Show Dilemma

[Devolare]

You're right, I read your conversation with Nate a little more closely. Also, Pardon my massive post. x'DDD

But I don't know if GP or limiting shows to newbies will necessarily fix things either. GP is based on overall stats (plus other factors, including some hidden), not the specific ones required for a particular discipline. So a horse could technically be the biggest star at dressage, let's say, but the stats that aren't being used could be the worst in the entire game so the GP could be low. And it goes the other way too... a horse could have a decent GP simply because it's got okay stats across the board, but it's not going to win any shows because it doesn't have the high stats needed to compete with the horses that are monsters (high stats, high GP, all around wrecking balls -cough- argent's ponies -cough- x'D) in that area.

As a side note, AC GPs can range anywhere from 24k to 39k. At least from what I've seen... I started up a new project that requires massive amounts of foundation horses and that's what I observed. I didn't get a 39k, I only saw one from browsing around peoples things, however, I did just get a 37k AC Tarpan. If anyone wants, I can run up some statistics about all of the AC horses I've gathered (30 at this point, but I'm going to need close to 50 before I'm done with my project). In fact, if anyone else wants to give me information about their foundation horses, I'll gladly add that into my data. If I get enough I might be able to do it per breed or something.



As for the newbies, that would be a great idea, but the problem there lies with the fact that people aren't just stuck with their own horses or ones from the AC. You can buy really great horses that are trained even as a newbie in the market. I got my start originally from buying some high stat, champion arabians that were selling for cheap in the market. A low level person could easily win all the shows if that were to happen, and you're back to the same problem.

Which btw, you can do well in shows and get first place with AC horses, it just depends on the discipline and the horse. In fact, I was doing some testing on my other account with this stuff. I moved all of my horses to this account for storage and tried starting again on my second. It had no years on it, no training, 2 levels, and 100+ slots for horses cause all I use it for is storage. Training was unbelievably tough, but I did get an AC forest horse somewhat trained by age 10 and he could place in the local shows for Driven Dressage, Dressage (tho it was a little rough), Hunter, and Western pleasure. A lot of times it wasn't consistent, but it was do-able.

[Scythian]

The following AC horses appear in "Top Horses" overall competition rankings:

Points

#8 Deacon -- North African Barb (32,898)
#13 No Help -- Belgian (29,405)
#19 Deliela -- Arabian (26,827)

Wins

#9 Deliela -- Arabian (249)

Earnings

#10 Deliela - Arabian $411,809
#11 Eloquent Damsel -- Shetland Pony $390,877
#14 Deacon -- North African Barb $315,822
#15 Princess Shield -- Shetland Pony $314,551
#17 Silver Seal -- Shetland Pony $287,320

One of the other horses is only one generation removed from the AC:
Earnings
#7 Prince of the Hunt -- Shetland Pony $473,217

There is considerable variety of experience and expertise in this game. Also luck. I have been, on the whole, very lucky. Although I work and learn as best I can.

[Argent II]

The GP issue was already addressed in the original conversation.

I highly doubt people will be selling off their genuinely competitive, top-tier horses at prices that newbies can afford. Regardless, the issue is protecting newbies from being completely squashed early on; if they're savvy enough to seek out established horses, then they'll have to compete in open competition. If at all possible, the newbie limit will be restricted to horses bred by the newbies or from the AC.

----

And exactly how many of those are owned by established players vs new players? Are they in competitive disciplines, or in the empty ones? Are they earning six figures off of 1000 entries, or 100?

[Weaving]

I'll hold my hands up, I don't enter my horses into anything until they're pretty much fully trained 90%+ in all relevant stats. I do this simply because it gives them a good head start on getting their win numbers up. There aren't any rules against it and I didn't realise it was actually an annoyance until now...maybe i'll stop?

Anywho, I think shows with a training cap could be interesting, because it would be a much more level playing field for everyone. However, whilst I think the training cap could be a good idea, I'm not so sure about the GP cap. I have a *virtually* unbeatable log pull stallion and his GP is only 42ksomething, which isn't that high as he has a red but competitively unimportant stat which pulls it right down. I don't think a GP cap unless set VERY low could successfully weed out the top competitors from the rest.

The bit someone mentioned about having really elite showing circuits sounds like a brilliant problem in theory but a lot of competitions don't get enough entries as is so I doubt segregating competition even more would ever work in practice. Its a tough one!

