Account Rewind

Now, I got this idea after I left my account unlocked for a period of time while my life took a turn for the worse. I'm not blaming the game, this was because of my incompetence and not checking to see if I had locked my account or not. I lost a lot of horses and a lot of breeding opportunities, and I'm greatful for the fact that I can resurrect deceased horses and rewind retired horses, but this is costing me quite a bit of real life money to get everything back and I'm not sure if it's really worth it..

So here's my idea. An "account rewind" item. Of course it can't actually reverse the effects of cron because that would affect everyone's account, the name isn't exactly literal. Things like shows, breedings, sales, etc won't be reversed, but what the item would do would ressurect horses that died within a span of time, let's say a week, and age rewind all of your horses for again, let's just say a week. I don't see how rewinding and ressurecting horses could cause issues considering we already have these items, this is just like a bundle for when people lose a lot due to unintentional negligence.

This item wouldn't be cheap by any means, but if you have so many horses that are affected by not locking, it would be cheaper than purchasing enough of the items we already have. Let's say the item costs somewhere around 40-80 credits, give or take of course. This would depend on what Abbey think is appropriate if an item like this ever does get implemented.

The reason why this would be beneficial is I keep seeing people suggest "auto locking" features for when you can't access your account for whatever reason. I feel like this would be a good compromise. People who can not get on their account have an opportunity to revive it from these losses.

I am open to criticism on this idea, let's bounce ideas off of eachother and see if we can get something like this that could function on the game :)

it would be nice, and I also think a beneficial item for circumstances like this.

A flat rate would make it fair for everyone I think, and the oppurtunity to ressurect a smaller herd for a cheaper price is already available via the spectral draught, BUT, I think your additional proposed option of an account rewind item would be very beneficial, and not entirely prohibitive for people with LARGE herds to recover.

I like this, however maybe it should be two separate items. Like one item that resurrects all dead horses and another that rewinds all the living horses on a given account. I feel that one item doing all of the things you suggest would be difficult to code. This would require that players use the items carefully so that the resurrection item was used before the rewinding item though and that may not be good.

Of all the account saving ideas that have been proposed this is the only one I feel willing to support, though I'm not sure how difficult this would be to actually implement.

I think this sounds like a fair option for both deluxe & basic members. We all have real life situations that knock us on our butts and this would be a good solution for when one of those things occur. A flat rate makes sense and again is fair to both types of members.

My only concern is the potential for this to be over used by those who may actually be "absentee" owners. If there was a way to make it so that players could only buy say 2 a year maximum then that would keep it from being exploited. I have no clue as to how hard that would be to code so if it's too extensive then just disregard that idea.

I mean the cost alone could prevent exploitation if set highly enough, but I see where you're getting at. A limit could be used.
As for being split into two separate items, I'm not opposed to that. It may be easier to be one item that has one script run after another, first it ressurects, then it rewinds. That way people don't mess up with the two part item.

So this proposed item would first resurrect all horses that died within the week/time period then rewind them 5-7 days so they're back where you started before? While a great idea in theory I see a lot of complications with it based on time limits (one week, two months, ten years? What's "fair"?) or which horses get revived (do the 21 year olds come back that would have naturally retired in that time?)
The same effects can be achieved by buying the credit items to do those things, and choosing which horses you wish to bring back and rewind. Sure it sucks to have to do each individually, but if you want them back that bad you will do it. It might force you to make some tough decisions, but it could be good.

Pricing on something like this would be an absolute nightmare. Special Draughts are 5EVC each, Time Twisters, which rewind your horse 7 days are 5 EVC each. So that's 10 EVC per horse. How do you make a flat rate with that? The average person probably has at least 30-40 horses, so that's 300-400 credits. What about someone like myself with 300 horses? Even if I only brought back the lines I have established, that's about 100 horses, 1000 credits.
Say there's a discount drop it back to 8 per horse since you only rewind 5 days, that's still 240-800 credits. What do you make a flat rate at then? And how often would someone who forgets to lock their account be able to afford to actually do that?
Making the price something ridiculously lower in comparison (40-80 credits is only covering 4-8 horses the way we have now, or 8-16 if it were just a reviving with no rewind) cheats the game itself out of a lot of potential cash in my opinion, because those credits were bought by someone.

I do think it's a more viable option than auto-locking and would be a timesaver for people that would use it, but i don't see it as something that would be easy to implement if only because of the rampant price and horse descrepancies between players. And if it was as high up as a few hundred credits would anyone even use it? I know I would not. I'd pick the few best horses and resurct them, without a rewind personally, start a few lines at a time building back up as I could afford to.

