Common Sense bot

Well its taken alot of looking around and I think I've found us our very own bot. I'm still having a little trouble with it tho, something to do with my screen resoultion but I should have a new monitor soon. The bot's name is

CommonSenseBot

So add him to your buddies list. Right now he will be buying 100 commons for 1 tix, I know most bots buy atleast 160 to 256 for 1 tix but I would like to get him stocked fairly quickly and the better rate it gives the more people will trade (hopefully) once I feel theres enough cards stocked the bot will switch from buy to trading and will be alot like Mr Creosot, ( he trades you 4 of his cards for 5 of yours) i might make CommonSenseBot do 8 to 10 or something like that.

for now however the bot will buy all sets, i am open to suggestions as to what sets we should focus on. the bot will run weekdays from 7am -5 pm and 10.30 pm -5 am est time. (when i'm at work and sleeping) it will also be avalible on the weekends but mostly at night from 10.30 pm - 7 am both saturday and sunday.

well i'll try to get the bugs out of it and get it up and running in a week or so.

Hi Timmy. Interesting idea. I wonder if you could elaborate a bit over how you see the relationship between the bot and the clan. I mean how does the presumed income benefit the clan?
If you're putting up the seed capital to build the inventory then presumably you're going to want to recoup your investment before any profit goes toward clan events?
Are clan members going to get preferential access to the inventory?
If there were to be trading issues then the clan could be asssociated negatively, is that worth the risk?
Sorry to seem cautious, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who is surprised by this announcement.

I have to say I completely agree with all those questions jmason has put forward. I'm actually glad someone had the balls to ask them

well so far the bot has only cost me the $9.99 for a new account and harry did donate 5 tickets to it. the bot itself has to be rented for 3.5% of the value of cards bought or sold each month. so for example if the bot bought a card for 1 tix then the fee of the bot would be $0.035 and the same goes for selling. for ever 1 tix worth of cards bought and sold it would cost $0.07 a month and since we're dealing with commons the total monlthy fee should be quite low.

i'm not that worried about getting any profit back for myself personally, i dont see this being any different then the booster packs i dontated for extra prizes for the last league. as far as benifits for the clan i kind of think this could be a good way to get extra funds for inter clan things plus there are the pdc events that are in need of hosting and prize support now. plus the bot can be on almost 24/7 making more people aware of the clan.

i'm not sure what you mean by negative trades... i persnoally havent ever had a problem with a trade bot and we could test the bot to make sure all the setting are correct before its released to the gen public.

i didnt really think this would be a suprise there was talk of the clan having a bot back in september or around there.

Thanks for that. I personally hadn't joined back in september, so i wasn't aware of those discussions.

As for bad trades, I have had several failed trades with bots. The last time i was buying tix several of them failed to reach my account, and the owner replaced them. The time before that I lost about 1 tix worth of cards, and never managed to contact the owner to get compensated. I suppose you just need to be ready for something like that happeneing, and be fair if it does.

You should also be cautious about how you manage the inventory. The old 1 for 1 common trade bots suffered from having too many bad cards and not enough good cards. It is not surprising that people will want to trade their basic land for a lightning bolt say. Trading with mr creosot can be frustrating for the same reason, the bot won't take cards it has enough of, and i don't always have anything i'm willing to make tradeable that it will take.

Anyway, good luck with the endeavour, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

well the bot isnt accepting basic land so that will fix that problem, and i have the same problem with mr creosot. but that problem happens a lot, in the small group of friends i have that play paper magic we dont trade anymore because no one has anything i want any more and i dont want to give up things they want so the trading pool gets staggnet.

does anyone remember the 1:1 project? those bots where always loaded with good cards

anyways if the bot gets clogged up with too many of one card maybe if theres playets of a complet set i'll ebay them and put the profit back in the bot. i'm not sure yet i think we'll have a while till that decicion needs to be made. i'm open to suggestions as to what sets to focus on and how many of a card we should have. i wasnt really trying to make this my bot its the clan's bot

Thanks timmy. I suppose what i was wondering most was what exactly this had to do with the clan as nothing was mentioned in your initial post. Your answer seems to be exaclty what i'd hoped. One of the problems of hosting a new event is funding for prize support (if any). If the bot generates some cards or tix then we would have the option of opening free-to-enter clan events and have funding for that.

With this in light, I think the risk with bad trading issues is worth taking. To minimize the potential for problems and allow for some customer interaction and feedback it might be a good idea to have the bot give a link to this forum somewhere in its speel. Then we could open a new section for bot-related issues.

Once again, thanks for the effort. If only every member were as productive and enthusiastic as you we'd have taken over MTGO by now

cheers
andy

P.S. Hit me up online I've got a few cards i'd liek to donate

well my new monitor should be here this coming wensday so the bot will hopefully be up and running by the weekend. if anyone has some suggestion as to what sets would be best to focus on that would be helpful.

so the new monitor is here and everything seems to be work ok. right now the bot wil only buy ala, eve and shm because the only way to get it to buy 100 commons for 1 tix is to manually enter them in notepad then save them to the bot file which looks like this

SETNAME;CARDNAME;SELLING PRICE;FOIL SELLING PRICE;BUYING PRICE;FOIL BUYING PRICE;BUY IT?
ALA;Agony Warp;0.01;0.10;0.01;0.01;yes


also a note on trading with the bot.

"The bot can trade cards in the way the Selling/Buyingmechanism allows it: one can sell cards to the bot, have his credit rise, and then spend this credit to buycards. It is a 2-phase trading, rather than a single-tradetrader"

so simply you have to trade the bot some cards first to gain credits then trade with it again to get cards.

i'm sure there is a better bot out there for this but this one is the cheapest i've found.

I will try to add new sets to the price index every night so in no time at all the bot will be able to buy from all sets

if someone just wants to donate cards i can login under the bot and grab them then in the bot progam i'll give you a credit. right now all cards are worth 0.01 credits and basic land will be 0.005 per.

and finally the bot as been on for 2 hours now and has had 5 diffrent people want to trade but with the restrictions on what it will but right now there hasnt been a succefull trade yet. if people like i will post stats of the trading logs now and then just so eveyones on the same page

just an update the bot now accepts cards from ravnica block thru shards of alara

its currently stocked with:

359 commons
154 basic lands
5 avatars

518 total cards

the bot isnt taking basic lands yet, i just dumped all my extra in it. when i get to it basic land will be worth 0.005 each

why only from ravnica on?

also: there are three bots who give away free cards, we can use maybe some of those to fill our bot.

2 of them give 64 cards to each account -once-
and 1 of them, who also has the most and quite good commons too, gives away 64
to each account each month (mtgotradersfreebot or something).

so if you havent used those yet you can even earn 1 tix

thats a good question mooncalf its simply because i havent gotten the code imputed yet for the rest of the sets but i'm working on it. maybe tonight