Introducing Academy_Buybot…
As we recently announced, we have released our own bot chain, which we will continue to expand over time. Bots, for those who don’t know, are automated Magic Online accounts that serve as storefronts for Magic Online users. Sellbots (like our Academy_Sellbot) sell cards to users on Magic Online for Event Tickets and bot credit. Buybots, on the other hand, purchase cards from Magic Online users in exchange for Event Tickets and bot credit. The reason that this is important is because MTGO Academy has just launched its new buybot chain, beginning with Academy_Buybot. Just like with Academy_Sellbot, Academy_Buybot‘s software was developed in-house. It should be faster and smarter than our old buybot, MTGOcardtraderbot, which will be shut down (though any bot credit you may have at our old buybot will be transferred to Academy_Buybot by the end of the week). Though we’ve been working hard on Academy_Buybot to make sure that it’s well-stocked and functional, feel free to share any problems you’re experiencing with it below in the comments section. You can find Academy_Buybot in the Classifieds section of Magic Online, or you can type “/addbuddy Academy_Buybot” in any chat window on Magic Online and hit enter to add it to your buddy list.
(Note: Due to testing and bug fixes, Academy_Buybot may go on- and offline periodically over the next few days. Stay tuned!)
Because the online trading of Magic cards is the most important source of revenue for small but growing Magic Online-related businesses like MTGO Academy, we’ve decided to ask you to help generate excitement for our new buybots and sellbots. And what better way to do so than to invite you to participate in a contest with us!
Contest Details!
Entry is free, and to be eligible, all you need is a Magic Online account. In fact, to play, you don’t need to do very much at all. The only thing you need to do is to post the following message in an ad in the Magic Online Classifieds section when you’re online. Just copy and paste — no trouble at all! Here is the message:
[sE][sE] MTGO Academy is hosting a contest to celebrate their new bots: Academy_Buybot & Academy_Sellbot. Mythics, rares, commons, foils, promos & boosters for Standard, Modern, Legacy & Pauper. Visit their site for details to win free bot credit.[sE][sE]
“But what can I win by helping you advertise?” We’re glad you asked! At four random times each day for the next work week (from 12:00am US East on Monday, August 22, until 11:59pm US East on Friday, August 26), our staff will be scanning and searching the Classifieds for the above message. If your name appears next to the above message when we search the Classifieds, we’ll write down your user name and enter you for a chance to win a prize of 1 Event Ticket worth of store credit at our bot chain, which you can spend at Academy_Sellbot, Academy_Sellbot2, or Academy_Budgetbot. At the end of each day, we’ll randomly select 20 of the names we’ve written down and add the winning Magic Online usernames to the winners list at the bottom of this page. At the same time, we’ll make sure to add the credit to our bots, attached to your user name. Because we’ll check four times a day, this means that each day you will have four chances to win (if you keep your Classified ad up!), and over five days, you will have 20 chances to win! You could rack up 20 Tix worth of credit at our bots!
Just so you know, though we’d love to have you register a username at MTGO Academy, you do not need to be registered here to win. You only need to have a Magic Online account. If you have any questions about the contest, prizes, or the procedure, feel free to ask below in the comments section.
Server Change
An unrelated (but still exciting) announcement: We’re moving MTGO Academy’s website to our own server. This doesn’t affect the way that you’ll be able to locate or view anything on our website, but it may make things faster for you in the future. Videos should load quicker, and we’ll be able to exert a bit more control over how our content is moved, rendered, and displayed. Because of the server move, we’ll be changing our schedule a bit for this week. _ShipItHolla’s Standard Spike series will be run on Thursday instead of Monday, and KillerOwen’s Forcing the Will series will be pushed from this Tuesday until another day to be determined.
Though our server move will make our website somewhat easier to view in the long term, over the next few days, as we move most of our data from our old server to our new one, you may find that things on our website go a bit more slowly. But we assure you, this will only be temporary, and then things will really kick into 10th gear!
Contest Winners
Each night (by midnight in the US East timezone) we’ll be adding contest winners’ Magic Online user names to this list:
Monday’s winners (some more than once)!
Malum
MattyStudios
middleman_35
Serakus
SquabblingHawk
SuperDoomMonkey
DiNo29
Gunho
pumpkinhead13
Qik
Bozsmits
Alwyzbtapping
rarewolf1986
Piro
Manhandle
ChazMcGavin
Qik
mrdee
shenigomi
SuperDoomMonkey
Tuesday’s winners (some more than once)!
pietro14
Vaasgothik
Boticario
JoseOllero
Lb13
Gunho
MagicGod87
pk23
Kaento
rarewolf1986
CollyDee
Froggery
Lope
Vaasgothik
Decade_of_Statues
vaughnswift
Kensiky
Piro
DragonRiderMtg
mohio
Wednesday’s winners (with a few repeats)!
