News news news news news!

Welllll apparently BBC code is also not allowed. xD

Don't worry-I havn't been on it much too!

Congrats on the soon to be wedding!! :)

These idea sound great! :)

Also, Congratulations on your wedding Abbey!!! :D

1. What do you think would encourage members to breed outside of their own stock of horses?
A) Ability to search for *exactly* what you want. Confirmation, pedigree, foal count, things of that nature.
B) Price changes. Someone may be willing to pay $80,000 for your Black QH store horse with 550 stats and a 57.0 H&C. But that person isn't me. The max for a foundy stud would be about $25,000ish. Because we KNOW you didn't spend that much on them. Now a stud with 6 pages of clean, low foaling, gorgeous lines with 1300+ stats and H&C in the high 80s. Yes, now I would pay $100k for a foal. As long as I knew my foal would only be one of... 5? (Because that took time. LOTS of TIME.)

2. Why do you think there is a problem with it at the moment?
Overbreeding, bad breeding, bad breeders and horses that shouldn't even see a stud request yet. There's too many nice studs, with broken lines, and 23 foals. Like... Just staaaap. Keep your foals limited. The problem with "outsource" breeding is you never know what that other person is doing with their horses. But I can make sure my horses can don't end up overbred. Another thing is I have lost about $30k to stud requests that were never accepted and never denied. My money is just trapped in limbo, and now my mare is past breeding age.

3. What do you think would encourage members to sell and buy horses more frequently?
This I don't have an answer for. I have bought and sold horses. I also was asking a resonable price, and was paying a reasonable price.

4. Do you think that there should be an overhaul of how stats work with horses? Should they be more static to encourage breeding horses at younger ages (and make the game less static for the first 15 weeks of playing)?
No. I think that by breeding towards the end of life span is creating better foals. Which go on to gain, and create better foals. The only thing I wish I could change by working toward (other than breeding) is conformation numbers. I've heard talk about "Confirmation Shows" from before the recode and would like to see that implemented.

Congratulations on your upcoming wedding! I hope it's a magical day for both of you!

I've been playing for a little over a year now - both on the other version & this version. I constantly add new horses to my herds to get diverse genes. I normally buy these horses. I have sold horses before but my horses don't always sell. I think the problems with getting people to breed outside their own lines and buying/selling of horses are both caused by 2 situations that I've noticed.

The first thing I've noticed is that we all seem to lose track of the fact that our beloved EV herds are not real horses. They never were & never will be. This is a shining example of how truly amazing a game Equiverse is. Yes, we've all put time, effort & sometimes real money into these horses, but none of that makes them living breathing creatures. All of our work & effort could potentially disappear with a computer virus or malware. Our horses lines are code, their stats, colors, conformation - all code. In reality - no one horse is really any more special than any other because they're not real.

The second issue is personal preference. Everyone on EV breeds for something specific - be it stats, conformation or rare colors/marking. Sometime these things do cross over. I personally breed for stats but for at least one breed I'm also actively working on a certain color. I have zero interest in a horse's conformation however. For others it's all about conformation & stats or stats and color, etc. You get my meaning. The problems arise when we go to look for studs or to buy/sell horses to meet our personal systems. I would be more inclined to pay more for a horse or stud with the stats I need, but I wouldn't want to pay what I would consider an inflated price for a horse with the stats I need and a high conformation or rarer color. I may want to sell one of my horses with what I consider great stats but because it's confo is average or it's not a rare color it won't sell. While our EV community is loving, warm & welcoming - it is divided into these 3 schools of preference.

My only idea is to do away with separate official breed groups and create 3 official "breeding for" groups. One for stat breeders, one for conformation breeders, & the third for color/markings breeders. Any EV player (basic or deluxe) could be a member of any or all of the clubs. Each club could have it's own sales & studs area and it's own advertisements, contests, and the other new club features you've mentioned.

