Some changes to shows

I know that I have put so much time and money into this game that when I see my horses place 1st in 10 shows that had at least 5 entries and they gain 1 stat total it is extremely discouraging. I'm sure there must be others who feel the same. 

I feel like there needs to be more of an incentive for showing. Especially for people who are sticking with EV when so many others have just moved on. There are many of us who put so much time into showing our horses only to be disappointed when they place in the top 3 but earn no stats. It makes it quite difficult to stay motivated to continue on. 

I suggest that some type of stat gain be guaranteed for the top 3 horses if there are at least 5 entries and it might be nice to make it so there is a chance to earn stats if there are at least 3 horses per show. There aren't a ton of people who are entering shows daily so it can be difficult to ensure a proper number of entries in each show because there are so many different grade levels. 

Give us loyal EVers some incentive to keep on going and maybe it will also help encourage newer players to stick around as well and even bring back some others who have left for other games. 

Absolute support!

When Abbey tweaked showing (what has it been, over a year ago now?) where people are penailzed, monetarily as well as no stat gain, for entering shows with less than 5 horses, I think, it was really detrimental to the showing community. Forcing a lot of people to quit showing in favor of riding schools. Shows need to be a profitable means for players to actually gain money, plus, horses should regularily gain stats from shows when they are placing well.

I also feel bad for anyone showing in a less popular discipline. There is a very noticeable difference in stat gain in say a western horse versus a show jumper. People who show in say, driving, should stand just as much chance to gain stats as a western horse should. People should not be penailzed by our show system for showing in a less popular discipline.

PLEASE FIX OUR SHOW SYSTEM!    ♥

I would love this! It's very frustrating when my horses (aka my singular Friesian who is apparently pretty darn good in Endurance) place first out of 5+ and get 0 stats in 8 out of the 10 classes. 

Realistically, I think guaranteeing stats for the top 3 in a 5+ could cause the top horses to skyrocket and end up making it harder for people who don't understand all the elements of horse showing and stats (like me) as well as foundation horses vs gen6+ who were born with more stats than my foundations will end up dying with. But upping the likelihood would be very nice.

EDIT:
This literally just happened lol

So frustrating :T (granted this guy had less than 5 in each show but still. I should've just put him in a riding school /sigh/)

Last edited on 2020-01-08 at 15:34:23 by box

As an alternate point of view, and maybe it's only because I have so many horses entered in shows, but a majority do gain stats for more thank half the shows they place in, unless they're in the 1-3 entry shows. An example from today would be Lunar Princess who placed 1st in all 10 of her shows and gained stats in 6/10 because there were 6-8 entries in each show. Some of the others had 5/7, 3/3 and 7/9(where the first number is show where stats were gained and second is total placings). Wonderful Oblivion placed in 10 shows and won stats in 3/3 with over 5 horses, the remainder had only 3 horses in them. There are a few at the opposite of the spectrum with 1/3 and 2/6, but those same horses might get more stats the next day. I do enter my horses in all 10 shows every night and never riding school or split the difference.

Guaranteeing stats for every placement doesn't sound like a fix to the problem. As of now you get the same "chance" at stats as you would with riding school but 0-3 instead of 0-1 per show/hour. When schooling my retired kids I usually only see 2-4 stats per session, whereas my showing horses have a chance to get 0 to about 15 (the highest I ever actually saw, the absolute max is 30). It's a no-brainer for me to pick shows over schooling. Even if a horse does poorly for 1-2 nights the third night they can make  up for it and in the meantime it helps flesh out shows for other people. Getting at least 1 stat in every placement means 10-30 stats a night while that will make people want to show it will create a new problem of some horses stomping out all the competition and gaining levels far too quickly which will eventually lead to a mass of too many horses at the highest of grades and probably also complaints about never being able to win shows.

For the second half of the problem I don't think the number of grade levels are the causing there to be not enough entries (lumping them together would cause the same horses to win over and over as it was in EV version before this one), the problem seems to be not enough people entering shows. If you look at the statistics page none of the disciplines and grades below National have less than 1000 horses, assuming half are locked or not progressed daily and even splits between the 5 levels in the grade, that would give about 100 horses in each grade, say half are riding schooled daily, that's still 50 potential horses to fill shows, enough for at least 30 shows completely full or 100 shows filled with 5 horses each. So where are those horses at?

The player base was given the easy way out with Riding schools and that way is constantly recommended for players as an easy way to earn money(it is), a good way to earn stats(I'm not convinced it's better), and a time-saver(one click to enter one click to collect and not costly like autoshow). Showing is touted as "too complicated" or "a waste of money" which for some people it might be there's nothing wrong with that, but it turns potential showers off before they even start. The easiest solution to not enough horses in shows is to put more horses in shows, and the easiest way to do that is to get more people showing.


