Controversial suggestions, opinions needed.

[Ashley**]

ok i really agree with you especially on the geldings one like you want to sell foals b/c you don't have room but don't want anyone else to take credit for your work

[crystalized_horse]

Hello! I have couple suggestions that have been on my mind for a while.

1. Geldings.
I really can't understand why this feature doesn't exist. WHY????
It allows people to sell off unneeded horses without fear of losing their unique line to a stranger. I'm a big breeder with several years of experience, and I can't sell any of my colts because I have zero control of what happens to the horse after it's sold. If my colt ends up on studs, someone else will benefit off my hard work without my permission.

2. Competitions should cost energy (just like breeding).
This makes horse's performance important. There's no reason to breed better horses to compete now, you can enter 10.000 competitions with adopted horse and earn the highest title. Isn't that weird? Breeding consumes energy, the next logical step is to make competition's cost something as well. This will make competitions harder, but it's how it should be. One horse won't be able to dominate everyone just because it was born early and entered in thousands of competitions over the course of months if not years. This will boost breeding as well, because breeding one ultimate horse won't be the answer anymore, and champions will retire(especially if they're geldings). Consequently, players who don't have the ability to train horses fast, will ask others to do that or invest money into their own accounts, because the younger the horse is and the better it is trained, the more money it will earn.

3. Rankings should be reset.
This should be done to make two previous points work as they should, or #2 is absolutely useless and even harmful and #1 is not as effective.
Rankings are all false now (except World Records), they don't represent the horse's abilities, just that it was there long enough to accumulate insane amount of points. You can adopt a horse and make it #1 in the game if you have enough time and patience to enter it in all shows every day for months (or years).
If there's a cost for every competition, ridiculous megachampions in every discipline won't exist anymore. If champions retire on constant basis, there will always be the need for new, better horses, there will be progress, competition, new names, new bloodlines!

4. New ways to spend money and other improvements.
I have 80kk on both my accounts and I don't even try to earn money, I have nothing to spend them on. It would be ideal to exchange money for PT, even at very high rate, like 1kk = 1 PT or something like that.

I'd like to have bigger pastures and barns, 24 or 36 or even 50 horses instead of 12. It's not comfortable to manage big breeding projects when you have 15 small pastures and need to check them all every other game year. I'd pay anything to reduce strain on my fingers from constant clicking. Regular pastures are not enough, why not make bigger ones and allow people more flexible management of their farm?

Also, I think sales ads should be time limited and there should be an option to sort out offers only ones. If I want to buy the horse right now, it's tiring to read through dozens of offers only posts which have been there for months. Marketplace is covered in old posts from inactive accounts. Search system is very lacking, with such a complex breeders report it's very hard to find a particular stat or their combination. I think there should be at least the ability to sort and order by HGP and certain stat's color.

That's all I have to say for now. I know that some of my points are quite controversial and require lots of work, especially wiping all rankings, but I firmly believe it will do good for the game.

I agree! I am glad there is someone that thinks like me! Geldings would be helpful; bigger pastures would mean less work; ranking do need to be reset; yes competitions should cost energy; I love this and totally agree!!!!!!

[Ashley**]

crystalized_horse

[Skraythrax]

Dropping in to say that I'm surprised geldings are still not a feature. I don't personally care if other individuals use my bloodlines (I enjoy seeing what players accomplish breeding with my horses), but I know a lot of players do care, and the option to geld would allow many quality horses to reach the market.

I am not the biggest fan of the energy usage for breeding, although I do understand it was added to prevent the usage of a stud forever. This change makes it extremely frustrating to find perfect studs who are out of energy, but whose owners have not played in years so the horse is just sitting there. There are currently 1800+ pages of studs and I'm sure many are out of energy. The same could be said for sales and the "offer only" horses. I feel like since we have the energy usage for breeding, we should have it for competitions to be fair. Although I'd rather have it for neither.

To fix rankings, I am an advocate of removing "all time rankings" and having ranking periods instead. For example, we could have daily rankings, weekly, monthly, semi annual, and annual rankings. It would be cool to look up past ranking periods, such as November 2016 or Jan 2019-Dec 2019. That way we could easily see the current most competitive horses and owners, as well as the historical data. I am a big fan of the large amounts of data available on this game, such as pedigrees, so this would a really nice feature.

The change I want the most is a training overhaul. It is so tedious right now, and is honestly the reason why I haven't played at all in a few years. I have a bunch of foals that I don't want to age until I feel like I can adequately and quickly train so I can enter them in competitions. I have read over the forums many times for suggestions on how to train faster, but I am still a few years slower than I should be training the horses.

[rosie0922]

Dropping in to say that I'm surprised geldings are still not a feature. I don't personally care if other individuals use my bloodlines (I enjoy seeing what players accomplish breeding with my horses), but I know a lot of players do care, and the option to geld would allow many quality horses to reach the market.

I am not the biggest fan of the energy usage for breeding, although I do understand it was added to prevent the usage of a stud forever. This change makes it extremely frustrating to find perfect studs who are out of energy, but whose owners have not played in years so the horse is just sitting there. There are currently 1800+ pages of studs and I'm sure many are out of energy. The same could be said for sales and the "offer only" horses. I feel like since we have the energy usage for breeding, we should have it for competitions to be fair. Although I'd rather have it for neither.

To fix rankings, I am an advocate of removing "all time rankings" and having ranking periods instead. For example, we could have daily rankings, weekly, monthly, semi annual, and annual rankings. It would be cool to look up past ranking periods, such as November 2016 or Jan 2019-Dec 2019. That way we could easily see the current most competitive horses and owners, as well as the historical data. I am a big fan of the large amounts of data available on this game, such as pedigrees, so this would a really nice feature.

