and will never be erased. The idea is go to get a clear understanding of how the bot is performing (and possibly tune it).

We'll work on the data during the next weeks, so this is the time to request adjustements / new features !

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.

Finally, ESXi Part III

Last time I gave a breakdown of the server that I am using ESXi on:
1 physical CPU being split into 2 virtual CPUs
3.5 Gigs of memory
An 80 Gig hard drive. 

I put two (2) bots on this machine and some time has passed.  How does it perform and more importantly, what resources are required to run each individual virtual machine?

Fortunately for us, ESXi has a plethora of tools available which can give you more information than is required.

As you can see from the above graph, this bot is consuming about half of the CPU resources.  This is not surprising as there is one physical core being split into two (2) virtual processors.  It also indicates that we need approximately 1.6 Ghz for a virtual machine.  My best guess was that 1.5 Ghz would be sufficient to run a bot.

The above graph shows disk usage.  As you would expect, there is not a lot disk read/writes during idle time and even during a trade event, there is not a sufficient drain on resources.  I should throw in a caveat here.  The hard drive in this machine is an older 5400 RPM drive with an 80 Gig capacity.  It is enough for a two (2) bot setup.  If one is desiring to run an eight (8) bot chain, there is going to be more disk activity as you would expect.  There is going to come to a point where simultaneous trade events will start to over-lap and start to degrade the smoothness of the trade, possibly damaging potential sales.

One could mitigate this by using an SSD drive ot a Hybrid drive and putting MTGO files in a folder and then networking that folder thereby minimizing disk access drive.  This procedure has been detailed in previous entries.  Next time, we’ll continue our exploration of ESXi.

Magic Online Economy: Fundamentals

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/economia-de-magic-online-parte-3/

In this article I will talk you about the fundamentals of the Magic Online economy. With this information you will have an idea of ​​how to perform your purchases/sales of cards and the reasons that justify the price of a card. This comparison will not only be related to digital cards, but also between the value of an online and a physical card.

The main currency on Magic Online economy

Certainly there is no official currency on Magic Online. Since the beginning of the game the material was bought from the Magic Online official store, which can be accessed within the game itself. The only options available for sale are: boosters, pre-constructed decks and Event Tickets. These tickets allow you to enter at Magic Online tournaments where you can win prizes, and each of these items costs $1 plus taxes.

Due to the price of the tickets and their intrinsic value, soon people started to use them as the main currency. Their market price depends on factors such as the amount available on Magic Online, the number of drafts/limited queues to be launched, and recently also the high value of the mythic cards. Today their market price is slightly higher than $1 each, and it is unlikely to rise much more because if their value is very close to the official price ($1 + VAT) people would directly buy them from the store.

The evolution of prices

A particular feature of the Magic Online economy is that the price of each card evolves very fast. The reason is that the trades of cards can be done immediately without shipment delays, something that cannot be avoided on the physical market.

For this reason, the digital market behaves much more likely the real stock markets, and price changes are motivated by reasons like fear or speculation. However, in the Magic Online economy itself predictions can be made without being a financial guru. The important thing is that you must have a lot of experience in the game and know the cards, so you can correctly analyze the new sets and their possible interactions with the old cards in different game formats. In this way, you can overtake the market and buy a card that will be probably played (and, therefore, will rise in price) cheaper.

Giving a value to a Magic Online card

You might think that digital cards should have almost no value at all. After all, it is something that you can not own physically. In fact, your collection is not even stored on your own computer, but on a remote server managed by Wizards. However, if you look at the price of the cards at Magic Online, you can see that their value is not so different from the printed version. Normally, the digital market value is lower but sometimes happens exactly the opposite.

Why does this happen? Like I stated for the physical market, the value of the cards depends on many factors. Some of them are the same in both the virtual and real world, but others are specific to the Magic Online economy. Moreover, the effect of each factor is usually much larger in
the digital version because the changes happens instantly. Below I summarize some of them:

• Tournaments and prices: like the physical format, when a major tournament is announced for a certain format, the cards increase their price and then they stabilize again after that tournament finishes. Besides, when there are announces of drafts for a certain set the prices also get lower in anticipation of higher stock and less demand. And so on… 
• Reprints: Due to high speculation and the fast changes at Magic Online economy, the announcement of a reprint for a card makes its price collapse, especially if the card has a high economic value.
• Banning/Restriction: When a card is forbidden for using on certain constructed formats, its price usually gets lower because noone is able to play with it.
• Rarity: Although this is not a general rule, the rarest cards usually are more expensive and their foil version also have a higher value than normal ones.

These factors are may apply to both, the physical and digital market of Magic. However, there is another factor that, togeteher with the tournaments one, may have the highest impact on Magic Online economy: the redemption option.

