[UPDATED] Devs' Corner: May 2024

Our developers have something to tell you! Every three (3) weeks, our devs will provide you with information about their work in the “Dev’s Corner.”

This publication is a way of keeping everyone updated on what’s happening with the game. We invite you to discuss and leave your feedback for each of the publications.

Note: All posts must adhere to the forum guidelines and be constructively made.

Take a look at our very first Devs' Corner publication!

Warm wishes,

The Howrse Team
 
Ow
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I'm finished with Wilds as they're overpriced the way they release them and without the (collection) trophy there's no incentive for me to do it, so this is yet another update that does jack all for me.

Did they add the Iris Coats back into collections yet? default smiley (d)

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Also the Pet Horse is the UGLIEST thing I've ever seen in my entire life. I hate the chimera series and flat-out refuse to own any of them because they're hideous beyond description so why they added a SECOND one... I know it's a personal preference but good lord. default smiley (n)
Crookedstar915
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Arabians are best wrote:

Now I'm suppose to fish them out of retirement????


well at least you'll only need them when theres a wild/chimera/pet in the promos LOL default smiley (d)
apollonia
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Wish the new trophies were to have x amount of wild, chimera or pet tamed. It is unfair to those of us who have been collecting them and working them, i am not buying doubles and it will take forever for help requests....
szynszyla
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Also why is Wild and Chimera 2 times per help ask (for the first trophy) but Pet horse is 10? That doesn't make sense, they're all virtually the same thing. default smiley (o)
Crookedstar915
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szynszyla wrote:

Wish the new trophies were to have x amount of wild, chimera or pet tamed. It is unfair to those of us who have been collecting them and working them, i am not buying doubles and it will take forever for help requests....


I very much agree with this, I have 11 chimeras, all tamed, yet all I can do is accept help requests with them to aid towards the trophy, or spend up to 2000 passes to get another one to use when they are next on offer. I don't mind losing some passes to help towards the trophies, but over a 1000 passes loss is way too much for even me to justify. Even if they can't be fully backtracked for the trophies, it would be nice if you could have some points added to the trophy based on the amount you had tamed already.
Oathkeeper
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It's the same with trophies like the rosettes, where more should have been done to give a more accurate starting amount. Like, my Ocean has over 200, yet only 67 of those are currently counting towards the trophies? I understand they probably don't have all the data stored, but when you have a horse that has that many and you are the breeder, it should have been used as a starting point if it was higher than the amount at the time of the change.
Oathkeeper
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I don't even think ANY pass loss is worth it for the trophies. The prizes they give aren't worth more than 300 passes max, and quite a few of them are worth less than that. Wilds give a 150-pass net loss on average, and chimeras give even more. If you buy expensive horses for these trophy rewards, you are GOING to lose money, full-stop.

Howrse did a really poor job making an incentive to play these.
Crookedstar915
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Crookedstar915 wrote:

I don't even think ANY pass loss is worth it for the trophies. The prizes they give aren't worth more than 300 passes max, and quite a few of them are worth less than that. Wilds give a 150-pass net loss on average, and chimeras give even more. If you buy expensive horses for these trophy rewards, you are GOING to lose money, full-stop.

Howrse did a really poor job making an incentive to play these.


To me it isn't a loss to buy things for these trophies, mainly because I eventually want to try and get all the divines, the next one is one I don't have, so, the way I see it, I take a small loss and eventually get a divine that would have otherwise cost me thousands to buy when it eventually came up in a weekend offer. That said, I do make around 1000+ passes on a good week just through working my divines and doing objectives, so 300 points is barely going to make a dent in my reserve and doesn't take long for me to make up.

No one has to agree with what I do when it comes to my game or even follow my example, but it really would be nice if I could post the direction I take without effectively being told what I did was a bad idea, as, believe me, I do weigh up my options a lot before I invest in these kind of things, I don't just throw passes around for the sake of throwing them around.
Oathkeeper
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Also, how is spending more passes on a wild/chimera any different than spending a ton on a series that will take years to pay you back? Example, you spend 4k maxing out the meter for a love divine, it would take you almost 17 years to pay the passes back, yet you decide to do it anyway because you want to keep a full set. Another example is the rainbow divines, who only give 40 or 50 passes a month if you don't have VIP, yet cost 6000+ passes to max the meter each, taking over a decade to pay back the passes that were spent on them.

