*Replace Random Leisure Riding Stat Boosts

Following from an earlier discussion, I think it'd be nice to replace all the random stat boosts from leisure riding with the prompted "choose X or Y" options. For clarity, by 'random stat boosts' I mean the events where a stat is conferred as soon as you click "Ride", without the choice between text prompts. I believe this is a holdover from before the prompted choice events were available.

This suggestion is mainly directed at the fact that many of us are afraid to leisure ride two-year-olds who don't yet have a coded speciality because there is a (small) chance of randomly increasing undesirable stats without your control. Applying this change wouldn't affect the overall incidence of stat increases from leisure riding, just allow for user choice of which stats are changed. It also wouldn't call for any new coding, since the prompted choice events are already in effect.

So just a small quality-of-life change that would allow more people to leisure ride more horses without fear! :)

Last edited on 2020-09-10 at 14:57:42 by River

I was unpleasantly surprised the first time this happened to me, because I didn't even know random stat boosts for young horses were a thing.

Seeing how stats are so integral to the game (with the farmstead feature recently being added for the purpose of growing treats with the right stats) it seems a bit out of order that one might accidentally "ruin" the stat distribution of a young horse with leisure riding, which sounds pretty harmless.

So, I support :)

I don't not support this, however I don't exactly see how this is really that necessary. It's not gonna hurt anyone for this to be added, and it doesn't sound that hard to change, but I feel like there's more important things to add currently.  I suppose with younger horses without a specialty set yet this would make a difference, and I know people who are very serious with showing wouldn't want more nss, but... couldn't you just not leisure ride young horses if you're concerned? 

I agree that this shouldn't be top priority exactly because it's easy to avoid, but to me the issue is that it isn't clearly stated anywhere that this could happen which means one might not find out about it until the damage is already done. A bit of a harsh lesson to beginners, I think :)

Perhaps just a text like "Horses without a specialty set will gain random stats" could be added in the meantime?

Indeed you could just not ride young horses, which is what most people are doing right now, but it just seems counterproductive to penalize people for engaging in a fun aspect of the game. Some people want to leisure ride two-year-olds and this is the only thing stopping them, that's all :)

Certainly not a big problem, but proportionately easy to fix I think! I don't suppose it would take much more effort to tweak a line or two of code than to add a warning message that may confuse people.

What if you could set a young horse's future specialty? So it won't have one yet, but the game knows what you plan on doing with it so it can deal Leisure Ride stats accordingly. Say with several of my horses, I'm gonna put 'em in the wrong discipline and then convert, so if the game knew that then the stats wouldn't matter anyway, but my 2yo Andalusians who will be in Dressage won't get +1 SPD, END, or STR :3