How to apply purchased credits to associated bot?

Rage is fuelling my soul today so hopefully I get this answered quickly before I snap. Given I can no longer run the bot for free I decided to purchase credits to see how much this is going to cost me in the long run. My experience with the process has been less that stellar. My feedback would be that this needs a lot of work before it is ready for primetime. I couldn’t find any documentation. The web pages on manage.botengine.org do not inspire confidence, the process seems to be broken. Here is what I did…

I followed the series of text html pages at http://manage.botengine.org/ using the account associated with my bot (verified it was the correct bot key before purchasing). I purchased credits. Received the e-mail from Paddle saying I successfully purchased “300 000 BotEngine Credits” and provided me with a license key. It has been two hours since the purchase. My account on manage.botengine.org still says I have 0 credits, and I can’t find anywhere to input this license key. I tried it as the Bot Operation key and that does not work either. I cannot through searching on the forum find any documentation on the process.

Can anyone help me?

Thank you,
Hack.

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OMFG I finally figured it out. This process needs a serious over hall. You have to go back through the purchase process. When you get to the http://manage.botengine.org/credits/Buy page there is a link to “Redeem Credits Voucher”. Go to that page (http://manage.botengine.org/credits/RedeemCreditsVoucher) and enter the license key. I will create a detailed document when I get some time. This was not obvious.

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16 credits per minute is an odd number :slight_smile:

So if I run the bot for 12 hours a day my 300,000 credits are consumed in 26 days.

That is about 0.20 euro a day per bot. I can live with that.

Hack

Sorry to hear it was not clear how it works.

I am not online every day. I recommend to people to not pay for something which they not yet understand but instead wait until I have answered their questions. It seems to me that this way such a risk of snap/rage can be avoided.

In order to avoid bad surprises, we had a review phase of the new App including the purchase process to give users time to test it in advance.

Thank you, I am looking forward to seeing how it can be improved.

Thank you for this detailed account. This is very useful as I can already infer a measure to improve this: I see the information on how to get the credits from the key needs to be found in more places. Probably adding this section of the guidance to the email from paddle would be a good start. I will try to implement that with paddle.

Thank you again for the feedback, I will try to build better navigation for this.

For those that would like the euro to isk breakdown. One 300,000 credit purchase is worth about 177 plex at regular price, which can be converted to 531,360,000 isk at current market price. I believe my math is correct on that but please check.

Based on my play this would require my toon to mine roughly 5 days at 12 hours a day consuming 57,600 credits (16 credits/minute x 60 minutes x 12 hours x 5 days), leaving 242,400 credits to mine for profit. That is about 20% overhead. If you are also plexing the account from your mining efforts you need to consider this additional overhead.

The good thing is you are only charged for the time the bot is running. Unfortunately, much of my bot use is not directly generating isk. For example, I have a small bot that just monitors local for neutrals and reds coming into system while I am doing hands on fleet mining. It helps me not lose ships, but is not actively generating isk.

I hope this helps people understand the economics.

Hack

I made those improvements to the process based on the feedback from @hacksaw:

  • Renamed the product available from paddle from 300 000 BotEngine Credits to 300 000 BotEngine Credits Voucher Code
  • Added this product description on the checkout page:

A voucher code for 300 000 BotEngine credits. Please Note that after checkout another you will need to enter the code on the BotEngine site at http://manage.botengine.org/credits/RedeemCreditsVoucher to apply those credits to the account.

  • Added these instructions which show up in the email received from paddle:

Thank you for purchasing a BotEngine credits voucher!
Please Note that another step is required to apply those credits to a BotEngine account:
After logging in to the BotEngine account, enter the code received via email from paddle on the BotEngine website at http://manage.botengine.org/credits/RedeemCreditsVoucher

After redeeming the key there, you will see the new credits on your account balance at http://manage.botengine.org/credits

I guess I can find some ways to improve navigation on the website too.

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@Viir, FYI: 0.02 cents (USD) per hour doesn’t sound like much, until you do the math. That would be over $90 per year at 12 hours per day. But if someone wants to bot 5 accounts, that person would be paying $450 per year.

The other major bot available has way more features, doesn’t require any coding, and is way cheaper. The ratting license is a one time payment of $45 to have unlimited use. Miners are about half that. Your bot can’t even start itself and log itself in to Eve.

Just trying to add some perspective, here. You might want to try a trial version of the other bot app for comparison.

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Sounds interesting, how do I run this trial version?

No worries, coding will not be required to use BotEngine. :+1:

Since you mention features: BotEngine development is in an early stage and there will be more features soon to support the goals outlined at An Outlook on Development of BotEngine

Thank you for the changes. These will help with end user frustration :slight_smile:

The one advantage of the other mining bots offered is that they can control multiple accounts simultaneously. With this bot it is one client at a time. This is one major disadvantage in addition to the higher costs. You may want to consider how feasible a onetime charge model would be to address the discrepancies. For Eve you have a very limited user base on a dying game. You don’t want to price yourself out of the market, but also need to generate some type of sustainable revenue.

Hack