I have to say something. I just have to. And I am very much a blunt person, and all you'll ever hear from me when I care to speak up is raw and brutal honesty.

Okay, let's get into this.

1. I get that you're trying to encourage people to buy passes. I get it, You're a business. Of course you want to turn a profit. But you're doing it the wrong way. Sorry, not sorry. Encourage players to play, and the money will follow.

2. The pass horse change. I'll address this first.

I have spent 7.5 years out of my ACTUAL life to be able to support my pass usage. I have spent 7.5 growing up and gradually understanding the game more to get to this point. I spend so much time on this game, to support my VIP account and otherwise pass spending. And of course I'll use what I've got, which are pass horses. VIP account is a luxury. You achieve it either by hard work or paying for it. That's life. And as it should be. YES, it is a privilege and a luxury. But I actually bought my VIP privilege. I didn't place in rankings or whatever. I cut the corner to get the luxury, and I support the luxury with hard work. If you're really going to take away two years of hard work, what has the point been all along?

I'm not opposed to changing the system. But I still want to be able to gain the same amount with the same amount of work. 30 passes a month, that is taking care of 100 horses for 6 months. Daily.

3. The co-management change. This will affect teams. I'm not working hard for those 10 co spots to be essentially useless. The people who have co, have co because they either:

-Help me
-Use my fillers
-Use my resources (which I have worked for)
-Efficiently work things WITH me

This won't only affect teams. This will affect everyone. WHY in heavens is only one person allowed to work the account at a time? Why am I not supposed to be able to monitor what they're doing on my account? That's just a step backwards in making it safer. No, scratch that, that's 40 steps backwards. When I can't see what's going on, IT IS NOT SAFE.

4. Everything else:
We've adjusted to the blup change. We've adjusted to you suddenly enforcing rules you have never enforced. We've been GOOD to you and accepted a lot of things which didn't benefit us as players, because we're loyal. We've grown up with this game. We love this game. But you're taking the fun parts out of it for us. You're demotivating your player base. WE are your income. So please listen to us. Please hear us. And please take everyone into consideration. Because I, personally, do not trust our ambassadors to promote what the entire community wants over their own wants. No shade to our ambassadors, but I wouldn't trust anyone to do that.

On another note, we all know you have the power to pm all of us. We all know you can make surveymonkey surveys for all of us to answers. Use the tools you have available, and please listen.

I'm not expecting the game to be without microtransactions. I'm not expecting to winning every divine without spending a cent. What I am expecting, is that hard work and years of gaining knowledge about the game will continue to pay off somehow.

That is all.

Team multis are accounts on teams who are inactive that other players use I guess. However, I find this point invalid, if the person has given you co and permission to use then I don't see an issue, it's a different story if the said person hasn't given permission but you just go on anyway.

If that is their goal with the changes for the system, why not just deactivate co on players accts who haven't logged on themselves over a set period of time? It works just as well without actually dumbing down the system we have currently. In fact the proposed changes are just really irrelevant and make people do more work in the sense every time they log out they have to work out who to activate co to. Who even has time for it? It's supposed to be a fun game not my second job.

And at this point I feel like by micromanaging things like this, they are making it feel like a job. If that is the case I will find another game which is less of a chore to go and play. I can easily take my business and any money I put into the game to another game which don't make it like a second job.

And here I was hoping that the ambassadors would speak up for the players.

I personally don't really blup anymore since the blup change, due to how sore my finger gets due to an injury I got at the end of last year and the extra 18 like agings to get to 100% blup does add a strain after awhile. If this co change comes in it will be even harder for me as I have a friend give me a hand when it came to breeding and aging to save my finger getting strained from it as much. I really don't want to be forced to blup when no one else is on simply because it takes a while for me if I want to prevent being in pain as a result.

Have to say it is very hot in this topic currently, but can't really say I am surprised. I feel Howrse really needs to spend some time playing this game from a competitive standpoint to see just how much this co change will impact a lot of the players here.

They claim to play it, they are welcome to come onto my team and see how teams work from the insides

How is this going to work with VIP account? Can we switch the 10 co perk out for something else more useful if it is being changed? I know it's included but it's a bit pointless when it's pretty much going 10 steps backwards and it's not even worth it, yet we all pay 10 passes a month for these features.

I'm sure all competetive teams would let the devs have a run with them, if that makes things better for us. And not useless changes like the co change.

If they want a semi relaxed team they are welcome to trial our Irish Hunter team as well and see that even those on the more relaxed side still rely heavily on Co to function properly.

Hmmm, this change won't effect me personally since I blup using one filler on my own account, but I can see how this will just make things harder for the teams. We all know that there will always be cheating on this game. Comp filling with other team members has been an accepted form of cheating. That being said, as much of a pain as this might be, all you gotta do is ask your friends and or team members to fill for you(If they are on). That being said, I've been watching the numbers drop over the last three years from around 2 million players to about 100,000 players. If the Howrse community gets any smaller, then who are we sell gonna sell our horses to? Less players means less people buying passes and selling horses that cost passes. Less and less comps are even available because of the massive drop in populace. So no, I'm against any changes that will discourage people from wanting to play this game.