pietro14
tato83
jctenn
mintfloss
Cannonadek
Piro
TankJunkie
carlosib
FreezerPen
Frolsh
BondGamer
JbUSTIN
SilverFolken
iamrawr
MelRox
Sfilho
vhbe3
enderfall
carlosib
FreezerPen
Thursday and Friday’s winners
xerio
pk23
Malum
Fadeaway1
iamrawr
Decade_of_Statues
Vaasgothik
Sfilho
Serakus
Manhandle
Zage
SilverFolken
Malum
Jimbobway
Kasaki
jefer
LoathingLasVegas
PlanesStrider
Lope
BondGamer
puuhkam
Arby
Dessiker
Buscuit007
tato83
MemoryDump
jefer
JbUSTIN
GeekBri
CollyDee
metik
Manhandle
Grotius
Green Opal
falsetto
Baalzamon
Gunho
TheBrain17
TimeMage
MelRox
Congratulations to all of this contest’s winners; your credit has been applied to our Academy bots. A big thanks to everyone for participating, and plan on seeing more contests and other prize-awarding events in the near future!
So more accounts you own the better chance of winning you get right?
love the quizbot, got some nice promo lands there.
@Neros: Short answer – yes. As long as the accounts are displaying the information we put up above it does not matter to us who owns the account. Every published classified is eligible.
Why everyone say Nero instead of Neros? Epic I’ll be trying to enter then.
@420gabriel
I’ve never seen anything that good on there besides the one time I answered and closed the trade thinking I could come back and get the 4 when I figured what I needed for my decks.
Apologize. Corrected. I guess your name resembles to closely the name of the beloved ancient historic figure that called Rome it’s home.
Yeah thats why I decided to take off the 64 I had attached at the end. I never knew about Nero. I knew there was a Nero around that time period but, not that one.
I remember Sharpbot using a similar tactic to promote their bot.
Unfortunately i need the adspace myself, but looking at classifieds right now, you don’t need me anyway.
This has been my favorite MTGO site for a long time now and i’m happy to see you grow!
Hello Martin,
glad you like the site. We are pretty excited to publish even more content in the future as well as develop small useful tools for the community. If you haven’t done so yet check out the “tools” page with our updated MtGNotifier 0.04 – a must have for MTGO users!
Ha I think somebody tried to trade with me believing I was an mtgoacademy bot. I wish I wasn’t in the middle of a match so I could have played along and pretended to be a bot.
How awesome is this? Very.
Good luck to everyone who does this
Sweet. My name is on there twice. Now hopefully, my computer doesn’t go to sleep at home while I’m at work.
Yeah, this is straight up ripped off Sharpbot’s prize system he ran all last month. Pretty surprised yall would do it.
Curse you sharpbot, for copyrighting competitions!
RE: Anon — We’ll be offering some more involved contests as we move forward. Magic puzzles, deckbuilding contests, PREs, stuff like that. Really, this is just a great promotional tool that simultaneously gives away stuff to our fans at little cost to them (just a couple minutes and a copy/paste).
I tried the new academy_buybot and Wow! It’s fast! It seeks cards almost instantly and the buy prices are quite good. But I have one problem: I wasn’t able to remove cards I didn’t want to sell, and the help command … didn’t help much. Is there a way other than making these cards untradable in the collection?
@lazdada: You might have noticed the “Beta 1.0″ in the classified. That indicates that we are still adding features over time and to answer your question – no, there is currently no option to do that but there will be; along with a lot of other features we are going to slowly roll out.
Thanks for your comment.
Pretty smart idea, this. Good for you and good luck with the bots!
Ever since I put this ad up, people keep ‘trading’ me every 15 minutes or so (saying nothing or cancelling when I ask them what’s up). Anyone know why people would trade someone posting this ad?
@Zage: Short answer is that many players seem to be to lazy to read….
You can prevent that from happening by marking the checkbox “Ignore trade requests from non-buddies” in your personal settings page.
Wow, you must be getting a ton of traffic then because seriously, every 15 minutes for a few hours. It’s died down a little now fortunately.
Thanks for the tip btw, never knew such an option existed!
Hi guys,
buybot beta 1.0 doesn’t work for me. It selects 75 cards to buy and then logs off. Happened twice in a row, session ID’s LQL254 and LQL2B2.
Just FYI.
regards
@ReinaldoVrins: Thanks for the info. We did not have much of a problem with it so far and will look into the issue you had when my tech guy is back from his well deserved vacation….
Can you maybe try it again and see if the error still exists? It might have to do with our server changes we made. Thanks!
great contest, guys
can’t wait for the next one
@Plejades: just tried again 5 minutes ago, same thing. [@A]10:59 PM [b]Academy_Buybot[/b]: Your trade session ID is ‘LQNOZ6′ (include it in support requests)
Hello Reinaldo,
seems to be an issue with the combination of letters in your username. We are using OCR to do the trades and it seems to stumble in very rare cases. We are already in the process to resolve the issue with the new release. Thanks for the info again.