Yes, these series will eventually pay you back, but, realistically, the majority of players will not stick around that long, yet those players still buy them for the sake of completing the collection, even when they probably won't get back the passes they spent on them.
Oathkeeper
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Yeah, if you have enough reserve and it furthers a goal you have it wouldn't be an issue, since it gets you closer to where you want to be on the game.

My problem wasn't with you, it's that Howrse set this up where you have to buy duplicates of an already-overpriced (net loss) Special in order to progress with the trophies and they rewards they offer don't cover the cost. The only reason to do it would be, like you said, if you've already got such a massive reserve that the net loss is negligible AND you specifically want one of the Divines offered.

Otherwise, they're setting us up to lose money and I think it should be clear that that's what they're doing by making these things so obscenely expensive and for such little reward to most players. If a specific player wants a specific Divine and considers the expense worth it, that's fine, but I am going to continue to call Howrse out for making pass drains and thinking we won't notice.

I just think it's in bad practice. Sorry if it sounded like I was attacking you, I wasn't, I was just saying from my perspective I think they shouldn't be jacking up the prices on these things where you have to pay 900 passes up front to get a Golden Apple (100 passes). It's nuts. It's been an issue I've had since the beginning with these new trophies though, they're just not worth it and they get worse with every single update.
Crookedstar915
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I agree, they are overpriced, but with how long they have been getting sold at these prices for I sadly don't see that changing.
Oathkeeper
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Oathkeeper wrote:

I agree, they are overpriced, but with how long they have been getting sold at these prices for I sadly don't see that changing.


Yeah. It used to be not that bad; I collected them for the trophies and I figured 150 passes as a net loss wasn't SO much compared to, say, Harlequin who goes for 500-600 and does nothing. default smiley (lol)

But then they took the trophies away and expect us to buy duplicates and I just...? It feels like a MAJOR ripoff, like they realized "oh man everyone has one of these and won't buy a second, how can we dupe them into spending that 150 pass net loss FOREVER? Oh, *I* know!" and then introduced the Permanent Trophy Drain. It's weird. It may indeed be cheaper than buying the Divine if you're going for the Divine, but if you DON'T want the Divine, it feels like a major slap in the face how they keep doing this instead of just... pricing stuff fairly.
Crookedstar915
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szynszyla wrote:

Wish the new trophies were to have x amount of wild, chimera or pet tamed. It is unfair to those of us who have been collecting them and working them, i am not buying doubles and it will take forever for help requests....


Going to disagree on this. It may take ages waiting on help requests, but at least you can still plug away at it with just a single wild or chimera rather than /having/ to buy more of the pass losing beasts.

With the exception of the zonkey trophy (and even it has some sort of slightly-cheaper-than-buying-another-divine work around so long as Eros eggs keep being offered in promos) all the other trophies allow you to progress with a single divine of the series.

I do agree it's a shame there's no retroactive credit for people's work.
sleepingrose
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sleepingrose wrote:

Going to disagree on this. It may take ages waiting on help requests, but at least you can still plug away at it with just a single wild or chimera rather than /having/ to buy more of the pass losing beasts.


I completely agree with this and the part about retroactiveness.
Nalu93
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sleepingrose wrote:

Going to disagree on this. It may take ages waiting on help requests, but at least you can still plug away at it with just a single wild or chimera rather than /having/ to buy more of the pass losing beasts.


Well, I disagree with you. Those of us who have put many hours, months, years into the Wilds, Chimeras and other stuff should not have our slats wiped clean. I don't want to plug away because I'll already plugged away....default smiley (li)
Arabians are best
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Arabians are best wrote:

Well, I disagree with you. Those of us who have put many hours, months, years into the Wilds, Chimeras and other stuff should not have our slats wiped clean. I don't want to plug away because I'll already plugged away....default smiley (li)


My point was not that you shouldn't have credit for long-tamed wilds and chimeras, but that the trophy should not be changed to be a count of tamed ones. That way just forces players to buy new ones to progress. Do you want to have to buy more when you still have more trophies to go in that line beyond how far your current collection got you?