I am trying to understand all of this. No, as of right now I am not a pass buyer, and NO I don't get the divines. That is just part of life. I am hoping in the future to be able to buy passes and collect them then. But I do use the pass horse. So now I get a diamond for it. What am I do with a diamond.? You can't save them up and buy special horses, like unis, new horse breeds, and divines. What are diamonds even good for? I think in the past you could get 10 and change them to passes, is that what is now? Will take me forever to change them.
And I do think this effects all of us, even the pass buyers. Yes, I use the pass horse to get passes, but I use the passes to buy the horses from other players, the divines,. special coats, special breeds? So if I can't get my passes, I can't buy from you. This will hurt Howrse, or us. I don't like it. Will Howrse listen and change it or we just stuck.

I don't use co-management much since I stopped team breeding, but here is my take on the changes to it:

Having to activate it every time you log out:

My main question is why? I don't see how this is of benefit to anybody. If you have given someone co-management, then surely it is because you want them to be able to access your account when you are not online. If you did not want them accessing your account, you would remove them from co-management. It only takes a few clicks to remove/add people, so it is not a huge chore to temporarily remove someone if you don't want your account accessed for a while. Having to activate it every time seems like an unnecessary hassle, especially for those of us who never/rarely properly log out and instead just close our Howrse tab or move on to another site once we are done playing.
It could be improved by giving players the option of having co-management on or off by default. Those who prefer to have it off by default could still have the option to activate it temporarily upon log out, while those who prefer having it on could temporarily deactivate it upon log out if they wished. I still wouldn't understand why anyone would give someone co but not want it active, but at least the option would be there for them without inconveniencing everyone else.

The co-management activation only lasting for 30 days:

This I don't mind. It isn't unreasonable to put measures in place that will prevent people from using an inactive account indefinitely. Requiring the account owner to log on at least once a month to keep co-management active seems reasonable to me. It is, after all, supposed to be a feature that allows players to aid one another, not a feature to allow players to all but give their account to another player.

Accessing via the co-management page:

This I prefer to the current method of logging in with their username and our password. It is easier than copy/pasting the usernames of friends who have weird characters or difficult (for me) to spell names.

Only one person being able to access an account at a time:

I suppose the answer to the question 'why' would be because co-management was never intended to be used to as a way for multiple players to be on an account at once. That said, I don't really see the harm in it being used that way. If it was a technical issue then I would understand but I don't see that being true when it has been used that way for years and we've never had a hint that it caused problems for the server or anything.
Not being able to access a teammate's fillers because someone else was busy AP farming on their account, or they were online but busy with something else and unable to fill themselves, or simply because they forgot to activate co would quickly have become annoying, especially on my smaller team where there were only 4 of us to start with, so I can see why current team players are unhappy with the change. Getting kicked off mid-BLUP would be irritating, too.
It isn't a change that will affect my game but it also isn't a change I can see a reason for making when it is going to disrupt a lot of players' play styles.


The changes are supposed to make co-management "safer and easier to use" but I don't see how. Only one thing, a relatively minor adjustment to accessing co-management, makes it easier to use. None, as far as I can see, do anything to make it "safer".
I just don't see the point in making a change that isn't going to improve anything but is going to annoy a lot of people.

is howrse aware they're losing the players who invest money into passes? Doubt they're that blind but cmon, i get that forcing rules and changes is one easy way to earn more money and make more business out of a game, but maybe listening to the players will be better in the long run???

Oh dear, this is so sad it's practically hilarious. Most of what I want to say has already been said, but I'd like to analyze this replacement of passes with diamonds a bit more. Originally, this first change I heard about pass horses was a year or two back when Howrse planned to do away with getting passes from horses altogether and instead create a ranking for number of horses killed, and the ability to receive a divine (Yggdrasil) once you killed a certain number. You would get 10 passes from the player loyalty meter instead. I'm not sure if this exact change is implemented on other servers such as Italian (@Aldebaran, maybe clear that up for me, or any other players on servers that have an implemented change, thanks!). But anyway, replacing diamonds with passes is frankly, a destructive decision. A cheat. Because diamonds, it seems very clear to me, are much less valuable than a pass.

Case in point, one diamond equals 1 AP while a pass equals 20. 10 diamonds equal one pass when you want to buy a BMIs or APs. Also, you can't use them to buy anything in the sales that requires a pass or more. So essentially, you can buy only items, and not everyone has a divine to spend diamonds on, so I'm ruling that out as a really useful aspect (I am under the impression it is very exhaustive to use diamonds on a divine to get significant skill gain). And may I point out that since less players will have passes to spend, people selling horses for passes also will not get passes, and behold, down goes the economy for horses with a price of passes. I suppose the idea is to get more players to buy passes but it is evident that that is not working because Howrse is doing stuff like this.

