Show System Discussion

by no means do i want showing to be easy money, i do not think it should be so easy that every single day is tons of profit with low effort. but there needs to be a sense of progression with earning money just like with earning stats. a better expansion of the bank overview could help, break things down into show income/expense, school income, account expansion, and group the rest under other income/expenses. i would love to see both monthly and weekly overviews as well as stud/sale income and expenses too but that could be a lot at once.

if the gameplay loop is supposed to be about steadily earning show money over time while making use of the other sources of income it would help to be able to see it happening rather than just feeling like something is or isn't working. if it's clear that showing is actually bringing in enough profit to cover the cost of purchases, care, training, and boarding, and be a decent way to earn money for bigger projects and expansions, then maybe it wouldn't be as discouraging to have some days where showing is a loss right?

i can try to calculate my earnings manually but i really do not trust my dyscalculia to not mess things up as usual. it would take hours for me to gather this month's bank info and make sure i calculate everything without making tons of mistakes. so i'm always going to have trouble figuring out where my earnings are coming from and getting lost.

breeding and selling horses is still enjoyable enough for me to not have a problem continuing to play the game. i'm grateful that attempts to improve the system have been made, i just worry that if people are discouraged from showing and schooling we'll end up with way too many people relying on the more inaccessible forms of income such as overpriced credits and not really bother playing the game itself.

I assume that because of the amount of showing I do it puts me in the highest Members with the Most Points Earned in the weekly and monthly Hall of Fame stats (when I am active) but there is a HUGE discrepancy on where I fall under Members with the Most Money Earned for both.  I've been keeping a close eye on it for months out of curiosity and it is only getting worse now, which makes sense as my show winnings continue to plummet.  The only way I am able to make money in the game is to sell credits, which of course costs me real $$ and definitely isn't ideal and certainly isn't practical (and I also feel guilty selling them as the inflation is out of control).

Last edited on 2023-06-12 at 17:53:58 by trrrot

@ forgottenland,

I would love to have a detailed bank system. I recently graduated in the Bookkeeping/Accounting field. As part of my courses, I had to learn how to use QuickBooks Online and I am obsessed with their system. Obviously, we don't need an advanced system like QBO but a simpler version would be awesome. I love the ability to view a chart of cash flow, net profit/loss, etc. The ability to generate reports based on various stuff is an amazing tool. My personal favorite is the Pie Chart breakdown of all income and expenses. 

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IMO, EV needs another major recode... This new showing update only strengthens my opinion on that. Slapping bandaids over issues one by one over time clearly isn't working. We need to fix the showing system, conformation system, item market, banking, horse market system, and many more. Modernize EV while we are at it as well to attract new and younger players. Add all highly requested suggestions such as Sperm and Egg Bank as well. Implement a dynamic in-game spreadsheet system so we don't have to create our own. Everything needs to be ready at once when we transfer our account from this version to the new version. I will gladly spend my RL money on that version, tbh.

The new showing system backfired because the rest of the game isn't designed for the new showing system. Most of us earned much less but everything else still has an issue with inflation. Because of that, we cannot afford all necessities.  In addition to inflation, we also still have problems with the bad item/horse market.

With recode, everything will be adjusted accordingly to the new showing income before the public release. Markets will be more dynamic and easily accessible than present as well. We would have better and more accurate banking that allows us to see that we are indeed making progress. It would be less frustrating than just "fixing" the showing system and expecting us to just blindly accept it when our horses start losing while everything else is the same.

Last edited on 2023-06-13 at 05:41:03 by Lucia

After discussing with the other mods it looks like the earnings system isn't equipped to handle the change in entrants for more fuller shows so that would explain the decrease in earnings (as currently only the top 3 receive prize money). Solutions are being looked into in terms of earning in shows to work better with the new grade tiers. 


It's already been stated that EV won't be receiving recodes or major overhauls of any systems. 

I'm not sure how it can be reasonably expected to have a perfect update with such a small testing team and even smaller coding team? A change was made, it's improved some previous issues with show entries and complaints of showing being too quick, and unfortunately caused another issue as an oversight. It's not necessarily game breaking, and not the end of the world when measures can be put in place to try rectify new issues. 

i've been seeing this update as more of a test run of a system change, so it's reassuring to hear there's room for tweaking and improving down the line. thank you for looking into it maple and the rest of the mods ♥

i just don't think this is uncommon with sim games tbh, given how complex they are it's normal to change one thing and accidentally break 3 other things. not something you want to happen for sure but it's not a surprise. other games i've played had such awful side effects after updates that i had to quit playing them for a while. things that make me question how it even got past testers at all, if anyone was bothering testing in the first place. but after a while they were fixed, or they weren't because the game was abandoned. some things take way more time to understand and repair than others even if it looks simple from my end.

Glad to hear you caught it and are working on it - thank you!

thanks 4 listenin to community @maple ♥

Kinda funny that I'm on this thread given that i do 0 shows, only riding school. still, wanna clarify that I wasn't pushing for riding school income to be heavily reduced, or for showing income to be heavily increased. it's just that they need to be in the same sort of ballpark (i.e. not having riding school outperform shows in income in almost every single case, bc then what's the point of competing in shows when they do require a bit more effort).

the question of how to do it and how to solve inflation are very big things that i don't feel remotely qualified to talk about. with a game as old as this, i think inflation was realistically just 100% inevitable. to me, it's most important that the current gameplay basics are balanced.