Point system and training clarification?

Ok, so I just came back a few months back. I'm finally back in the swing of training, or so I thought. Taking a look around my horses aren't even coming close to some of the top horses once they retire. This is strange to me as obviously I'm working with outdated strategies. My Andalusians used to rock the top charts.

So can anyone explain to me where my problem is? This is my average day on EQ:

Auto Care
Treats
Arena Training (now that it's back open)
Auto show with shows with least amount of entries.

All of my tack is at least 4/5 if not 5/5. I treat with only what is appropriate for that horse's specialty.

I'm sitting here scratching my head trying to see if I forgot anything, I don't think I did. Can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong?

My horses are winning quite a good amount of first places. The only thing I can think of is that they are closer to foundation stock. Some are multi generational, but I keep a lot of foundations to prevent inbreeding (my personal OCD problem).

If you enter your horses in the shows with the least entries, there's a very good chance that they will not gain any stats from the show. You only earn stats if there are five or more entries in a show. To ensure that, you either need to enter shows by hand, or use the most entries option. Of course, if you use the most entries, it's harder to place because you have much more competition, which would also mean that you would get no stats. I really recommend that anyone who is serious about earning stats through showing should enter shows by hand.

Also, if you are using treats that increase non-specialty stats, that will put your horses at a huge disadvantage in shows. Two horses can both have 500 stats and be in the same division, but one with 250 in each specialty stat and none in the other stats will beat the one with 100 in each stat every time.

Horses with strong specialty stats, upgraded tack, that are fully trained, and entered in shows with five entries each, should gain stats very quickly.

Unfortunately I work a full time job and go to school, on top of the regular life of a 28 year old adult. Hand training almost 60 horses is a little out of my time availability. I do treat to specialty and even switch up what I treat depending on where the stats are needed, but I can't go horse by horse every day, so I usually feed treats that are acceptable to the stats required by that specialty.

I did not know about the 5 horse minimum for gaining stats in shows, that would probably be why my horses aren't gaining stat points really fast, but my question was aimed more towards showing points in general. I know they hold little value in the game right now, but I noticed it was the one thing that seems to separate the top horses from my horses where points are concerned.

Can anyone expand on this?

I follow pretty much the same method. Showing is difficult, I haven't figured it out for myself but I just show with cheapest for all horses below regional and then highest entries for those above regional.

But with 200+ horses I'm not very good at keeping track of stats, but my third generation paint herd unexpectedly hit 1k stats quite recently aged 16 years, so I think this is a strategy that works well?

Showing points won't affect ranking stat wise, just means the horse has been entered in more shows, which it probably won, and therefore gained more stats/points. But giving the couple months the game has been running, those higher showing points are probably because they're horses from the old EV, hence have some of their parents showing points added on.

That makes sense. I brought mine over from the old EV, but I went on hiatus sometime last year, and even before then I wasn't very active. I finally locked my account when I came to terms with being too busy to play. Honestly, I'm just super excited to be back more than anything. I guess we'll all have to keep trying different strategies and see what works the best.

As of today I did cheapest shows. I will see what kind of difference this makes. I'm going to make a note of a few horses and see how they do. I don't think I can sit here and do them all, but a few test subjects won't hurt.

i show the majority of my horses using the cheapest option.

however, using the stat and grade chart found here, i will show horses that are within 5-20 stats (depending on level; i get less restrictive the higher the grade, since the stat span increases) in hand-picked shows that have 4 entries.

this ensures that all my horses are getting at least a small chance of gaining stats, whereas I'm increasing the odds that my best performing horses will perform the best by hand picking shows. once those hand picked ones go into the next grade level, they're back to performing at the bottom, so i drop them back into my "show cheapest possible autoshow" pool.

Khazie that's a pretty good strategy. I could probably pull that off once I get one or two horses that are in the higher grades. Right now, having just come back, most of my horses are struggling to get out of Local grade. Once cron finishes running today I will see if my tester horses did any better as far as stat/point gain. I was running least entries, but yesterday I ran cheapest instead. If I see a significant difference in gain then I will be switching to cheapest shows for my auto tool.

Ok so the results of my little test last night are pretty believable.

The horses in Novice grade did horribly. The cheap classes are probably too full to make an impact. They gained upwards of 6x the amount of horse points as they were, some as high as 2k horse points for the night, but they did not place so they go 0 stats.

The horses in the Local grades did marginally better. The highest stat gain was almost 10 stats and 2k horse points.

Going forward I think it might be best to do the lowest entries for Novice grade and cheapest for Local.

Since I'm just getting back into the game that's all the higher my horses grade, so I can't comment on the higher grades.

One thing I also noticed doing cheapest shows on all horses yesterday...Today I only got back 2 pages of results. I have been running least entries. I usually get 5-8 pages of results back. I also did not make my money back on showing. I usually make a profit on showing when doing least entries.

I'm hand entering my top conformation horses in shows and picking the middle shows of 4-6 entries. After doing that with several I switch to most entries and then back to cheapest shows. I was finding that I was entering my horses against each other since they are mostly N3 N4 and N5.

I have that problem with my horses that are the same grade as well.