*Owner-defined breeding cap for studs

My suggestion is for a feature that allows people to place a limit on the amount of times their stallion can be bred to when placed at public stud, and for the stud to automatically be removed from stud once the limit is reached. This would only include people paying to breed to the stud, the tally wouldn't include the owner breeding their own mares to their stallion.

Essentially when putting a stallion up for stud you'd be able to choose either 'private stud', where you have to approve or reject every mare, or 'public stud' where you'd be required to pick a cap of between 1 and 10. (Default cap would be 10, and you'd have to pick something, you wouldn't be able to have it infinite.) Once the cap is reached the stallion is removed from stud, and if you decide you want to allow more people to breed to him, you just have to manually put him back up at stud again, where you choose a new cap, and the tally starts from zero again. (Obviously, you can still remove your stallion from stud manually at any time, before the cap is reached.)

There are several benefits to this system:
1. Players have much more control over how many foals are produced from a stallion without requiring any manual input, such as the alternative system of approving every mare via the 'private stud' option.
2. If placing a horse at public stud there's no risk the stallion will end up with more foals than they'd like if lots of mares are bred to him before they get back online to remove him from stud.
3. It's impossible to have an 'indefinite stud', i.e. one that is placed at public stud and just keeps breeding forever because the owner hasn't come back and therefore the stallion hasn't aged or been removed from stud.
3b. Abandoned studs wouldn't end up massively overbred, as they'd eventually reach the cap and be removed from stud. Even if this is set to the maximum cap value of 10, this isn't tons of foals, at least compared with some abandoned studs that were up for public stud for several months without aging.

I would also like to suggest that as part of this studs are no longer required to have progressed first before they can be bred to, as suggested here. I believe the progress requirement was recently implemented to address the 'indefinite studs' issue, but instead it's just blocking people from breeding.

Last edited on 2017-08-10 at 14:06:30 by River

I would love this. The only reason I put my studs on private is so that I don't risk them being bred more times than I would like, however I know many players (including myself) don't like to use studs on private for the sole reason that it has to be approved, and depending on when the user approves it, it could mess up breeding plans.

I would support this, but only if leaving a stud open to infinite foals is still possible, too. If chooses not to set a cap, that should be their prerogative.

I agree with Sonoma. Some people don't believe in the idea of "overbreeding", so why should people be forced to have a cap on their horses if they are fine with breeding willy nilly. I think it would be annoying to have to constantly going back to a stud to put him back up.
I limit my breeding but I just don't see why there HAS to be a cap.

I support!! I agree with Sonoma and RemRem as well, I think we shouldn't put limit on cap.

I also would LOVE to have requirements feature added as well. A lot of private studs have simple requirements such as Mare need to have at least 600 stats and 55 conformation to ensure responsible breeding. However, like Persephone said, a lot of players avoided private stud due to timing of approval. Requirements feature will allow us to put our horses up for public stud/broodmare but ensure that mare/stallion met our criteria for breeding.

"I would support this, but only if leaving a stud open to infinite foals is still possible, too. If chooses not to set a cap, that should be their prerogative." - Sonoma

I would support this as well. I am one of the unsupports due to the forced cap on all horses. *If* I wanted to let my stallion breed 20 times... That should be my choice.. not someone, who likes 2 foals a horse, else's choice.

(edit because my grammar stinks, and probably still stinks.)

Last edited on 2017-08-05 at 12:32:30 by Årty- Minis

I feel like if we extended the cap to 200 because I don't think any stud will actually reach 200 (correct me if I'm wrong).

Also, for the people that have certain standards for the mares bred to their studs, there could be a filter that would automatically sift through all of the mares and allow the ones that meet either one or all of the requirements (up to the owner) to breed, but the filter also has a Breed All option where any mare is accepted. 

There should also be an indicator of how close the stud is to the cap.

no support because it would limit those who wish to play the game without being concerned about overbreeding horses. some just like to breed to nice horses for a low fee to get a cool looking horse. not everyone plays for the 3 foals per stallion way. I think it limits the game personally.

Love this idea. I only allow one outside breeding and being able to set the amount of allowed outside breeding would be awesome. 

My fear is this, When you set a limit to the amount of foals one stud can have to outside breeding they can be used up by one person very quickly. I propose that the limit be increased to 1-100 not 10. I know of a few qh and paint breeders that love it when their horses are used all of the time. They would have to reset the breeding limit every 10 times, and sometimes the horse breeding limit might be reached in one day. I would support this if there was a higher option for the amount of foals a stud may have before it it taken off the market. 

It took another read through for me to catch I had misinterpreted something on my initial read through.  On my first read through my mind thought you were saying a lifetime cap at 10 and that's not what you said.  I do have a tweak to suggest.

I would suggest the range be bumped from 1-10 to 1-25 with the default at 25.  So a stallion can still have as many foals as an owner wished, just having to relist when the horse hits 25 foals (maybe an alert notify you of that?) But should someone go poor for one reason or another the market isn't flooded.

There seems to be some misunderstandings, so I'll clarify a few points:

The specified limit is not a lifetime cap, it's just a cap for however long the stallion is at stud. If you want the horse to have 200 foals you can still do this, you'll just have to keep putting him back up at stud every now and then. What you can't do is put the stallion at stud, vanish for three months, then come back to him having 200 foals and a ton of stud fees waiting for you, without him having aged a day, or had any care. This is a bit of a get-rich-without-playing loophole that needs to be closed.

Making the cap compulsory is intended to prevent the issue of 'indefinite studs'. Having an option to not set a cap at all, or some extremely large figure like 200, would mean this is still possible. I thought having a maximum cap of 10, and just taking a couple of clicks to relist the stud once that's used up, was a reasonable compromise for those who are happy for their studs to have lots of foals. Perhaps a notification whenever a stud is automatically taken down will help? I didn't think it likely for a stud to get as many 10 breedings in a single day, so a larger maximum seems unnecessary.
If you can think of an alternative solution to the 'indefinite studs' issue I'm open to ideas.

Someone suggested the amount of breeding slots left should be publicly visible on the horse's page. This seems sensible. If you have two mares to breed but a stud only has one slot left it would be helpful to know that so you can prioritise your preferred breeding.

No support. If you want to "cap" a stallion's breeding abilities, there are a number of ways this can essentially already be done.

1. You can set stallions to "private" breeding and hand select the mares they are bred with.
2. You get notified when people use your stallion, so you know when to pull him from breeding after so many notifications.
3. Raise the breeding fee! The economy on here is pretty... er... lousy as far as values go. I see a LOT of stallions that are underpriced stud fees which brings about over breeding. When people need to spend more money to breed a horse (aka create another horse), they may be more considerate and selective in their purposes which might in itself help dub some of the over breeding problem that is on EC.

@ UlyssesBlue,
Indefinite Stud loophole had been fixed recently. I brought it up recently and Abbey coded it to make sure that you cannot breed to a stud that haven't been rolled over. If you tried to breed to a stud that haven't rolled over, you will see this: http://equiverse.com/breed.php?id=525190. The message will disappear and stud will be available again once the owner log in and progress. 


Last edited on 2017-08-06 at 12:00:42 by Aɴᴅʀᴏᴍᴇᴅᴀ

@ andromeda, We are trying to find a better solution for the infinite stud problem as the error message makes it very difficult to find studs to breed to now