What is redemption and why is it so important?

The redemption is an option offered on Magic Online to link the virtual world with the physical one, from both the ownership of the cards and their economic value point of view. Redemption consists of ordering a full set of physical cards to your home, only if you own all the cards of that set on your Magic Online account. You must have one copy of every card and they cannot be replaced by a foil nor another set version.

This option was introduced since the beginning of Magic Online to give extra value to the digital cards. Although nowadays the impact of this option on the Magic Online economy is smaller, it yet has a considerable weight.

The main advantage of this option is that you can buy digital cards in Magic Online at lower prices than the same printed cards. Likewise, you only apply the shipping costs once for receiving the cards in your house. Thus, it may be a very profitable option for collectors or even if you just want some very expensive cards of a specific set.

The main problem of redemption is that the big sellers flood the market with a huge amount of collections, lowering the price of both redeemed sets and those collected by opening boosters. For this reason, Wizards has recently increased the price of each collection requested the $5 to $25 (shipping not included). Although it is still an affordable price to individuals who wish from 1-4 sets, this new value limits the benefits obtained by directly selling the redeemed collections.

In my opinion, the redemption is one of the best options offered on Magic Online, and is also an excellent regulator of the economy. I could write a whole article dedicated to this topic, but I think I have offered you the basic information to know the fundamentals of Magic Online economy and how redemption works. In the next chapter I will discuss the profiles of players you can find on Magic Online. This analysis will aid you to better understand the market movements of digital cards.

A great story

Two days ago I talked to a customer of mine. It was the first time I had a conversation with him. This person run 4 bots.

I cannot tell you the name and give you the exact numbers, but the substance does not change.
He shared with me his financial spreadsheets, with monthly reports. He started one year ago and he does incredibly well. With just 4 bots he is able to extract a net profit of more than 750 usd/month, real money, in his bank account.
While this person is not the most profitable one (he is half way up the ladder), he just run 4 bots compared to the usual 15-20 of top botters. As time passes, he will add bots and he will surely become of the biggest chain.

What he didn't tell is how he made it (of course). I guess passion, good prices, great inventory, some collections bought on eBay, tixs on the accounts.

Percentage Corrections & Estimating Potential Profits (updated)

I am writing this post on James' behalf.
He made some updates based on user feedback and fixed a few minor things on his spreadsheet. 
You can download the revised version here.

Changes:

+ Prevented macro from hiding "CardsMTGO3" tab; folks use this as reference to enter prices into other tabs.

+ Made table on "corrections" tab (hidden) now go from +100% to -100%

+ Updated drop down menus to pull from new "correction" tab ranges


Thanks James!

Card Log - What is it?

Some time ago a new feature on the MTGO Library website was offered to us.  The Card Log can be accessed through the Control Panel. The Card Log is a useful tool for tracking trade information and statistics on a card. 

New features can be intimidating to make use of without training so we will take you through each field and explain what you need to do and how this tool can be used to improve your ML Bot experience!

Blue - Card Name
This field requires the name of the card you wish to track trades of. It is not case sensitive, but does require the full card name. You cannot search for One Thousand Lashes by using the term "Lashes". However, you could search for One Thousand Lashes using the search term "OnE ThOuSaNd LaShEs".

Orange - Set
In this field you specify from which set the card in question belongs to. One Thousand Lashes belongs to Gatecrash exclusively so you would set this field to GTC. If a card has been printed in multiple sets you may wish to search each set it has been printed in.

Green - Buddy 
Buddy is an optional field that allows you to single out an individual and what trades of that particular card that buddy has made with the bot. This can be a valuable tool for tracking down specific support questions for a user, or tracking unusual trades from an individual.

Red = From/To 
From/To is another optional search feature that allows you to limit your search to a specific period of time. This could be useful to track changes by using two card searches over different periods of time. One week versus three months could give an insight into whether a card has recently become popular.

Purple = Bot
In this option you can specify whether you wish to search for trades taking place on a single bot, all bots attached to the account, or all bots attached to a chain. This is useful if you're having trouble with a single bot or run different kinds of bots that require different forms of attention.

Orange - Purchased/Sold
This result field provides useful data on the amount of cards you have trade and sold. This field also includes average, minimum and maximum buying prices.

Teal - Average Profits and Profits in Last X trades
These two boxes will show you the average profit per card you will make as well as the profit you have made over the last X trades. This field is particular useful in finding out if a card has been priced at a value that has cost your bot to lose on trading that card.

Yellow - Trade Details
Last of all this field will show you specific trade information on when it took place, what bot was involved, to whom it was traded to, if it was a purchase or a sale and what it was purchased/sold for.