[ADDED] *Make Cubes More Rare

Currently, I have 18,753 uses of haycubes in my inventory. *groans* 

I used to make use of the haycubes all the time with all my foals, but when I accidentally put two three year olds into their correct discipline, and I didn't have enough credits to reconvert twice; I quit using them for every Foal. Now, I only make use of them for my foals, and horses that have higher ns stats than their base stats. I can and do have money for credits NOW, but not for 8+ years. 

Personally, I agree, and support the idea of LIMITING the amount out there; but make sure they're just a bit more common than the peppermints. 😊 

Last edited on 2018-08-11 at 14:40:49 by 💜 Feathered Gold 💜

just want to clarify that the idea is NOT to make cubes as rare as peppermints, but to make them less common than they are now. nobody is saying to make them impossible to find or get rid of completely.

@feathered They would in no way be as rare as peppermints, just slightly more uncommon to create a balance as Therion elaborated on. 
Decreasing the amount of uses would work too, though that may be more difficult for Abbey? Whichever is easier is fine with me, there's just a massive surplus right now. 

@ Eliza D - Yep, I can attest to that! *18,753 uses and counting*

<sup>I don't think anyone's suggesting the kind of extreme as peppermints. I've only recently found peppermints in leisure riding and the fountain (only 3 in the last couple months) but I also don't use peppermints due to rarity, so maybe I get more and just don't notice. I haven't seen anything  funky in treat gain (I have been keeping an eye on gain on a beta version with less horses and they seem okay there) and in fast collections images don't always load so maybe you are getting them and just don't see the image?

With the amount of stat gain, there's not a lot of difference between peppermints and hay cubes  given the randomness and chance of 0 stat gain. I would prefer they were acquired on a scaling factor, peppermints are rarest, hay cubes more common than peppermints and sugar cubes more common than hay cubes, but not enough to completely replace common treats (you may as well put them in the store as someone pointed out).</sup> 

@ Maple:
I know that hay cube shouldn't be as rare as peppermint. However, the current outputs have me concerned. The output for Unicorn, Black Horses, and Winner Circle are ridiculous. Abbey never fixed it. My biggest concern is that Abbey make a mistake in coding output and never fix it like she did with peppermint (I seem to remember that Abbey never intend to make them that rare) and plushies. I think reducing uses will be easier to do than figuring out the correct percentage for output.

I don't think they would intentionally unbalance the distribution of certain normal treats drop rates. It wouldn't make sense too, gamer wise. I think its more that psychology idea where we tend to notice something more then others but are instead getting the normal rate of things. Like a person can notice all the bad luck they had in one day and conclude it's their unluckiest day but in turn stop noticing all the positive things that happen in that day. I actually forget what its called. It's like how you flip a quarter, supposedly on average its suppose to land 50/50 on either side but sometimes the quarter might flip tails more often in your experiment. So my class how many years ago idk of 30 students did the whole quarter flipping thing. Our individual results were one side had more flips then the other but when we averaged everyones results together it ended up being around the 50/50%. I'm guessing thats what would be happening with the treat drops. It just seems to much trouble to make them all different rates. For every green apple you get someone else is getting more reds etc etc and down the list of other things. 

Also in turn, if said person is getting more red apples they aren't using, they can just trade with someone who has a lot of greens. Its a healthy way of encouraging player interaction. It's part of a healthy gamer market to trade things your not using to those who will and etc. 

It comes down to how many items can drop and what rates they drop. Your not going to see evenly disturbed items on a individual account or personal perspective. But if you took the averages of every account you'd see its at the rates they should be coded at. Which idk personally. 

At any rate I still feel haycubes are still imbalanced. Not suggesting they be ultra rare, but instead placed at a healthy level of for every one collected its counter part is being used. Right now they aren't being used fast enough and are instead stagnating or just sitting on people's accounts. They are just accumulating vs being used. It effects their prices and demand for them. Why buy or collect them when you already have them? Maybe there are a few players who have reached their equilibrium of everyone they find they use. But looking at the market it doesn't look like thats the case for everyone.  It might be painful to adjust their rates but it make for a healthier market. I'm not a expert but i enjoy watching economies on games like this. If there isn't a demand for them then they accumulate. Accumulation normally destroys a game's econ over time. Many games have to constantly adjust their item's rarities depending on other items or current amount of players. One rarity used 5 years ago will not work 5 years later. More people means more collecting and differences in game play styles . One breeding for colors or con might not care for stats so they collect cubes. Not pointing fingers or saying those players are bad but instead they supply the enco in a different way. Idk if its possible for one player to cube their entire herd on their own unless they freeze their horses and collect over time. OR those other players can supply the missing cubes. Sure its more expensive but that money the others gain will just go back into the system one way or another. 

I don't think it'll show effects till later down the line anyways. And if its unbalanced when those cubes are used up. Adjust it again so it reaches a balance of player's demands. I shouldn't be able to replace normal treats with haycubes. I should still have to buy normal treats. I work under the assumption that haycubes are a "treat" for us humans. Like "omg I just found this rare item!!" not "oh another one for the hoard". Somewhere in the middle it needs to be balanced between those two ideas. Plus over all I think it'll make more a challenge for players. Reaching higher stats should be a challenge. If theres not a challenge to gain haycubes , whats the point of having them being an item? Should just throw them into the general store so people can buy them at that point. If they drop as easy as normal treats then they are a "normal" treat. I think they have become a "normal" treat to people. They need to be rarer to retain their unique qualities. I'm only assuming they weren't designed to be a "normal" treats because they aren't in the store but instead a incentive to collect. If theres no incentive whats the point? or "thrill" in it at the end of the day. :/

<sup>I didn't see spread out stats being popular in precode, only highest discipline stats. Spread out stats didn't impact showing but peppermints were used because you had a chance of getting higher speciality stats, spread out non-speciality was just a side effect. 