The problem for most people seems to be that they aren't willing to "risk it to get the biscuit", they don't want to possibly lose money (you lose more money if your show has less than 5 entries than if you place lower in the standings, filling shows helps people gain money), or not get stats (never entering means you never even have a chance anyway). Maybe the payout could be tweaked, I don't seem to lose money overall though so I'm not sure where the problem is(though it does look like either part of the money might not be awarded out of the prize pool and only fees are taken into account, or the more likely culprit: something wonky in the activity page because winnings on the pages are still high..., this requires a more through investigation). Just because your horse doesn't get a stat in every show one day does not mean it isn't doing well. Play the long game a while and you'll see more improvement. 

Maybe nerfing the riding school would be a better way to go since it's much less involved than showing. Make the stat chance much lower and make people enter one hour at a time. That doesn't seem super fair though so it's possible a mindset change is in order instead.

Apparently I have a lot of words about this, I'm very passionate about showing. My main point is: get more people showing to help improve the system as is right now.

<sup>No support.

The only change I would support is an increase in show winnings and fees, which is a severe limitation of money gained from showing right now, and would alleviate some pressures of the economy right now. 

Adding more stats to showing would be start to become a problem after a while, a horse can gain up to 1000 stats or more in it's lifetime already, adding more stats will be taking people to be capped out at international level pretty quickly. It's also not intended as a reliable stat source, training and treating horses are, showing is more of a stat bonus on top of that, and also a much higher gain over time (if you have potentially +30 for winning all 10 shows from time to time) compared to riding school and even cubing horses in most cases.  

As Sabriel said, you're seeing this problem from lack of entries across all shows, my horses win their shows all the time but don't gain anything because of no one entering shows and entering riding schools instead. I've always said lack of entries has been a problem. The riding school was only ever meant to be an alternative to showing for horses that didn't do well in shows period (usually due to high ns stats) and hay cubes being introduced only compounded that problem. 

I don't think it's a problem that you won't gain anything from a low entry show, the whole point of that tweak was to prevent manipulation of the system by creating one entry shows before cron ran to farm easy stats for a horse (people still do that to claim their horse wins all the time when it's really the only entrant) and to encourage people to enter higher entry shows.

Basically, if you're showing enough horses, your show string should balance out the amount of money gained and lost from each horse, and stats and shows will balance out as horses age. I have horses that literally have a 25% win rate but also gained over 1k stats in their lifetime, so the system isn't really broken, it just looks like a problem in the short term view.</sup> 

Interesting points, however, I still feel that having a guarantee of at least 1 stat gain for the placing horses in a show of 5 or more would improve the game and get more people into showing. 

At first I voted Support, but after reading Maple's thoughts I changed my mind to No Support. 

This is a tricky one... But I agree that something needs to be changed. :/

I agree with you that there needs to be more incentive showing! However, I don't think that should be with stats.

When it comes to stat gain, entering horses in shows to 5 entries can easily gain them 900+ stats by the time they die.

Whenever I show my horses, there's frequently not enough competition to fill up all the shows I need, so I enter 5 of my own horses per show to ensure some will gain stats. Every single one of my 16 foundation Arabians (a recent project for comparison) reached 900 stats by the time they died, and more than half were at or over 1000. And that's with them competing against themselves!

The downside to this of course is with horses competing by themselves in shows that have low money pots is that you show at the risk of not making any EVD or even showing at a loss some days :c

1000 stats in a horse's lifetime is huge! The offspring I bred are only 3 years old and are either almost at or already surpassed 600 stats. 3rd generation is going to have even more stats on top of that! If I remember correctly, the horses that I had been training through the riding school made on average 800 stats by the end of their life. granted some did get higher, but some were also lower. That's a nearly 200 stat difference between schooling and showing for a horse's lifetime, that's more than enough stat difference in my personal opinion.

The only change that I would maybe like to see to try to encourage more people to show is to possibly cut down the entry limit to spread the horses out more instead of 15 stuck in a show. Have server run shows in addition to player run shows to help keep shows available when there are none, and possibly increase the prize pot so players can more frequently show at a gain than a loss (though spreading out horses may help with that since there wouldn't be 12 horses not winning anything, though maybe not because as Sabriel said, more entries means a bigger money pot. I don't know).

I think something like this may also make the auto show function a more viable tool to use as we wouldn't have to worry about mass entering all of our horses into the same 10 shows.

I'm very much in agreement with Sabriel and Maple. Showing mechanics ain't broken, just need more people.

