Copy and Paste Magic

In our continuing series on little used MTGO bot features, I'm going to refer the reader back to my prior series, Building Your Own Bot Server. I went over the advantages of not using a backup but of installation of Windows and MTGO because of the increased stability. What I neglected was that I do not do ALL of this. That's right, I cheat.

How do I cheat when installing a new bot or moving a bot to another machine? I do manually install Windows and the updates and MTGO. Doing this is not any great chore as for the most part, the installation is painless, just a time consuming background task.

However, when it comes to setting up the details of the bots, such as how many of each card to pick, which sets to buy, etc, I do not do that. Instead, I simply restore the settings from the backup.

What do you mean, restore the settings from backup?

Exactly that. If you look in the Magic Library folder, you will see two (2) files:

[botname]user.data

[botname]buyerSetting.data

Each of these is a simple file which houses all the particular settings of your bot. You copy these files and transfer them to another machine. Then you're done. No more micromanaging settings and clicking all those check boxes.

But wait! There's more!

Once a day, Magic Library takes a backup of these settings. If you look in the “setting backup” folder, you will see files in the “dd-mm[botname]user.data” and “dd-mm[botname]buyerSetting.data” format. This way, if there is a corruption somewhere, you can restore those settings by using the proper files from a time when the bot was working flawlessly. (Dropping off the date part first.)

That's it and now you're back in business. Next time we'll continue the series on little used bot features,

MTGO Library Bot 4.65 is out!

ML Bot 4.65 now supports passwords for Magic Online with escape characters such as "^", "/" and "@"

MTGO Library Bot 4.64 is out!

We have just released ML Bot 4.64, supporting the set From the Vault:Legends (V11) in wishlist buying mode.

Password maximum length removed

In order to increase the security of the passwords, we removed the 11-characters limit, a legacy from our old website. In a nutshell, you can now choose passwords longer than 11 chars.

In the next days mtgolibrary's staff will also implement a series of features in order to make the login and the registration process stronger.

The Price is Right

In our continuing series on exploring the little known features of MTGO Library, I'm going to delve into the prevailing task of management today: Maximizing Profits and Minimizing Expenses.

A good part of Senior Management's job is to look for ways to increase revenue and decrease costs. How this is done is a very tricky proposition; which the Occupy Wall Street movement is highlighting. While global politics is not the scope of this forum, there are lessons which can be found by looking at other examples.

There are the obvious methods of doing so: The first one is to simply raise prices.

Assume you sell ten (10) rares a day for 1 ticket each. This nets you ten (10) tickets each day. Increase your prices by 10%, or 1.1 tickets each and assuming you keep selling ten (10) rares a day, you have increased your revenue by one (1) ticket.

This method has its drawbacks as Bank of America recently discovered when it announced it was raising some of its fees. If your customers balk at paying the increased price, they may be motivated to look elsewhere. There are economic theories based on finding optimum pricing for maximum profit.

The other obvious method is to decrease expenses. In traditional businesses, many times this takes the form of cutting employee pay, which the Occupy Wall Street crowd highlights. In our MTGO business, this takes the place of paying less for incoming cards.

Again, while this method will not be detected by those who buy from us, it may be detected by those who supply cards to our bots. Again, they may be motivated to find another bot to sell their cards to.

But there is yet another method which can decrease our costs with no other drawback: Wikiprice.

What is Wikiprice? It is a tool used by buyers to find which bots carry a specific card at the lowest possible price.

But more importantly to use bot owners, ticking that checkbox instantly reduces our leasing fee by 1%. This may sound like an insignificant number but in the “real world”, such a savings would get the person finding this a large bonus.

Imagine buying a chase rare for 40 tickets and selling it immediately for 60 tickets. Normally, the fee for this transaction would cost us 3½ tickets. Having that checkbox checked reduces the fee to 2½ tickets. One ticket may not sound like much, but how much business does your bot do over the course of a year? Does a simple checkbox tick save you 50 tickets? 100 tickets? More?

MTGO Library Bot 4.63 is out!

ML Bot 4.63 is out, supporting the From the Vault: Legends (V11) set. The new pricelist is available for free during the update process and as usual from the Online Control Panel.

RTFPDF - Read the Frackin' PDF

As we leave Halloween behind us and look forward to the holiday season, I thought I would look at how we can we can maximize this annual occurrence to increase fun and profit. Large corporations plan for the holiday season around June, picking and choosing which items they are gambling will be the hot items. If this planning is good enough for the big box stores, why can't it be good enough for us?

In order to approach this, I think it would be profitable to read the manual. Oh, I know there isn't a printed manual for MTGO Library. There is a PDF that we can go over, but I am not being literal here. I am not referring to sitting down and reading an instruction manual.

What I'm referring to is going over the little used, possibly overlooked features on MTGO and see which ones need to be tweaked to improve the bot's performance and to increase profits.

I'm not planning a feature by feature exploration of the bot's features. That would bore you, my dear readers, and it would be boring for me to write it. This is not going to be an expanded explanation of things that would be printed in a 200 page manual.

Instead,we'll look at unorthodox traits to see where we can improve performance. We'll begin next time.