...Why on earth would anyone spend real money or time on a horse you don't get to keep? If they ended up a part of your breeding farm I might consider it but the entire description of that event is just absurdly stupid. Just waste money for nothing? If it's how it sounds I'm not bothering with it.

Could care less about Ascent since I hate Ascent but I *was* trying to get the trophies for it, so knowing those are now going to take an extra 47 years isn't thrilling either.

In regards to the trophies, what I liked about ascent was that you could work at them at your own pace, as the mode wasn't going to just disappear. Now we will lose that access half the time as the mode just goes. Why not just give us a "bad" rotation for each three week break so that the option is still there for those of us that want to continue working towards these trophies? There's already so many that force you to wait months to work on them again, why do that to ascent as well? There doesn't have to be an active God just to play the game.

Also, if we cannot collect the obols during this time, we are losing out on 630 passes worth every time this mode goes, how is that fair? That's a massive amount to take away from us if this ends up being the case. I worry this will be the case because of how this section has been worded -

"This means that Ascent of Olympus won't be available in the update planned on January 27, 2026. But don't worry! Your Obols and Drachmas are safe, and the divine horses who give you these coins will keep sending them your way until your inventory is full."

I understand why there is the need for a break, as it's likely tight to create new art for the Gods with everything else, but there are several ways around it that don't involve removing the mode for so long. A week at most, but three is way too long.

If i cant breed and keep foals in events then i just dont breed appaloosas or ones that they give me. I try to play every promo and i do want another frosts to have a foal sniwflake or put the second one in english comps for winter on the game. The 3 week snd on cycle only works for me for Apollo really. I don't have any fragments for the first two and apollo i have at least 600 fragments.It’s going to make people want to spend passes. Ive been getting the main divine during second cycle of the game. I went to classic version to hit icon for spoiler banner. I don't usually post in this forum.

Purple tape items are hidden in:
- Advent Calendar (Dec 12th, 16th and 22nd)
- Secret Santa.

You'll have to take part in BOTH Events to get the full Purple Tapes to fully upgrade your Bushy.

The event is time-sensitive, so you might want to make sure you'll be here at the start to complete your Tutorial as fast as possible.
The timer starts as soon as you finish the Tutorial.

The Tutorial will take you through a couple of passages, will force you to upgrade Bushy the first time and then, after a while, it'll let you go.

This is what I used and found myself comfortable with, but keep in mind that you might want to tailor the experience to your own time availability.

- First upgrade: TUTORIAL, Energy capacity
- Regeneration Time Improvement
- Wrapping Power Improvement
- Regeneration Timer Improvement
- Wrapping Power Improvement
- Wrapping Power Improvement
- Regeneration Time Improvement
- Energy capacity
- Energy capacity

As I said, this was my personal experience, but you might want to change it to your tastes.

As long as you keep Energy Capacity LAST, you should be fine. I know it's tempting to upgrade Energy capacity first because it's Cheap and it gives you 6 energy, BUT a level 1 wrap is 1 point, while a level 4 wrap is 4 points per energy. Need I say anything more?

ENERGY CAPACITY LAST. Repeat after me. LAST!!

- ALWAYS go for the Purple tape. ALWAYS. You cannot afford to skip any. You can come back and get prizes later, but missing an upgrade will be a serious detriment to you. If you see a Tape roll, give up everything and get the Tape.

- Purple Tape rooms: 5, 11, 16, 19, 23, 26, 30, 34, 38, 43, 46, 51, 57, 61, 64, 68, 71, 74, 78, 81, 84, 87, 91, 95

- ALWAYS check the top of the door you want to go through. Every door has a Wrapping power needed (at the bottom), but most importantly, an Energy Per Wrapping value at the top. Sometimes the door with more Wrapping power is NOT the door that will take up more energy.

This is an image with the old Oni's Castle, but the concept is the same.

The top shows how much ENERGY any wrapping action takes

The bottom shows how much WRAPPING total it takes.

So in this case, you need 3 wraps, and each wrap takes 1 energy from your bar, so a total of THREE.

- The Christmas horse is free if you want to go after him.

- If you REALLY want the Divine (or more!), consider investing on the FIRST DAY. A few purchased Energy packs (about 270p) will give you the 2h Regeneration upgrade on the first day. Those are extra lives that come in handy!

- You can enter and leave any Lab at will, and your progress will be saved. This is very important if you don't want to miss out on upgrades, but you'd rather go for another Divine instead of Feliz Navidad.