So Howrse is definitely shorting us out by replacing passes with diamonds, which have a much lower capacity for usefulness than a pass does, in my opinion. Not only that, but they're replacing 10 passes with 90 diamonds, and as 90 diamonds equal a pass, that's, if we pretend for a second that 10 diamonds is equivalent in use to a single pass, that's only 9 passes, so Howrse is still cheating players. What does that say to me, as player? It says, your opinion doesn't matter, we want/need more money so we're going to take something that affects everyone away and replace it with something of significantly less value in an attempt to get you to buy what we just took away. Cool, thanks! You know, an easy solution I see to this problem would be simply lowering the pass prices, or creating some special offers.

I don't know if the Ambassadors will be able to have much sway regarding these changes, for passes and co-man, but if you can do anything, //please do something!// Also, no offense to the Ambassadors, but it would be so easy so just take a poll that all players could answer instead of having Ambassadors communicate to them (as far as I can tell, Ambassadors aren't allowed to communicate developments and such to us players, but correct me if I'm wrong, it is true that we have yet to see what they can do as the Ambassador program was just implemented). But I digress. My last comment would be that I think it would be hilarious if we could do a cross-server movement where we all quit the game for 2-3 days (since we can log back in within 5 days to stop the process) and give them all a big scare. Might actually get their attention. Watch me get punished for that suggestion, oh boy. But I sem-seriously think it could be effective.

Y E S.

Also, it takes them ten minutes to set up a survey on surveymonkey, then another half hour at most to get that pm right. Then just send it to everyone. I don't get what ambassadors are for if they essentially do that on a smaller scale.

And when you think about it that way, the ambassadors program is statistically incorrect! Would you believe? 100 people isn't a big enough group to take some real info from. That's why you usually can't trust one study on 9 people.

And everyone deleting their accounts is the perfect protest.

HAHAHA watch them change it so deleting accounts only takes 36 or 74 hours to take full effect. wouldn't be surprised.

Do you mean in a public forum? They can't speak about anything they talk about with Howrse *in secret* because it will break some contract they had/have to sign. It's so bizarre how our ambassadors cannot talk to us (the people they represent!) about upcoming changes... which is pretty much what all of us are *almost* freely doing in this topic.

Luckily I didn't have to sign a non-disclosure and therefore am not muzzled so I can continue to voice my opinion here... provided I add spoiler tags, of course.

Be fair. They've only just been appointed. My understanding is they'll be asked about ideas that haven't been put into development yet: that's stuff that's due in perhaps 2 years time, not now. They certainly have not been asked about these changes.

on Tuesday they'll take away our last free passes and give us diamonds.

I'm just hoping the ambassadors see whats going on in the forums and report it to ownlet or whoever they report back to. If they do not listen to who they said they would listen to, I will be beyond disappointed.

If they chose to not bring this change up to ambassadors or to the players explicitly before implementing the changes, then they are fully aware of the inconveniences and the flashback response they will get from players.

These aren't children, they're adults working to make a business. Sadly, these people seem not to care for the players opinions like they claim to.

I am not 18 yet. I do not have a job. I have no means of purchasing passes with money. Once I could afford it, however, I have been planning to purchase. Im sure im not the only one who feels this way. Now, not so much. I'm not going to give my money to a game that does care and acts like this.

You c a n n o t expect children with no way of getting money of their own to give you money.

Taking away the pass horses takes away many players ability to gain passes. Market will crash. More people will quit the game.

That is all.

Just another person that wants to voice my dislike of these potential changes. The pass horse system is honestly one of the few things that makes this game fun for me and others who cannot buy passes.
While I'm not economics expert it seems to me that if you remove the pass horses then you remove a significant portion of the passes being spent on horses in the sales.
Less horses being bought for passes, less fun for the actual pass buyers such as the teams who I imagine prop the game up quite a bit.

Add on to the that the people who will leave or just stop playing if these changes go through and your heading towards a dead game, less people playing is less comps running, less buyers for teams and less EC's for everyone which would then lead to teams leaving I'm sure, because what's the point of playing a dead game?

As for the co management changes, while I don't use them myself, having read the opinions of others in this thread they look to be another pointless change being implemented by Howrse.

The biggest I've always seen with Howrse is that they do not listen to their player base, I've played this game on and off for the past 8 years or so and it seems that its always been the company forcing changes onto the games population. I guess it's all about profit at this point, but if you kill the game you'll end up with 0 profit.

I hope the ambassadors can make some meaningful change with regards to Howrse's attitude towards these things but I'm doubtful and it seems like smoke and mirrors more than anything else.