A week is fair. It was less then that when I realized my account wasn't actually locked. And since it was a week, it wouldn't have to revive naturally deceased horses because they would have been retired by then and retired horses can't really do much, so no loss there, really.
I am proposing it because it is a dramatic price drop. Nobody would have spent the hundreds of credits on the items we currently have, but I know that I would spend up to 100 credits on the item in my idea. If you're looking at it from that perspective, then the game is actually making money, versus me giving up and not buying items at all.

I do support this - but as far as "rewinding" age - it should definitely only be able to be used once per horse like the Time Twister - so that we don't have immortal horses.

As far as pricing - maybe it could be per horse grouping instead of by account. Like. "Time Twister x 20" or something?

Last edited on 2016-05-19 at 14:11:27 by Ruki

Yes you're correct about the money trade-off of someone buying all vs none. It'll be monetary risk in either case that is virtually incalculable, because of the amount of play styles and infrequency of it happening to members game wealthy enough to consider either option.

More of a grouping option would be preferable over entire accounts from a money standpoint, probably not from a coding standpoint, but I don't know enough to tell you either way since I'm no coder.

I really like this idea. I was thinking about the cost of resurrecting a large herd earlier, due to the suggestion of the auto-lock feature (which I don't support.)

But for my 300 or so horses, if I failed to lock and they all died, it would cost about $750 USD for me to revive my entire herd using the spectral draught item (not including using a time twister on any of them; add that in, and it's $1500!) That is FAR more than I could ever hope to spend on a game; it's almost a paycheck and a half. It's extremely likely that I wouldn't wind up reviving any of my horses, because reviving only part of the herd would still make my plans for said herds obsolete.

[That's certainly a risk that I'm willingly taking on, by having so many horses, and I certainly hope that I'll never fail to properly lock my account!]

But I don't see this proposed item as cheating the game out of money; that $750 wouldn't have gone to the game anyway, because I can not afford to spend that much on, well, literally anything.

This should absolutely be an expensive item; 80 or 100 credits, minimum. That's $40-50 USD, which isn't a tiny purchase by any stretch. But it's something that I *could* save up the money to purchase to save my account. And that's 40 or 50 more dollars going into the game than would be without this item, because as stated, I couldn't afford to bring back my horses individually, so I wouldn't. Heck, even if it were a 200 credit item (a still-painful $100 of "real money"), I'd probably try to save up for it, because it would be worth it for the amount of energy I've invested in my horses and how much I've enjoyed my time on the game.

The price itself would do a lot to prevent abuse. I can also see the merit of limiting the number of times it can be used; once a year, or even once ever for an account.

I think a $40 or $50 (or $100) purchase is large enough that most players would have to think about it, but not so large that the majority of players would be entirely unable to ever afford it. 40 credits ($20) seems too inexpensive, while the $500-$1000 that it would currently cost to revive a large account is probably out of the question for almost everyone.

Basically, I think this would add a lot of security for some of the game's most serious players, who are the ones most likely to have herds large enough to justify using this item. It could be a lucrative item for the game, because I think it would be a large but worthwhile purchase for dedicated players. And I think it could exist without making the current items we have obsolete, as buying the one-horse items would still be more economical for smaller herds.

Personally, I think it should just revive all horses that are able to be revived without rewinding them. It'll bring back most horses in a herd and if there's a particular pair you want back then you can always rewind them yourself for a smaller price. Having just a revive all potion would bring the price down a lot.

Just my personal opinion, in this day and age there's usually some sort of access to the internet to be able to lock an account, heck I locked mine last week from a mcdonalds because the power went out in my campus with no way of knowing when it was coming back.

I don't think players should lose their entire herd, I know I'd be annoyed, but I think the horses should still take a small stat hit for the lack of care during that week and not automatically be set back a week to catch up.

I'm not saying that I didn't lock because I didn't have access to the Internet. I didn't lock because I wasn't in the emotional shape to get on EV and I thought I locked already.

I'd be in favor of a revive all item instead, too. The stats lost would suck tho.

I understand, I wasn't blaming you for not locking your account at all, I was just saying it's easy to access the net from anywhere these days. o-o

I'm just saying that because they're not cared for for a week, under whatever circumstances, then the stat hit would be fair since other people have been on regularly to take care of their horses. And it's not that much of a difference, easy to catch up on if you have some treats from the fountain, etc.

Just makes more sense economically to have revive all instead of revive and rewind all.

Not to mention there's the problem of it reviving horses you might not want to revive. I have hundreds of horses under the age of 22, they'd all be revived too. So it could either be a checklist of sorts maybe or "revive all deaths from the last week" or something like that.

Yeah the "died within a week" thing is in the original idea lol I thought about that too beacuse on old EV they died before 22

Maybe there'd be an auto account lock where after a certain amount of time of being inactive with your account unlocked,it would automatically lock for you so you don't lose anything.