But this isn't about the use of special treats on precode, which is an entirely different (and easier) breeding system. This is about trying to fix the current system and stimulate the market. Reducing the abundance of haycubes is one theoretical way of doing that. Your concern about the "current output of cubes" is exactly what this post is addressing, so your stance is a bit confusing when you say you don't support this suggestion. 

People are using cubes because they're free and give higher stats, and all it does is increase the amount of undesirable horses through breeding those cubed horses. Normal treats from the riding school are still useful, just not used as much as haycubes. The riding school is intended to be a supplement, not a replacement after all, and quite often the new players that don't have money also have more horses they can afford to care for, and not realising the impact of cubes has on showing or selling horses, as they often turn to breeding their horses and trying to sell cheaper foals, which are subsequently unwanted for their high ns. Any extra stat increasing item should be rarer than a normal treat, or you might as well have it in the store, as Therion stated.</sup> 

@ Maple, there's a point in this game where spread out stats are desirable... maybe it was before your time or when you're new. Timeline blurred for me after the second/third recode so I don't remember which years it was. I was in high school that time so I think it is 2010-2013. Abbey began to prepare for V2 recode in 2013-2014, I believe.

Back then it is very common to see a horse with something like this:

DRIVING HORSE
str: 400
spd: 200
agi: 200
int: 200
end: 400
If I remember correctly: for showing, the total of non-spec just need to be less than the total of spec focused stats for a horse to do well in shows. A lot of breeders opt to increase non-spec stats (as long they are less than spec focused) because it will make it easier to breed cross-discipline which helps to spread out the market. A stud with this type of stats will receive requests from all disciplines while a stud with much lower non-spec will only get request from same discipline only. 
However, there are several breeders who would pride in be "100% purebred" in discipline. Basically, they would aims for low non-spec (like current game) out of personal preference and as a breeding goal. They would avoid cross-discipline to create a perfect pedigree of same discipline. Both paths have their own cons and pros so it is up to personal preferences (unlike right now).
That's when all special treats are introduced to the game. Before that, we never have those treats. 

<sup>I just don't see why you're bring up previous version of the game into the suggestion? They're obsolete methods and breeding strategies, we should be focusing on trying to improve the current situation, not derailing the suggestion to past versions of equiverse. 

I'm also not sure why you're bringing up my buying habits into the conversation? That seems rather a personal vendetta- I'm not exactly sure when or if I refused to buy horses? I don't have a problem with converted horses that were previously cubed, or cubed horses that can be converted, but with the breeding of cubed horses personally- and others agree. We're not saying get rid of cubes, just reduce the amount, either by making them rarer or reducing the number of uses. 

Even so, I still believe there's too many cubes than people know what to deal with. You might not see a problem but clearly on the support of this suggestion and from previous threads about the market, people do see a problem- a huge problem, and the abundance of cubes is part of it. You also only bought horses for $500, which is only a small portion of what's up for sale, a lot of higher ns horses also have a larger price tag, not everything that's unwanted is priced dirt cheap. One experiment doesn't exactly mean a conclusive result or that it should apply to everything. 

Precode lines aren't actually a huge problem, yes they do have higher stats in some cases but the the majority of precode horses have lower than foundation base stats, precode lines that weren't converted or were continued to be fed cubes and peppermints have contributed, but nowhere near as bad as new lines being fed hay cubes. Precode lines are also almost always belonging to the same players and same herds, if you look at what the breeding is like, it's usually a long line pedigree horse, crossed with cubed foundations/short generations. Precodes did have higher stats in the beginning, but cubed horses are still the highest contributor to that large amount of high ns horses.</sup> 

I support! I also agree with a lot of maple’s points. I feel as though something needs to be done to reduce the amount of haycubes on the market, whether that’s reducing the uses each haycube found has or making them slightly rarer.

Andro/MC you have made your point, you don't support cubes becoming more rare but rather decreasing the amount of uses instead. We understand that, you don't need to keep repeating yourself because you have made your stance quite clear. I would appreciate it if you didn't pull the discussion off topic, especially by trying to drag down other players and by using knowledge of a version of a game that hasn't been in use for 7 years, possibly even more. Like you said, this version of the game isn't old EV.

I would very much like to hear from other people who oppose the idea

I guess I don't really care one way or the other since I don't use any cubes anymore. But after reading through this thread, I feel like everyone's arguing in circles but essentially saying the same thing. In this version of EV (and I know nothing of old EV since I've only played this one) high non spec stats isn't good for showing. So essentially when people only cube and then don't convert (this being the key factor. I get that when you convert them, it all evens out and is fine and dandy, thus those horses aren't the problem), it's hurting non spec stats and no one wants to breed to, or buy them, if showing is their main goal. And cubes are so easy to get. I currently have over 22k hay cubes. I used to have enough sugar cubes that I was able to trade them in for 2mil. So, a ridiculous amount. 

From what I gather, the main point of this thread is to "make the 10 use cubes slightly less common" and the other argument is "no don't do that just make them 1 use". Which in the end, is exactly the same thing. In one case you have to find them 10x as much to get the same thing, and in the other you may find them 10x (or whatever) less often, but still find 10 at a time. 

I still don't care if they change, since my only use for them at the moment is selling them, but I guess I can't wrap my head around all the arguing when the main point of each argument is the same. The only difference I see is now the non-spec stats not mattering in the pre-recode game has come up. Which I don't see why that's relevant at all,  when now high non spec stats only hurt you (I have a whole herd of GVs that prove this), and again, both main points of "less cubes overall" is the same.