I would also suggest a set of guidelines for each preference. These wouldn't be set rules - just basic guides. Knowing what constitutes good stats at what age group would be helpful. Knowing what ways to breed for better conformation would be great. Knowing what colors/markings are rare for each breed would be a huge help.

Anyway, this is my two cents. I don't think any one way of raising our horses is better or worse than another. All are equally valid, equally exciting, and equally worth the work.

Thank you for creating such an incredible game & community, Abbey!

1. Probably not a lot. There's a massive mindset towards the idea of "clean lines", "even lines", and "X amount of foals per horse" (See prior posts for examples of this). All of these are restrictive and all games that I've played where the players had this mentality had economic issues. Getting rid of this mentality would be a good start.

Each breed has a limited amount of studs, and once you've hit the top you're forced to either breed down your horses or to continuously buy foundations..Which results in the rescue center being chock full of foundations, as people have complained.

2. People put time and effort into their horses, even the foundations. It's not as if a magic wand can be waved that magically puts 500+ stats on a horse. Because of that, people are loathe to get rid of something that they dumped 15 or 16 weeks of their time into. Again, a good chunk of it is player mentality. They want people to all play the same.

3. Not a clue.

4. I barely play, so I'm pretty indifferent.

aww congrats abbey! what a happy time :D
i just got married last october so i know what you are going through now C,:
just remember to not stress out because it's going to be an amazing day even if everything goes wrong- because you are getting married to your love :D omg just so happy for you ♥

1. Honestly I feel like making improvements to the club will help a lot because if you limit imports like before people will still find a way to get imports and some people just like privately breeding but if there was a better way to advertise studs then it may help.
2. Horses aren't being able to sell as they are worth because many serious horse players have a tough time making an income on just horses (from what i have read) and so it becomes discouraging to sell a horse or foal that you spent 20 weeks working on and raising and all players can afford is less than 10,000 evd.
3. Maybe like an auction system, i have seen on other games idk
4. I feel like it should just be more realistic in life where you have a horse and maybe you train and show it for the first 8-12 years or longer depending on how famous you want your horse to be and then breed them in their 'retirement' until 22 when they die in the game.

honestly i wish i had better ideas to help you out abbey but i am sure that no matter what you do i will always support your decisions and equiverse :D

Hope everything goes well and I agree with your points.

I love the idea of limited cross breeding...would love to see pony of the americas on the game :)

The only thing I would change is the leveling up. I played on version 1 where we never had to level up at all. It was much easier to get a head start. This new version makes it so hard that entering even $20 and training your horses cheap takes so much money because the prize money is barely pushing $200.

As for the questions, I'm stuck at level 4. But some of the pricing turns me away from outside breeding, even if I were able to at the moment. As for keeping lines fresh, I have 1st Generation mares and stallions created with the customize a horse or the Equestrian Center.

The reason I breed with my own stock and don't sell much is naming. Several times I've created a line and kept a naming schema going and then decided I didn't want the horse anymore. Someone would buy it name it one letter and dump it in the rc so clearly they didn't want the horse. I would have rather they not bought the horse in the first place and messed up my lineage so now I just age out my horses even if I don't use them.

In response to #1 and #2, I definitely think there should be a weekly or monthly limit on how many foundation horses can be purchased. Way too many horses end up at the Rescue Center and I think that goes against the idea of this being a horse sim game. In real life no one would buy 100 horses just to breed them and dump 95% of the foals at a rescue.

For #3, it would be encouraging if finding horses to buy was easier. (I haven't tried to sell a horse yet so I can't comment on that.) We should be able to search by min conformation score too, or even better if we could input a minimum number for each category of stats and conformation. And not just in the horse search but in the Rescue Center as well.

As a newbie, my answer to #4 is no. I play 2 other horse sims and this one is much less static at the start than the others. The only change I would make is to have the conformation numbers actually mean something other than bragging rights, but the downside is that might make players even more obsessed with it. If there was an expansion to the showing aspect of the game I think that would help. Like if horses could collect 1st/2nd/3rd place ribbons from shows.

your awesome Abbey! have a good wedding, and congrats! :)