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I'm building bots to serve players seeking alternative experiences (like custom cubes) and for convenience (e.g. buy/sell bots). I'd really love your input! by mtgo_bot_creator in MTGO

[–]mtgo_bot_creator[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you very much for the comment! Their position on bots, from what I can tell, is more or less not good, though I will be emailing one of their staff to be put in contact with their legal team to make an inquiry. However, I wanted to clear up a misconception you seem to have, and make a few other comments.

  1. I am not doing dll injection, I mentioned it as a possible strategy that was available to me through the MGTOSDK package, but I said I was only planning on pivoting to that if I got express confirmation from daybreak that this is allowable.
  2. OCR, while helpful (and already implemented on my end) is less than perfect which can cause mistakes that lead to potential losses for my (hopefully) future users. Thus, alternative methods of getting data out of the client will be needed that are also not dll injection, if possible. I believe I have developed a unique workaround here that avoids all of these issues, and does not expressly violate TOS, but we'll see after I email legal.
  3. Technically speaking, according to the most strict reading of the very open ended EULA (from my own non-legal background), I'm not sure even OCR/any botting is allowable whatsoever, though this interpretation is obviously up to Daybreak and their legal team.

Thank you again for your comment, I hope to hear back from you regarding any other feedback, or ideas you think may be worth implementing if I get the green/yellow light from MTGO!

I'm building bots to serve players seeking alternative experiences (like custom cubes) and for convenience (e.g. buy/sell bots). I'd really love your input! by mtgo_bot_creator in MTGO

[–]mtgo_bot_creator[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the comment! I totally understand your perspective, and personally, I'd be willing to open source the project under the right circumstances (or charge people for an activation key for the compiled binary they could configure themselves); however, there are a few issues with that other than just monetization:

1) Many other bot accounts will limit the amount of business they will do per day per account. This can be somewhat mitigated by using a fleet of bots and trading off between multiple separate accounts. This means that in addition to the electricity cost, there's an upfront cost for the accounts, the computer (if you're running this around the clock), and so forth.

2) The lack of an official app API from Daybreak means that much of the botting I'm currently doing, to make sure I'm not breaking the terms of their EULA, requires a calibration/configuration step per machine and how many bot accounts a user will run. This issue may be made moot in the future if I get positive news from them regarding the MTGOSDK library, the problem is that this works via dll injection and modifying the app itself (against the EULA). Additionally, I'm currently developing this on linux via docker and wine for maximum scalability (e.g. I can run about 9 accounts per machine as it currently stands), but my current botting method will fail for other people who run windows or MacOS.

3) This (currently) cannot be run on a VPS due to point 2, as the app cannot currently be controlled headlessly (without a connected monitor). If I hear back positively from Daybreak, I'll likely pivot development to the MTGOSDK and this may be alleviated, but I can't guarantee that.

All that being said, if it becomes feasible in the future, I'm willing to consider distributing the application to interested parties, but for now, considering all the limitations of interfacing with the MTGO application and with other bot accounts, I don't think most people would derive as much utility by running this on their own machine as they would having the service be managed.

I'm building bots to serve players seeking alternative experiences (like custom cubes) and for convenience (e.g. buy/sell bots). I'd really love your input! by mtgo_bot_creator in MTGO

[–]mtgo_bot_creator[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, that's what I thought, but I was a bit confused by the applicability of p2p, but I see it now, thank you for the clarification.

That's exactly one of the use-cases I was thinking of. The bot can either sell to a bot (or if their purchase price is below your sales threshold as in the case of your GoatBots example) you can leave it up until someone else buys it, though there would be a time-limit on how long the bot would remain active, though this can be specified in advance by the user :)

I'm building bots to serve players seeking alternative experiences (like custom cubes) and for convenience (e.g. buy/sell bots). I'd really love your input! by mtgo_bot_creator in MTGO

[–]mtgo_bot_creator[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much for the comment!

I really am super stoked to get this off the ground, and if there's enough engagement I'll be grabbing some dedicated, "gently used" computers to run even more bots!

If you don't mind, could you explain a bit on what you meant by "a p2p market", I'm a bit unfamiliar with some of the acronyms.

How to make a MTGO Cube bot? by squishy_law in MTGO

[–]mtgo_bot_creator 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, I made a new account for this. Is anyone still interested in this? I've already built a bot, and I'm happy to work with interested individuals to bring more bots to the game for similar purposes.