Yikes, just decrease the amount of APs found by waking horses to 500 horses and be done with it.

May I just point out one thing that always drives me nuts about these ranting sessions? People are saying that Howrse is dying because of all the changes being made. But that statement has been floating around since before Ubisoft took over. People have been saying it for years and it never happens. Right now, the Directories page states that there are over 130k players on this server with 280 connected at the moment. Howrse is not dying. The server's activity level has stayed fairly stable since I was a noob. Can everyone please stop spreading fake news? We get enough of that in the tabloids.

Although this change doesn't affect me, I would like to say that I think it would have been nice to be told about this change. I'm almost certain that there are plenty of people on this server who haven't read this forum and so don't even know that this has happened. Who knows, they may have realised that they are getting fewer APs but are just putting it down to luck and then getting frustrated about their luck. Personally, the only change I have seen is actually an increase in the number of APs I've been getting. Given that I barely use APs or work my horses due to time constraints, I thought it was a little odd.

I think it would be fairer on all players if you had made an announcement that this change "COULD" come into effect and then opened a forum for discussion on how to implement it and get players opinions, as has now been done on previous pages. THEN, see what the players want and discuss the issues with them from your point of view (through ZOwey etc.) so that they can see all sides of the argument and come to a fair agreement. HOWEVER, I know that Howrse doesn't work this way. They implement and then ignore backlash and say 'it's been implemented now so we can't change it'.

I know Howrse asks for VIP players opinions when it comes to events and some big changes , but it would be nice to think that you could value the opinion of smaller, non-pass-buying people like me.

Thats just my 2 cents worth.

I don't really care that there is a new way of AP collection, but I do care that we can't buy them from the store with Equus. Like they are an almost necessary part of the game and I wish they would be in the store for easy access. Passes, can be hard to come by sometimes and I would rather buy BMI items rather than APs but I have to spend it on APs. If they are a necessary part of the game like they almost are, I would be just fine dumping some Equus out for them.
I usually don't have enough time to farm 1000 or even 20 horses and I would rather just BLUP one horse in between University Classes. But I lose tons of APs that way and there isn't a great way to just buy them again. So I so wish that would be changed :/
Also, I wish people would stop being so callous about the AP farming problem. After working 5 years in customer service I totally sympathize with the team when they are defending themselves in the nicest possible way from people who are hating on them for a decision made that was intended to better the game. Just, I dunno, be considerate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

People are reacting so strongly because it is yet another change that wasn't even announced or even warned about in advance, so I feel that we have a right to voice our dislike considering this is massively impacting some of us.

I am happy to give them respect if the same could be returned, but it feels like we are being disrespected when we are not told about things, especially when they impact some of us, as, in my opinion, it isn't very considerate to hide things from those that play this game, and I am quite convinced that if they had actually announced it and warned us in advance, people would have taken it better.

I feel that we should have a feedback forum or something that we can express our opinions without feeling that we will be sanctioned

Well, the CORE of the ACTUAL problem is that it doesn't matter to Howrse what and how do we feel.

Today waking up to face less APs. Not a word about it at all. Anywhere. Cool. That's cool. Why wouldn't it be? It's not affecting them, it is affecting us. It's not their problem.

Tomorrow I might wake up and find in my inbox a message from Howrse telling me half my horses are taken away, because I have too many of them that are too good and this is giving me an advantage over the new players. Why not? Who cares what do I feel and think?! And why should they care, right?!

<font color="#b402cf">I haven't had a chance to read all of the comments left since I last posted, but I will do that shortly and answer questions.

I just wanted to let you know that your feedback has prompted us to take a closer look at this.

We're currently looking at how many AP players were getting before and after the change.

If you know that you've definitely seen a big change, please let me know here so I can include your AP history in the investigation. </font>

So what I have understood so far from ZOwey's responses is that the intent of the change was just to balance the scale towards higher chanes of finding the aging points when we start the farm and as we progress through taking care of more horses, that day those chances drop?
That is actually a fantastic change, since it takes a lot to look after all 1000 and would take some load off those players who did try to go for all since would the last lets say 200 horses really be worth the possible N amount? (theoretically if we could find 150 and first 800 give you 130 I for sure aint gonna bother 200 more for 20 )

So the issue that arose was that we actually seemed to have dropped the overall chances as well which, if I understand correctly, wasn't the goal at all. I completely understand why this change was not announced because if it had gone as (what i think was) planned most of us doing large amounts wouldn't have even noticed at all.
Thank you to the Admin team for responding and I harbor hope we can get back to the approximate amounts we had before the change

I farmed yesterday with Shenma trigger and found 151 total (couple might have been from a divine haven't checked). It used to be closer to 200 and up on Shenma days for me.