The change I want the most is a training overhaul. It is so tedious right now, and is honestly the reason why I haven't played at all in a few years. I have a bunch of foals that I don't want to age until I feel like I can adequately and quickly train so I can enter them in competitions. I have read over the forums many times for suggestions on how to train faster, but I am still a few years slower than I should be training the horses.

I love the idea of ranking periods so much!

[Tenacious Equine]

...

The idea of having ranking periods is pretty genius! I think that would solve most of the leaderboard problems, especially if horses could only compete in the ranking periods they were born in- so you could continue to comp them afterwards, still frozen, it just wouldn't count towards any leaderboard rankings.
I think that would likely disrupt gameplay the least, and create the most incentive for players to continue to breed better horses (especially if there are small rewards, like exclusive decorative "ribbons", coolers, saddle covers etc for being in the top ranking spot at the end of a ranking period).
Why do I think decorative items are the best option?
-they're account bound. They belong solely to the account that acquired them and there is no way to move them that I'm aware of. Similarly, they can be put on any horse on that account; they're mostly an indication that the player themself was a champion breeder/owner
-they have no impact on gameplay whatsoever. Collecting different fancy tack items would be a fun pastime for someone who has the means to do so, but not having them won't have any negative impacts on any other players. Kind of like digital bragging rights.
Additionally, if there were different tack items for different placings (1st, 2nd, and 3rd-5th maybe? or for different lengths of ranking periods- maybe ribbons for shorter ranking periods, but longer ones have bigger prizes), OR, hear me out, different colors/styles for the different competitions, that would create incentive for anyone who might be interested in collecting such things to diversify their herds (and create more activity in different types of competitions)!

[WildMustang]

I agree with everything here, except for point 2. While the concept is definitely headed in the right direction, this is something I’ve been thinking about after seeing this post. What would happen if this feature was implemented in game, and how would I personally work with this? Unfortunately, I don’t think I would continue playing HWO. A lot of people like me have a frozen account where they keep competitors, and if competing takes energy that means it would constantly force me to either 1: transfer each horse over to my main account, roll for energy, and transfer back or 2: wait until all my horses energy bars have been spent and then roll my side account. This is a problem for more then one reason though. I don’t like aging my horses, I get quite attached to my pixel ponies and certain ones I’d like to keep for the majority of my time here. And yes, you could say that I could simply keep the horses I’m attached to permanently frozen, but my issue is that 90% of those said horses I’ve put lots of love and effort into, so of course I show them. One of my favorite things about this game that makes it stand apart from others is the fact that it doesn’t pressure you to constantly be on, or put a load of work in when you do decide to log in. I can simply log on, check my horses ranks and wins, enter more competitions and log back off again without the worry of having to do all that energy stuff I mentioned earlier.

So what am I saying here? Basically to sum it up I do think HWO needs most of these changes, however I’d like to keep the aspect of keeping horses “frozen in time” as you could put it. I do have a suggestion of my own however that will allow you to keep horses frozen show horses without worrying about feed, energy, weight, age and all that jazz because you have to roll again for more energy.

I propose that instead every horse is given a certain amount of competitions to take place in, and depending on that horses individual performance in those competitions they are assigned a rank/level.(For example, if you decide to show a racehorse, the times recorded on the horses placement competitions for racing will place that horse in a level category). After the placement competitions the horse can still show, however they can only show in the level/rank they were able to score in, allowing skills and lineage to actually matter without the worry of someone just spamming competition entries to reach the top. This can be done for every individual discipline for said horse so that its fair to that horses skillset (because if a horse is good at one subject and the owner decides to show them in something else as well, it would be unfair to place them higher/lower competitions since discipline skills vary). Leaderboard wise, maybe it could act similarly to that of the world records, except theres one for each level/rank a horse can fall into. That means that the top scoring horses of that level can actually be rewarded for their skillset with the leaderboard. This is a system where spam entering to the top is not possible simply because your horse is placed on their performance only and not the amount of wins (because you might be competing against a horse way better and lose), entries, etc.

Tell me what you guys think of my rework idea ! I definitely think this games comp system needs to be changed in some shape or form, and these are just my personal thoughts on it ^^


Edit: just read the messages above and it seems similar ideas have been brought up :)

[Twilight_Edits_1]

I completely agree with u! i once had 45k and nothing to spend it on, so i just bought tack, pastures and horses.

[Queen1539]

Yes! I totally agree! Great thinking!

[Lekara]

Hi! Checking in as yet another player who played for years and then left for over a year only to come back and will probably leave again soon because, even though it's a fun game, NOTHING substantial has changed over those years (adding goats and saddles isn't substantial - just a fun momentary distraction to make it feel like they are working on the game).

I've worked very hard to create my lines and I try to keep to their breed standards and lower COI, because that's what I would want in my real-life herd. But what's the point? When a bunch of 21 hand high Arabians with 160% COI beat me at competitions because they've breed to each other for years and then spammed the competitions boards... it makes it very much not worth investing in.

Let's fix the championships. Let's add the penalty for COI. Let's add health problems (oh, you ran your horse in 17 races today? Looks like they sprained a ligament). Let's add genetic testing (oh, that over-bred stud has a genetic defect? Maybe you shouldn't breed him any more). I know I'm branching away from the point of the post (namely, the problem with competitions/championships) - but to me it's all a part of the problem that we've been told certain things are "in the works" for this game and many of us have waited MANY MANY YEARS with no strong changes to the actual meat of the game.

Please listen to all these suggestions. Honestly, any one of them would be a vast improvement over the current systems. Maybe then you'll quit having players drop out and just *maybe* you'll see more return once you show the game is worth their time and money.

Thank you.