MTGO News 
2010-03-08 09:38:05
Accumulating tons of extra tickets or cards from your incredibly successful bot(s)? Turn it into cash! Either by selling tickets or full sets, it's easy to get some cold hard cash out of this hobby. Read on for some advice at maximizing what you get out of your profit.
The usual method of extracting your profit is by selling event tickets. The in-game store charges one dollar per event ticket, plus tax where applicable, so it's not unheard of for tickets to sell for over a dollar each. At the moment you can expect to easily sell tickets for 0.98 each. You can list them for sale through ebay, but it's really not necessary to subject yourself to ebay fees when selling tickets. Listing in the classifieds will get you plenty of sales, and you will already incur a fee from Paypal; 2.9-3.9% plus 30 cents.
Accepting credit card payments through paypal leaves you at risk of what is called a chargeback. By complaining to their credit card company, who in turn complains to Paypal, someone can get their money back for something they actually did receive. If you do not upgrade your basic Paypal account you will be unable to accept credit card payments, which is a wise decision. Even if it's not a credit card payment, the person can still open a dispute with Paypal. To avoid this headache, avoid selling large amounts of tickets at once unless you know the person well.
Once you have your potential customer, find out how many tickets they want and their email adress. Send a bill to their Paypal account and wait for payment. Do not give any tickets until you have confirmed the payment is in your Paypal account. Once you've been paid, pay close attention that the correct amount of tickets is taken. Congratulations, you've just sold tickets!
Another route for getting some cash out of your bot is by selling full sets. You can either advertise them for sale in the classifieds, or redeem them and sell them through ebay. Some people have a much easier time buying cards than selling them, and if that sounds like you, redemption might be right up your alley.
One last point worth mentioning, is that you can pay for your bot rental fees either with tickets or through Paypal. The amount of funds required to pay your renting fees is much lower than the amount of funds you would get selling the amount of tickets required to make the equivalent renting fee payment. Even if you want to funnel all of your profit back into the growth of your bot, which is a good idea, you should still be selling enough tickets to pay for your renting fees rather than paying in tickets... or even paying your fees out of your personal cash.
As always you can contact me at afterhoursbot2@gmail.com with any questions or comments.
Posted by _after_hours_
2010-03-02 14:14:22
This week I'd like to go over some of the bot's new features which are sometimes misused or overlooked. MLBot has been gaining abilities at an amazing pace for a bot which was already so well-established, so it can be quite easy to go without noticing something. If you've been using the program for awhile and don't recall many new features, give a read, because you've probably missed some.
I guess I'll start with perhaps the most comforting new feature of all: buyer/seller price consistency checks. On the main panel of the bot's interface, you have the option of enabling the bot to check all your prices to make sure you are charging more than you pay for each card. If your bot were willing to pay two tickets for a card it sells for one ticket, someone could buy them from you and sell them back to you until the bot has nothing left. Even if you ran out of tickets, they could then use the credit to take your cards. Everyone should have this enabled on at LEAST one bot.
The bot now has the ability to email you a summary of every trade that takes place. If your browser has trouble with the site, this is an alternative to the trades log. Most email providers feature filtering options which allow you to look at the specific trade data you want to see, such as searching your email for "Bloodbraid Elf" to see every trade in which you bought or sold the card. You can do searches like this in the trades log, but only for one bot at a time. If all your bots use the same email address, you can search through every bot's simultaneously.
Many people mark every card in their collection for trade when selling to bots, which can cause the bot to take a long time to scan their entire collection. The bot now has the ability to recognize if it is only interested in cards from the T2 or extended formats, and if so, filter any sellers' collections so as to only display those cards. Depending on how much old stuff someone has, this can cut the time spent selecting cards from minutes to seconds. The bot automatically employs this practice when applicable, but it is up to you to limit the bot to only buying from those formats if you so desire.
This next feature is the biggest time saver imaginable: MLBot is now capable of restocking itself. Under the administrator panel of the interface, you can configure your bots to open trade with each other and either give, take, or both give and take cards that they are in need of. If you employ separate buy-bots and sell-bots, one of the keys to maximizing profit is getting the cards you buy up for sale as soon as possible... and keeping a sell-bot as fully stocked as possible at all times is not a bad idea either. You can even set up a bot specifically for the purpose of restocking the others if you so choose.
You can set the bot to display |BUSY| or |OPEN| at the beginning of your classifieds message, which isn't so new, but you can now also set the bot to display an entirely different advertisement when it's busy. The default secondary message of "Buying and Selling all Cards!" should definitely be changed, at a minimum, to be the same as your standard classifieds message. To go beyond that, you might choose to advertise different cards when busy, or buy-prices when busy with sell-prices when open. For the latter suggestion, you might want to advertise the same exact cards. If someone found your ad by searching a cardname, and is waiting for your bot to become open, but the searched card isn't listed in the message displayed when your bot is open... the ad will diisappear when the bot becomes available. Ouch. Speaking of advertisement messages, the website now has a panel from which you can remotely set the messages across all of your bots.
Another time-saving feature has recently come to fruition: you can set the bot to create an advertisement for you! I won't waste time teaching the specifics here, click the "learn more" button on the messages tab of the interface to learn the formatting used to have the bot generate an advertisement for you. You can be as lazy as to tell it to advertise the prices of 7 completely random cards... or as specific as you want, telling it the exact cardnames you want it to advertise, and how many decimal places you want used in the price it lists.
This article ran a bit long, but I didn't feel like it was a good idea to split it into two parts, since some people are already of aware of everything it includes. Tune in next week for something more thrilling! As always contact me at afterhoursbot2@gmail.com with any questions, comments, suggestions, popetry, or cheese-soup recipes.
Posted by _FOILSPOT_
2010-02-22 08:24:01
This week I'd just like to hit on a couple factors currently and soon-to-be affecting the balance of supply and demand on MTGO. Shifts like these are inevitable, but as long as you're aware of what's going on you should be able to react accordingly.
Everyone has probably noticed a huge slide in Zendikar and Magic2010 prices the past week or so. The main catalyst for this sudden and drastic shift is the lack of redemption pulling cards off of MTGO. Zendikar and M10 non-foil redemption orders have been out of stock since at least Monday. Although there's no way to be sure when these redemptions will be available again, a friend of mine says they called customer service and were told it would be at least four weeks before either set is back in stock. These prices could be over-dropping in speculation, and rebound once redemption returns for these sets. However it's pretty hard to judge how long the fade in value will continue. I'd definitely keep an eye on the redemption section of the MTGO store for their return.
Of note is the fact the foils sets are still redeemable. Most people form their foil prices based almost entirely on the normal price of a card. As the regular versions pile up and plummet in value, the foils come down with them, which can result in foil redeemers redeeming even more, further skewing the balance between the supply and demand for the foil versions of these sets. Paying and charging a bit more than usual for these foils may be a good move, especially with the mythics.
Worldwake has arrived on MTGO, and I want to mention this one more time for anyone who has missed it. The final set in the block, Rise of the Eldrazi, will be a large set, and be drafted separately from the other two sets in the block. This could result in less Worldwake than usual entering the MTGO market, though that really depends on the popularity of RRR drafts versus ZZW drafts. I wouldn't go overboard and hoard cards or anything, but it may be worth paying attention to how easily you're keeping the cards in stock once Rise of the Eldrazi comes around.
As always you can drop me a line at afterhoursbot2@gmail.com with any questions or comments. Enjoy the release everyone!