*Bug? Better horses losing to lower level horses

I have noticed recently that there has to be a bug with the show results.

I have checked all entries in shows before entering my horses in them to make sure my horses will win. My horses should have won almost every time (8 of 10 shows maybe?), but they haven't. They have lost to horses with lower stats, lower level tack and less training.

This is frustating because I use time and game money to train my horses and get good tack on them so they could win and get more exp, stats and points. Instead my 140+ stat horses in N1 shows with better stats, better tack and more training are being beaten by horses with far lower stats, lower level tack and little to no training at all. This made me thinking that there *has* to be a bug.

Yes, the training progress gives horses a "luck factor" in shows, but a training level 1 horse with 110/120 stats and 1/5 tack *shouldn't* beat a training level 2 horse with 130/140+ stats and 5/5 tack.

I'll post a few links to shows where my horses were beaten by lower level horses:

http://www.equiverse.com/show.php?id=3729961
http://www.equiverse.com/show.php?id=3729966
http://www.equiverse.com/show.php?id=3730656
http://www.equiverse.com/show.php?id=3730662
http://www.equiverse.com/show.php?id=3729619
http://www.equiverse.com/show.php?id=3729613

Last edited on 2017-10-17 at 12:32:24 by River

Well, in the first show, your horse Bo'ron has 145 stats and was beaten by a horse with 196 stats, both horses at the same training level and with fully leveled tack.  The second to last, your horse was beaten by a horse with a slightly lower total number of stats, but actually had more stats in the traits that count toward their specialty, and it also had fully upgraded tack.

The rest of them are mysterious to me as well.  Your horses were beaten by horses with lower stats (both total and specialty only,) with tack that was either incomplete or not fully leveled.  I was expecting to see that you made the rookie mistake of adding stats in the wrong traits for your specialty, but this is not the case.  There is a certain amount of randomness to showing scores (horses can have off days) and none of your horses in these examples are trained above a level 2 yet.  It's certainly worse luck than I would expect, but perhaps there is more variation to luck at the low training levels than I assume.

Are these examples the only ones where the low-stat horses with inferior tack beat yours?  I'd be interested to know what percentage of your shows end up with this result.  If your horses are only occasionally being beat by underdogs, I'd probably chalk that up to the fact that you are still at low training levels.  But if it's 50% of your shows or more, my guess would be a bug.

The first show seems pretty normal, but the rest are unusual, as are quite a few other shows your horses have competed in. The winning horses often have much lower relevant stats that your horse (relevant stats = discipline-specific stats including what it gets from tack). All horses have low training levels, so it could just be the luck factor falling heavily in favour of the other horses, but it's happening often enough that there might be something else going on there. As I don't know how the luck factor works, or how big an influence it has, it's hard to say for certain, but I do think it worthwhile for someone more knowledgeable than me to look into this.