I've been thinking about this since voicing my support, and well, I still support it. I understand all sides but showing does need some changes, not just the player base.

While I don't support the "guarantee to top 3 in 5+" I support the suggestion of something going on with stat changes. I looked at my example horse's classes and he was the only one in 5 of them. That's not my fault. I shouldn't be penalized for being the only entrant, or one of three. Yes, I am going to use the word penalized. I tried to think of a different word but I can't. It's not the most accurate word but it'll have to do. While I did make a profit that day, it was minimal. $20 a class is $200, and Latte Foam brought in $278. I made $78. I also got 176 exp. And Latte Foam received 0 stats. A riding school would've made me something like $250 and 250 exp, with an average 3 stat gain between intelligence and endurance.
EDIT: If I were where I was about three weeks ago, before selling premade and custom designs on the forums, I'd currently be struggling financially as a new player. So while this may get easier later on as my horses go up in grades and rankings and whatnot, I'm looking at this from a newbie perspective and how frustrating it all is.

As for "not my fault," I enter most of my classes with 6 or 8 hours running left. Novice endurance classes can be hard to find most days so on days I want to show, I'm not picky and just enter what I can. At the time, Latte Foam was my only Novice in whatever grade he is/was. I'm not an upgraded account so I can't make shows. I'm not trying to take advantage of run times or whatever (although that's been resolved), so I'm basically at a loss. I realize that this means that novice endurance needs more popularity, which is a player base thing. At the same time, that won't happen if I'm the only one entering someone else's shows. There are some days where I log in and there are no shows running, either at that time or at all. So what's the point in me showing if I can't guarantee that there is a show, or if there is a show, if it's a regular occurrence that I end up in small classes with 0 stat gains, then why bother with showing anyways?

Basically, I think there needs to be some form of upped percentage. This may be harder to implement, but maybe figure out which specialties and which grades are lacking and try to give them a stat boost. But don't be sly about it. If someone figures out any form of algorithm or the secret or whatnot, they could take advantage of it. But if a news article comes out and says "we've noticed that L1 dressage shows are rare and thin, so we'll be boosting the chance of stat gains in all three placements for a week," then I think that'd be a bit more fair to people stumbling through those divisions. If that makes sense.

My suggestion here isn't the best one and probably not the one that should be taken into consideration. My point and rambling comes down to: I support the suggestion to change something within the shows dealing with stat gain. I'm not sure if the proposed solution in this thread is the best one, but I will still support it until something better is found.

Last edited on 2020-01-10 at 20:37:11 by box

MSGA
(make showing great again!)

I agree, people don't show as much as they should. I also agree that some people ARE penalized for showing by losing money for 1st place wins in small shows. I get not having the ability to gain stats in low entry shows but people should at least break even money wise.

People don't show because they can easily and cheaply gain stats from cubes and riding school. There is no incentive to show.

Last hour: 7 places, no stats gaining for any horse.

I think every horse entered in a show should have the option of gaining stats. Not only the placed ones when 5 or more horses are entered. 

Last edited on 2020-03-12 at 07:08:04 by SyLoBe

http://www.equiverse.com/horse.php?id=990649

This horse placed 2nd in 20 shows. Gained 0 stats because there were only 2 entries. Had I put him on a riding school he would have gained some stats and I wouldn´t have lost money.

<sup>That's not a result of the system being "bad", that's purely down to lack of entries. There's only 303 horses in Endurance I1, 24 of which are actually unlocked. Majority of international grade horses are cubed/pepperminted and riding schooled because their ns stats don't tend to allow them to compete well if there are lower ns horses also competing, therefore there are rarely horses showing at international levels right now. Riding schools were implemented as an alternative to unprofitable show horses, not as a replacement. Showing still gives you much better earnings and stats over time provided you enter strategically, enter 5+ horses, spread a maximum of three of your own horses in shows or showing at the top of their grade are all strategies players use to help win shows. 

I haven't changed my mind on not supporting this suggestion, I still believe it would be hugely detrimental in terms of game progression (too fast) and still suggest adjusting show fees/winnings as an alternative/incentive to enter more or reducing the impact of riding schools. Showing has always been bonus- read: not guaranteed- stats in the recode, and I don't think the riding school should reward stats all the time for 10 hour entries I believe I suggested a scaling system in the past where horses would be awarded stats at random depending on their final placing but struggle to find the thread it was on (may have been deleted now). .</sup> 

Well, school doesn't always give stats, the horse doesn't get +10 stats for 10 hours of lessons.

Maybe shows and school should give the same stats (ammount and probability), having the show 2 or 10 entries, or being the horse 1st or 8th. That way people would show more I relieve.