Farming currently for today as well, but slowly to see changes per each 100

I did some calculating and I have been getting an average of 107 aging points a day for 8 days. On the first day I even got Shenma bonus and I got only 144 aging points - and in the matter of fact just the day before when the odds were what thet used to be - I got 143 aging points. So with Shenma I got only one more than what I used to have on a regural daily basis.

So If I calculate those 8 days which I noticed these new odds going on, I did get 899 aging points when normally I would have got an average of 143 or so aging points a day (which including one Shenmaday I had) would have been 1214. So basically I lose 315 aging points in this period of time. This means that I would have to compensate this amount with at least two aging packs (and I would still be losing those 15 aging points) and pay for this with almost 1000 passes. So you are basically taking away what was once free and making us pay passes for that. And I honestly don't see why that is fair in any perspective.

In the last 3 days, I've been getting from 100 to 110 APs each day. Today I also have Shenma trigger and I'll let you know how many I get once I finish farming, but my prediction is 150.

Reading other comments and from my understanding of the situation, it seems that the system is working just as you team wanted it to function, but once again, taking into consideration the extremely widespread discontent among players, let me suggest you to keep the farmable APs to 150, but allow players find 80% of them in the first couple hundred horses (let's say 300), and then the remaining 20% caring for the other 700 horses!

*70%

150x0.7= 105 APs caring for the first 300 horses


*30%

150x0.3 = 45 APs caring for the last 700.

<font color="#b402cf">One small comment about catching scripters, we investigate every report that we get.

It's just that there are people who legitimately care for horses very quickly. We have to be careful not to sanction players who are not breaking the rules. </font>

Started at 10.354

100 - 10373 - gained 19
200 - 10381 - gained 7 (+1 from Divine)
300 - 10394 - gained 13
400 - 10402 - gained 8
500 - 10415 - gained 13
600 - 10426 - gained 11
700 - 10435 - gained 9
800 - 10441 - gained 6
900 - 10451 - gained 10
1000 - 10453 - gained 2

In total 99 gained out of which 1 came from a divine.
I would have expected to see a bigger difference in the first 500 however it is a clear drop from when i used to farm all 1000 - it was closer to 130-180 a day taking luck into account on different days.

<font color="#b402cf">I'm not sure I understand what the second number in your data means. (10373 and the rest of the column beneath it).


EDIT nevermind, I see that it's your total AP. </font>

Regarding the new ap changes. Most older players who are farming tend to have access to divines like shenma and not only have 1 but multiple ones because they have a more advanced game. Remember when you start out and it took maybe 5-10 days to blup and breed one horse just because aps were so hard to get?
Advanced players tend to get aps much faster. Not only just from breeding farms but regular blupping, contests, divines that give out aps, and using luck items.


I for one, do not farm more than just my personal divines now and can easily get almost 100 aps per day just from that alone. I see no problem with this as the players who used to farm 1000 horses per day went down significantly after the scripts were computer generated to ban you.
So the number of players farming per day which you can see in the rankings is quite small.
Yesterday alone, only 50 people cared for over 1000 horses, thats including blupping.

I did some calculation and calculated my APs from last two weeks. I took care of all 1000 horses each day (in the finnish server, my account is Najma).

8.5 - 161
9.5 - 156
10.5 - 152
11.5 - 148
12.5 - 253 (shenma bonus)
13.5 - 173
14.5 - 112
15.5 - 142 (shenma bonus)
16.5 - 106
17.5 - 108
18.5 - 177 (shenma bonus)
19.5 - 149 (shenma bonus)
20.5 - 102
21.5 - 125

I assume that this change came 14th day. You can surely see the decreased number of APs after that. This clearly shows that atleast I can't get as many APs as I used to. The average AP gain has been over 150 and now it has dropped to just over a hundred. And it has already affected the amount of horses I have been able to blup since this change, beacause I gained nearly 500 APs less than I used to.

