[ADDED] Auto-lock for all accounts

Could the locking feature be expanded so that if a player hasn't logged in for 3 days it engages automatically? Sometimes people forget to lock, or else think they've locked when they haven't, or else life happens and they can't get on to lock when they need to. This can lead to people unintentionally losing their entire herds, which sometimes represents months or years of work, and can be prohibitively expensive to revive with spectral draughts. To put it in perspective, reviving a mere 8 horses currently costs as much as a 1 year deluxe upgrade. Most herds are much larger than this, sometimes even over 100 horses.

An auto-locking system will both save people the heartache of losing entire herds and also prevent them from losing more than 3 days of time on upgrades that they've paid for but aren't using while they're away. The worst that will happen is horses will get a little hungry and unhappy. Under this system horses will no longer die unless their owner intentionally doesn't feed them, and a player will at least get a notification first if they do that. The current system effectively doesn't have notifications, since the player isn't around to see them.

I appreciate that the game needs to make money through credit sales, but I believe if someone no longer has to buy spectral draughts they would instead be spending those credits on different (more fun) upgrades, so there would be no net loss to the game. Furthermore, if a large herd loss is sufficient to cause someone to stop playing, the game is actually losing any credit purchases they may have made in the future.

Perhaps some sort of automatic email notification as well/instead? Of course this means emails would have to be used/up to date but if the player isn't already logging on then they're not going to see any game notifications.

I'm not sure how I feel about auto-locking, because it is your responsibility to lock but I know I would hate to lose 400+ horses if I forgot to lock myself, and I definitely couldn't afford to revive the entire herd. At the same time it also sort of takes away a reason to come back to the game regularly if you know your horses will still be there if you logged on to care for them or not. On the fence about it.

I'm actually considering not playing anymore because I lost my entire herd ;.;

Hasn't Abbey said she wants to update things so that cron doesn't run unless you log on? 'Cause that would solve this. Maybe I'm going crazy though because I can't remember where I saw that. >.>

She did but I'm pretty sure the player base was pretty divided over it.

I'm not sure I agree with auto lock, but I could definitely be on board with Maple's suggestion of email notifications once your horses have gone a certain number of days without care, so a player would know that they hadn't locked.

I agree with Maple and River on the email notifications. However, I'm all for auto-lock as well, but I think it should only activate when one or more of your horses is going to die the next day, plus you haven't logged on for that many days in a row (so people can still kill off horses they don't want). I'm not sure how many days of neglect it takes them to die though lol...

Last edited on 2017-01-23 at 16:24:57 by Raptorfang Ω

The e-mail option would have to be optional. I don't want any e-mails regarding dying pixel horses cluttering my inbox.

Another point is: if you're not able to log in and lock your account, it's often due to lack of internet connection. No internet = no e-mail.

Many games have auto-lock, I think it's a neat feature. It's not like logging in and locking manually makes anyone more committed to the game than auto-lock.

I agree with the auto lock. E-mails don't help those who lose their herd to to life happening (aka, can't get to the internet, family emergencies, etc). Losing an entire herd is more likely to make someone quit the game all together than cause revenue for the game.

Last edited on 2017-01-23 at 22:13:10 by SilverWolves

I am completely happy to update the system to cron only happening upon login (which I think would work better over auto-locking personally), but as Maple said, members seemed pretty divided over it last time I suggested it so I didn't end up changing it.

I like the idea of cron only running when people log in, but if plenty of people are opposed to it, or else no decision can be made right now, could we perhaps get auto-locking as an interim measure at least?

Regarding the suggestion of emails when horses are dying, this will only help in a few situations. For those that haven't locked due to lack of internet access it does nothing and they will still lose their herds.

Also, it takes 5 days of no care for a horse to die, hence why I suggested the auto-lock engage after 3 days of no login.

Added! ♥