They should have written some sort of script that can figure out that if you have x amount of tamed ones, you have therefore already done y amount of actions at minimum that count for this new trophy.
sleepingrose
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I think they could at least give us 1 point per tame Wild/Chimera we already own - and, hey, let's go mad and ask for another point per Wild/Chimera that is 80+ years old. How many players tame their horses without asking for any help at all? How many Wilds/Chimeras are aged to 80 without at least once helping another player? I would be surprised if it is more than a handful for either, so it's not like giving us *some* credit for the horses we already have would be giving a bunch of players undeserved progress on their trophies.

It wouldn't come close to reflecting how much time some players have put into their Wilds and Chimeras over the years but at least it wouldn't be completely ignoring the fact that some players have already tamed and aged 50+ horses.
bezo93
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What is the Evolution Trophy and what do you have to merge?
horsegirl28
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horsegirl28 wrote:

What is the Evolution Trophy and what do you have to merge?


Its for events like the one where we merged the Cats to get the cat sith item, or when we merged Jewelry to get the Anne of Austria coat
jsniper
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sleepingrose wrote:

Do you want to have to buy more when you still have more trophies to go in that line beyond how far your current collection got you?


I don't understand what you are saying here.
Arabians are best
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@Arabians are best -

I believe they're saying that under the current system, you can *technically* obtain all the trophies for the Wild/Chimera line with just a single one, by virtue of lucking out and helping others. It'll take forever, but it's doable. Same with all the other Divine trophies; you don't have to own the set. Just one will do.

If it were done the other way, you'd be required to buy them all yourself (since you'd have to own some exorbitant number of tamed ones), so in the long run it'd be more expensive.

Which is true. I do wish they'd kept SOME kind of count for how many we've tamed instead of making us start all over, but I have to agree that forcing us to own a million tamed Wilds would be worse in the long run than playing the chance game at helping other players.
Crookedstar915
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It is obnoxious to have to drag them out of retirement though and even then only have the iota of a chance that there'll be a help request. This wasn't a very good series to give trophies to imo. The other ones (except Zonkey, which is just pure stupid) are ones you work daily for the perk and will progress at a constant rate, however slow. This one just doesn't make a ton of sense all around.
Crookedstar915
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And there were tons of other series which could have worked. Winds (by hours of rides, making them theoretically usable even after they've aged out), Japanese (by card collection; a once-daily thing sure but no different than seniority and makes it quicker if you own the set), Pastry (by covering), Nordic (by journey), Maori (by... whatever that thing is they collect, I forget what it's called), Plants (by pruning), maybe Celtic, I don't know how they work but they seem to be a "daily action" Divine so sure why not, Greyfell (by resurrection). Loads of others that would be better than this.
Crookedstar915
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They've said they will eventually be adding the other series to the trophies, but they're just starting with divines that are being released or re-released. There isn't anything for some to work towards if there's a trophy for it, but it hasn't been released in a while.

No matter which divines are added, or the task for them, the players who've already been working those divines for years will still be starting from scratch. A Greyfell resurrection trophy will take forever unless you have many many Greyfell since you have have to wait at least 30 days to resurrect him, for example (to get his gifts).
Legacy Ann
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Legacy Ann wrote:

They've said they will eventually be adding the other series to the trophies, but they're just starting with divines that are being released or re-released. There isn't anything for some to work towards if there's a trophy for it, but it hasn't been released in a while.

No matter which divines are added, or the task for them, the players who've already been working those divines for years will still be starting from scratch. A Greyfell resurrection trophy will take forever unless you have many many Greyfell since you have have to wait at least 30 days to resurrect him, for example (to get his gifts).


Those are good points, it does make sense to stagger the releases for when the series are actually obtainable. I hope for a Pastry re-release soon in that case, as that's probably the one I'd get the most usage out of.

And the Grayfell one was a little bit of a stretch (especially since those are very costly as you have to pay for the perk) but admittedly the Grail ones can take that long or longer if you have only one, so it wouldn't be the first time.

It's also a little strange to me that they're concerned about players not having anything to do in regards to the Divines and yet they keep adding different Event trophies which are, by default, not able to be worked on unless that Event is happening? It seems like the old Golden Horseshoe method was just all-around better in every respect. I don't understand the logic behind the new Event trophies at all, I wish we could have a way to organize our trophy page somehow to keep only the ones we're working on on display instead of having to scroll through millions of unworkable 0% bars, it's just cluttered the way it is now.
Crookedstar915
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