Sab's Guide to Leveling Up

Sab's Guide to
Leveling Up
How to gain Experience most efficiently.

Are you struggling to progress through the member levels to get where you want to be? As a brand new player on EV, or someone who never had show points in the old EV it can be tough to know how to quickly and efficiently gain the enough Experience (EXP) to unlock all the game features. Hopefully this guide can help you out at least a little bit.

The Important Levels
First off the levels that get you access to something in the game. 

Must be level 3 to access Forums (21383 total EXP needed)
Must be level 4 to Expand Horse Capacity (+20383 for 41766 total EXP needed)
Must be level 5 to Upgrade Tack (+29352 for 71118 total EXP needed)
Must be level 6 to breed horses (+39951 for 111069 total EXP needed)
Must be level 10 to access the Auction House (+596822 for 707891 total EXP needed)


Ways to gain EXP

-Completion of the Tutorial:
Tutorial Completion automatically gives you 1000 EXP and bumps you to level 2. You also get a cool welcome pack with some goodies for your horses in it.

-Showing:
Showing earns EXP when the show runs. You get a varied amount of EXP depending on how your horse does and how many horses were in the show. A show your horse 91-45 EXP for 1st, 79-36 EXP for 2nd, 72-32 EXP for 3rd and somewhere between 30 and 10 EXP for entering in general I think so on an average night a horse could earn anywhere from 910-100 EXP for entering 10 shows. Shows cost money to enter and to win you need to have a lot of factors correlating at once, read more about showing to win in my guide: Successful Showing .

-Riding School:
Riding Schools have set amounts of EXP you can earn per session and a bonus if you use a riding school matching your horse’s discipline. Best part? Riding school costs nothing. For the highest EXP gain use Group lessons and get 20 EXP per hour for 275 EXP with the discipline bonus for 10 hours

-Training:
Gaining Experience while training requires either matching discipline or level, both for the biggest gain. You get more EXP for training higher level horses, but it also costs more money. On average it’s about 40 EXP for Novice horses($20/horse), 70-80 EXP for Local horses($40/horse), 110-130 EXP for Regional horses($60/horse) and 170-190 EXP for National horses($80/horse).

-Leisure Rides:
You can occasionally get EXP from Leisure rides. The for sure way I know of is to leave the bag of money when you find it which nets 100 EXP. Taking the money gets $20. There may be other random chance events added in the future to increase EXP also.



Obtaining Horses
The simplest way to obtain horses for leveling is to get them from either the EC or RC, and just make sure you’re buying horses over 3 years old. However if you’re able to spend the money on training you can usually find great deals on Regional and Local level horses in the Horse search. Just pull up horses for sale in the price range you're looking for and have them sort by "Total Stats Descending". Alternately you can enter a minimum stats value and sort by "Sale price Ascending" to see the cheapest horse in that stat bracket. For reference Local starts at 350 stats and Regional starts at 600 stats.
You don't have to stick with the horses you start with! You can get any breed and any type for leveling up and either keep them through retirement once you're done with them(retired horses can still do riding schools!) or send them back out into the world through the RC or for sale to others. All horses are equal in the eyes of the riding school. Show horses are more complicated but can be a valuable investment.


Cost Analysis
If you use Riding School your horses can easily pay for themselves, showing is a little more iffy unless you ahve good horses. I break it all down in the Successful Showing guide but it costs about $92 a day to keep a Novice level horse, $112 for a Local level horse and $132 for a regional level horse, all of which can be covered by the $275 you can get from 10 hours of group lessons in a matching school. 
Your excess money and money made with game features like the fountain, leisure riding and games can invest in more horses and horse space to help you progress quicker once you hit level 4 and are able to expand. Space comes in increments of 5 starting at 1k and going up by 1k each time you buy. 



Conclusion
Currently at level 6 you have all basic game functions. This should take a couple weeks to get to, which will give you a chance to feel out the game and see where your interests lie and whether it's a good fit for you. If there's a horse you REALLY want to breed before you hit level 6 you can always use the handy locking features to lock one of your divisions with that horse until you reach level 6. Just remember you have to account for that horse in your total amount of horses and locking one up doesn't gain you any EXP! If you have any questions or concerns please let me know you can post here or message me 

Notes: Showing Experience from 1st-3rd was collected from my personal records and seems to be the same no matter if the horse was regional or local(I had no novice wins unfortunately). Training EXP values are personal records for all my horses over 1 day of training, they were VERY variable but averaged to those values. Horse cost is based on the necessities(feed, Farrier/Vet), $40 treats(store cost) and minimum cost boarding and training. 


Last edited on 2020-01-10 at 09:18:52 by Sabriel

Thank you so much for this guide and all the others too. They've made my gaming so much easier at starting point. 
 I was just wondering, that If you accidentally click the tutorial away while starting the game, can you get it back? My other account is lvl1 and I accidentally skipped the tutorial which would have gave me XP :/

If I remember correctly. You won't be able to get the tutorial back.

You do unfortunately loose access to the Tutorial when you click out of it currently. I had plans to make a post with the full tutorial, but haven't gotten around to properly formatting it. In the meantime here is a link to the text of the tutorial if anyone wants to go through it again: Google Doc Link