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So a while back they forced a bunch of small servers, including ones that don't speak English, to use an English discord by removing the forums. That got me thinking - why would they knowingly ruin/shut down servers if everything had been working out? Unless everything was not working out. If Howrse was tight on cash, who's the first people they'll fire? The ones manning the small, almost insignificant servers. In other words, the admins of the small servers. If they fire the admins to save on a few salaries, it means that there will be nobody to monitor the forums unless there are other admins to take over. But I'm guessing that the admins of those servers also just so happened to be the only ones that could speak the language of the servers. Hence, there was nobody to replace the admins and Howrse had to delete the forums. But they wanted to keep a means of player-player communication, so they opened a discord. The biggest problem with that being that, once again, there is nobody that speaks the language of the small servers. So they forced everyone to speak English on discord because I'm guessing that they have a lot of admins that can speak English so there's at least someone that can man the forums. I mean, why employ someone new and have to pay a whole new salary when you can just give someone a raise to do some more? Plus that makes firing a few admins pointless. Not that I know what discord is like because I'm not on there.. Maybe it's not even being manned. And I'm guessing that those small servers that had their forums removed probably shut down soon after because players quit. Which means that, essentially, Howrse saved money from firing some admins. But at the same time they had to pay maintenance towards the small servers while players were quitting and other players were just not coughing up money anymore in protest to the changes. So they weren't making money and the servers shut down.
Now, these are 99% guesses because I'm not on discord and I haven't heard much about it or the small servers since. And I have not done any digging as to what actually happened that made Howrse remove the forums so I'm not sure about the firing admins thing. But I'd be interested to know if someone knows what actually happened.

I don't remember exactly when it happened, but at some point we got fed up with the overload of weekend divine because our pass and bank reserves couldn't keep up. We ended up asking for there to be only 1 divine every weekend, and Howrse listened. This means that essentially they had less income from weekend promotions because there were less divines up for grabs. Eg. If they had Anubis, a rainbow and a wild up alongside the promo divine over the weekend, either players were forced into spending money on passes to get multiple/all of the divines or they had to settle for 1 or none of the divines. And they were doing this every weekend with different divines. Whereas, there'd be less of a need to spend money on passes if we had Anubis one week, a rainbow the next etc. So they made less money from the offers unless players wanted multiple copies of each divine --> their weekend income was stunned.

And then they forced the crown on us. This was one of those issues about older players having too much of an advantage - there were too many players with divines that dropped TCs and GFs. These players didn't need to spend as much to get promo divines, so there wasn't much need for them to spend money on passes. Howrse wasn't making money off them, so they introduced a brand new luck item that you could only buy using passes. And unfortunately, not everyone has much of a pass income. Even those who do probably end up spending it on other stuff like teams or customisation stuff, so more players were forced into spending real money to get promo divines. Howrse used the crown to "revive" their income from promo divines. And they never went back from there irrespective of player feedback. I wonder why?

And around the same time that they introduced the new sad excuse for an HoP, they also reintroduced weekend offer bombardments. Suddenly, we went from 1 divine every weekend to 3. And it wasn't just any divines. It were really tasty ones and the ones that hadn't been reintroduced in ages. I remember that because my pass reserve hadn't increased at all over 2 or so months. And that's coming from someone that spent 2 years saving passes to get Jade when they had almost no pass income. Point is, Howrse was screaming for money. They needed it so badly that they just outright showed it.

Now I'm taking a very, very long shot. I think something also happened with the designers. The testers will remember - there was a phase where every new divine in testing was always missing some part of their bodies. Always. There were divines with no tails. Divines missing a leg or an ear. Or had their leg hidden almost perfectly behind one of their other legs so that they looked like a tripod. The designers that drew the divines just didn't seem interested in horses. We were getting dragons hybrids and flesh coloured, almost human things and divine horses that just seemed.. uninspired. *stares at Sushi* And yet as of late, the art has actually been decent.. with the exception of Zonkeys But the divines haven't been missing parts and they generally seemed okay or inspired. Well, I think whatever happened with the designers would also have costed Howrse a bit more. Better quality always does.

And then someone pointed our that the mobile version of the game is cheaper to run and maintain than the desktop version. And someone else said the graphics are starting to suffer. I don't think Howrse has the money to keep the game going as it was, hence trying to convert the game to its cheaper counterpart in attempt to keep the game running. They're strapped on cash, so they're being cheap with the trophies and trying to suck money out of the new players because they are more likely to spend money. The older players have had to deal with Howrse's nonesense for a longer time and their eyes are open to seeing the greed and seeing how Howrse treat their players like horse droppings. They have opinions and viewpoints of the developers that have formed over years and affect how they spend money on this game. And considering how Howrse treats their players, I won't be surprised if a lot of the older players have been demotivated from spending money on the game. The new players don't have those opinions, so they're more likely to spend. That and they have no income/divines etc, so either they spend years trying to get somewhere or they cough up the cash to get there sooner. I'm really not surprised that Howrse is targeting the new players for cash.

Now I don't know much but I know that Covid put a lot of businesses here out of business. I don't know how it affected Howrse, if at all.

Add all that together with servers shutting down, players downloading ad blockers and refusing to buy passes in protest to changes and you end up with a hoard of players that don't spend money on the game. Let's not forget about the smaller things like them putting love divines in GFs to stop us from getting a bunch of them for free with inventory HoPs. Point is, it looks like Howrse has been screaming for money for a while. I don't know if it's just greed. I wonder.. if Howrse really is strapped on cash, then how much longer do you think the game will last..?