Just a small correction: it does not include blupping as ageing a horse counts as if you are waking him up. So, using simple maths, blupping two horses would mean waking them up about 120-140 times, but the ranking would show that you took care of only two horses. This means that you wouldn't need to care for 1000 horses, but only about 850.

Additionally, there are rumours saying that AP odds drastically decrease after about 500 horses, so anyone caring for more would be penalised, and looking at the rankings, this would affect well over 100 players in the international server alone. And yet, this still does not consider those who have blupped during the day, meaning that, again, this would affect more players that you think it does.

And by the way, let's consider competitive those players who take care for more than 200 horses a day (which is a joke, because 200 horses are nothing, but still, let's consider them competitive). They are about 225, but those who take care of more than 500 horses are about 120, meaning that HALF of the people that actually base their game on AP farming and blupping are affected and penalized by this.

I have also experienced a drop in AP on a different server, it was large and noticeable enough for me to notice on the 17th, only a couple days after it was introduced silently... It will have a massive impact on everyone's game, it's 1/3 less AP daily if you farm large amounts so not sure why the game team thought people wouldn't notice. If you previously worked 600 horses, you're now getting the same as those who work the full 1k (almost double!) after the change!

Even if you farm small amounts, the AP you get is still slightly decreased... It's especially frustrating because over there some people have very large stocks of AP that they've built up over several years farming with the better odds. Now I will have to try to compete with only getting 2/3 of the AP I used to get and that these people got their AP stocks from, it's not fair. Honestly if this change was applied when everyone was at 0 ap I wouldn't take too much of an issue, it would be even and fair for everyone. But it's just not possible to catch large stocks of ap now! For example if a player has 40k AP (which a rival does) it would now take 400 days of farming 1k a day, without using any- to get to that level. Before it would have taken 270. This makes a massive difference in the long term and on a large scale! A smaller drop in AP or the same with the staggered odds as you farm would be fine,but this is just too much of a nerf to those farming now! It hurts new players!

Here's my AP, hopefully this is useful to help balance this change, as apparently the game team doesn't think it's that big of an impact. I hope it was just a mistake to drastically alter the max aps found daily:
12th:160/1000
13th: 159/1000
14th: 103/1000
15th: 98/1000
16th: 100/1000
17th: 96/1000
You can clearly see the change from these numbers alone, despite being luck based it doesn't waver that much over 1000 horses; I got 94 yesterday from 1000 again, that's a massive decrease in odds! If this change hadn't have gone through, I would have 350 extra ap right now. But instead, every week, I will have 350 less than if I'd have been farming like this earlier in the year...

If you want to help players who cant spend so much time farming, why dont you just higher the odds for first 200 cared horses and then leave the odds for finding APs as they were?

Why do you keep punishing players who are willing to spend extra time in the game and care for big amounts of horses? You always hide behind "players who can't spend too much time/new players/players who cant age pass horses". It's ridiculous! Where will you do any kind of change to reward your truly loyal players who spend hours and hours in the game actually? Me as a player who cared regularly for my pass horses and also for my AP horses to get enough APs for my team I feel bullied by your behaviour towards hard working players. Once you will remove an option to get enough APs which are essential for playing this game, I'm out of here, deleting my account from every server and will tell all my possibly interested friends to definitely not start playing this game ever.

After removing pass horses I made jokes about how you will take free APs from us soon too. Seeing I was actually not joking at all makes me very upset. After the divine dust feature, I started to think you actually want to make the game better and you started to listen to players, now I feel betrayed again and the more often this happens, the more disappointed from this game I get every time.

Sorry for this rant, but your behaviour towards the player base is the worst compared to any online game I ever played and I played really A LOT of them. Have you ever seen any online review about howrse? I did, you should too.

ha I logged into howrse just to read this.

For the past year howrse has worked to eliminate all of its “veteran” players because they have gotten so jaded and don’t stuff howrse’s pockets anymore. The blup change, the spring cleaning, and now ap changes are a campaign to completely eradicate non pass buying veteran players. congrats howrse it is working!

howrse needs to attract new players and make it easy for them, so they can dump money into the game. This is just ultimate greed because the game has nothing to offer anymore.

but I’m sure ow and the admins gave themselves a pay raise for this innovative idea

FACTS

<font color="#b402cf">Although I think most people would like to be able to give themselves raises, that's not how it works. At least not here.

Thanks to those who are providing numbers. I have added your information to the investigation.

We should have more info to share soon.

</font>