- Open your 16 crowns on Day One if you're going for the Fragments divine (Water Power). You'll have to spend them anyway but, in case you luck out, you can avoid the Fragment Doors and just go for the cheaper ones!

- Bar I (tutorial, mandatory)
- Regen I
- Power I
- Regen II
- Power II
- Power III
- Regen III
- Bar II
- Bar III

Bar = Energy capacity; Regen = Regeneration timer; Power = Wrapping power

I'm a returning player, the last time I had played Howrse was in 2017, and I have to say Ascent of Olympus is one of my favourite things in this game. It truly is a very accessible and fair way to get divines without spending money at all or at least too much money, and it actually depends on your skills to play. Even if there's statistics and luck involved, it's your decisions during each game that put you closer or not of each divine. Since the new round of the Greek God, I was able to get Zeus, and two christmas divines without spending more than 250p that were easily earned in daily objectives. It's crazy to think that 250p + playing each round very seriously + a little bit of luck earned me 3 divines in about a month.

And then there's what I also love about AoO: even if you don't feel like playing, you can collect your coins and play whenever you feel like it. Sometimes I get mad with the game - no one should lose with 93% chances!! - and I take a break a few days, and then I come back fresh, and end up playing it much more balanced. Ascent of Olympus allows you to really manage how you play, when you play, and what are your priorities. I remember that during the first 30 days when you have nothing to do on Howrse, Ascent of Olympus was one of the things that kept my game very exciting, because it was either playing good or not winning anything.

I am very very very sad to hear these news about Ascent of Olympus. To be honest, if Howrse keeps taking away free or easier options to get divines, while always implementing events that are easy to win if you invest money, people will just be very unmotivated to see beyond the obvious logic of "if you pay you get".

Honestly it's really easy for me to be... frustrated by the changes to the Ascent of Olympus, though I'm going to hold out and see what exactly the developers have in plan for the next iteration. I know in the Ascent's early days I would be one of the people who would grind the event to completion and end up with both the Greek Gods horse *and* the divines on offer. It might just be that I lean on the younger side of players on this game, and it starts to wear down on me quickly just how much the ascent tests my attention span . Hopefully with whatever comes in February, it will be somewhat more engaging, because I can understand why player interaction overall is quite low.

As for the Ephemeral Breeds event... I'm honestly torn. It definitely seems like an invitation for the most endowed players to splash out their passes and resources for a *chance* at a decent prize. There might be a greater incentive on smaller servers (where most of my gameplay is centred) since competition is lower, though I can't really say whether its going to be a decent trade-off by the end of the season. I suppose if you are an older player you might find a little bit of nostalgia from the days of the Howrse Cup, which I assume this gamemode is meant to emulate. If that is the case, I actually think it would be nice for the sake of community engagement to add a teams feature to the gamemode

I'm not the biggest fan of Ascent. It's very repetitive and hurts my hand. However!!!! I STILL play it because it's such a good way to get divines (even if I lose a lot of the rounds) and I love that you can play it whenever you want. Even though I don't like it very much game play-wise, I'm very unhappy with the changes so far. It sounds like they want to phase it out because it's not as popular as they wanted it to be

I wonder how broke Howrse must be going for them to add a whole new event to the game that's centred around spending real money? Who would've guessed that ignoring us about Major January Downgrade 1 fixes would push players away from spending money? And that back to back pack offers and sprinting through all the good divines week after week won't be enough to coax us into paying? So they added random reserved sales in between, and that STILL didn't do the trick??

Now they want to say that we should spend extra time here to breed a line of useless horses for a practically 0 chance of getting into the top 3, when the only good prize is for 1st place?? And they're demanding real money to get there as if we're just going happily cough it up not to mention how many popups that brand new cash grab will have? I looked at that and immediately got GC flashbacks and remembered just how much I hate the GC and every irrritating ufo popup festivity paired with it is. Probably one the fastest double down "nope!" moments I've had

And they decided that there aren't enough players interested in ascent, so they decided to attempt making it a "rare delicacy" to get player's interested??? When in reality, it just means that players who do like it play less and that it's easier to avoid it if you don't like it? And players who are only interested in playing it for new divines only need to bother with it every 2.5 months? I mean, that may be slightly more frequent than every 3m, but it's still rare. They're speedrunning the last of our interest in it out of it

What a thing to return to after a busy day

Seriously Howrse, consider listening to what players want and acting on that instead of forcing the game in the direction that you want it all the time. Maybe fixing your previous downgrades will be more effective than throwing out new cash grabs that are so obvious that they have no other purpose other than being cash grabs because all we get out of it is a badge and if players don't care about ascent, then it means that you must fix ASCENT or give them more incentive to play it. Dying at 97% chance of success means that there's a problem with your game and the chances of winning, so fix that first. Give the rankings to ascent and let the player at the top win something like a divine that was only offered in packs previously or something like how the rosettes work. Find that last employee that you fired for opposing your ideas and pay them for more new ideas. Play the game that you are breaking piece by piece and experience your changes so that you can understand their effects. Stop fixing "problems" that nobody cares about and fix the actual problems that need to be fixed.

Guess I'll be waiting for the game shut down notice when the upcoming cash grab goes "unexpectedly" south because I can't think of another reason for Howrse to do this unless they're adding a new game mode that relies on spending money and testing how many players would be interested in coughing up for it or something... like they're testing what would happen if this game became paid only or something. I won't be surprised if that's the direction we're heading with the pay to blup thing I mean, there's no point in bothering with temporary horses at all if you're not going to pay for extra horseshoes because you won't get into the top 3 without paying and breeding will get very expensive if vet fees double with each foal produced per day...

Oh well, it's just a new cash grab for me to not bother with, so I don't really care because I have far more important things to spend it on... you know? Sorry Howrse, but your game doesn't make the cut for real money, let alone tons of it thanks to our pathetic currency conversion rate

I suppose I can't be surprised that Howrse is halving Ascent's availability. If they reduce the number of ways players can get divines with in-game currency, then players will be increasingly forced to spend real money getting divines through the packs.

I guess step number two for Ubisoft is reducing the number of weekend offers, and then getting rid of them entirely. That's the biggest other way they could make money, and probably what they'll do next once they've knee-capped Ascent.



I'm not even all THAT upset if they want to introduce a completely optional gamemode that you pay real money to participate in. But do they have to sacrifice many people's favourite gamemode to do that?

What; because Ascent isn't played as much as they want it to be? Maybe it would be played more if they fixed the mobile version of it, so it's more accessible to a wider portion of the playerbase. Or add better divines to it, so people are more incentivised to play. Or add leaderboard rankings for the number of Obol rounds won in a season, so people can get competitive over it. Or anything other than removing it from the game for several weeks at a time, so dedicated Ascent players have almost nothing to do on Howrse.

I’ve already decided to opt out of the Ephemeral thing. Way too time consuming and I’ve no intention of sinking money into producing horses that disappear at the end and leave me with some useless Appaloosa.

Initially I wasn’t that bothered by having a break from AoO but reading the dev Q&A info posted by Legacy Ann, it seems you”ll only have 3 weeks to get the boss instead of the 9 we currently have. Am I understanding that correctly? Well I suppose that would encourage players to spend to avoid missing out on the boss. Repeating the old ones for those that were late starting is a nice idea and it will give a chance to stock up on obols/drachma if you don’t need the current boss

what time the event will start? I need to know so I can set my alarm

in the Pick Your Companion Chest is already the new Pig Companion and he gives +18 at Stamina

I have played Ascent since it started, I have every God and almost all of my Divines come from AoO. I really really like AoO and play it religiously every day at least twice.
I'll be very upset if they start to bring all the Gods back again, because I hate duplicates (especially those that don't give items/passes) + I have already grinded so hard to get them in the first place.

This wouldn't be an issue, as we can only get the Gods once, as per section 6.5.2 of the breeders manual. If the Gods were to return, it would likely play as if you already have it and just offer fragments for one of the divines at the moment on the boss level. Here's the section in question -

6.5 - Rewards
6.5.2 - Fragments of the divine boss
Every victory at the top of Olympus will reward you with fragments of the boss of the moment.

Once you've collected all the fragments of a boss, he'll join your breeding farm.

You can get each boss only once.

After you've won the divine boss, you'll earn fragments of the special horses of the moment every time you win until the boss changes.

The divine boss of the Ascent of Olympus mode changes periodically. Please note that any current game will be lost.

RE: Ascent changes
I'm not sure that making the Ascent "rarer" will help the issue of players just not playing it. Of course, we will have to see what other changes they plan on making, but just that alone likely won't change why players don't play in the first place.
Like for example, I rarely play Ascent because of the time aspect. I have limited time in the game to play on an average day, and playing Ascent will take up a good chunk of that time for me. There are times where I do really like the divines on offer and would love to play it, but can't.
I'm unsure if Howrse looks at this thread at all for suggestions, but I'd really like to see the Ascent be more efficient and less time consuming to play, I'd play it a lot more often!
I do also agree that the Ascent seems to favor a loss above the 90% range, which makes it discouraging to play.