[Devolare]

The GP issue was already addressed in the original conversation.

Too much green, my brain can't handle it. x'D

I highly doubt people will be selling off their genuinely competitive, top-tier horses at prices that newbies can afford. Regardless, the issue is protecting newbies from being completely squashed early on; if they're savvy enough to seek out established horses, then they'll have to compete in open competition. If at all possible, the newbie limit will be restricted to horses bred by the newbies or from the AC.

People do it all the time. I think it was Spritz who bought up a bunch of grades (I was looking at them too the other day) that beat a lot of records in Saddleseat. And since I've started up my new project, where I haven't had much time to focus on breeding for stats, I've been buying up really good show horses simply to get money/PT from local shows. None of them were really that expensive since the markets are kinda rough atm.

And perhaps that might help. Restricting it to AC horses, I mean. The ones being bred by them might also get into some grey area cause anyone can stud out any horse and you could get really high stat foals without much effort. I'm not sure how that one would work out.

[Xant’hippe]

I'll hold my hands up, I don't enter my horses into anything until they're pretty much fully trained 90%+ in all relevant stats. I do this simply because it gives them a good head start on getting their win numbers up. There aren't any rules against it and I didn't realise it was actually an annoyance until now...maybe i'll stop?

It's not common, or expected, for any competitor to give up an advantage. You're simply being patient. The example of "train -then- show" has been advocated, demonstrated, and proven by Argie.

The only reason I (and I suspect, some others) enter youngsters is that I get impatient. Also I want to see how they are shaping up.

Anywho, I think shows with a training cap could be interesting, because it would be a much more level playing field for everyone. However, whilst I think the training cap could be a good idea, I'm not so sure about the GP cap. I have a *virtually* unbeatable log pull stallion and his GP is only 42ksomething, which isn't that high as he has a red but competitively unimportant stat which pulls it right down. I don't think a GP cap unless set VERY low could successfully weed out the top competitors from the rest.

Wading into the minefield here: Training cap would discriminate -against- the competitors who have the diligence and patience to train properly. This is one of the few areas where players are given credit for effort, and have an advantage of sorts with the computer's judging formulae.

Something we already have that works -sort of- like a training cap is the ability to set age limits.

But then we get into "what's fair" again, because an AC horse/pony is already 4 years old and totally untrained when adopted.

The GP is an interesting stat, but we got along OK without it. Croissant II's "only 42k" is still higher than many, and he holds one of the rare Greens in Strength. This makes him unbeatable in Log Pull (for now), and highly formidable in other harness events, such as Marathon and Obstacle Driving. It may be that GP is significant in -breeding- but not quite so much in -performing-.

The bit someone mentioned about having really elite showing circuits sounds like a brilliant problem in theory but a lot of competitions don't get enough entries as is so I doubt segregating competition even more would ever work in practice. Its a tough one!

Quite a few shows wait for days to get enough entries, particularly in levels 1-9.

Scythian's point was that at level 10 horses with comparatively little experience and points are competing directly with Supreme Master Grands with 10K or more points. I think we'd have enough entrants for 10 and 10 plus even if further levels were instituted (the computer should then directly sort entrants by Champion level or total points earned). It's morally a rather cheap victory when a horse with 12.5K points beats out a hopeful with 125.

[Nate]

As Argent and I discussed at a later time which we didn't pull out of the chat records, Larissa is planning on requiring horses to learn skills in addition to being physically conditioned. Hopefully when horses are required to do such, this problem will lessen. However I don't think it would go away. The point of the adaptive level restrictions was to prevent this problem from happening. People would get good horses, show them once or twice maybe in lower levels, and then they'd be booted out to a higher one. Unfortunately, with hundreds of people showing their good horses one or twice in low levels, there's always an good but unshown horse ready to mop up the level 1 shows and prevent the horses that actually go there from ever winning.

I'm kind of torn between a lot of ideas for how to address the problem. Players could show their horses with partial training, but that would require a cultural change and wouldn't prevent a newer player who hasn't internalized the culture yet from doing it. Players on HWO have fully trained their horses before their first show since the dawn of time. It makes sense from a personal standpoint, just not as a whole.

I thought maybe if players were given a "minimum recommended showing level" based on....something. The horse's highest local show score versus the highest recent win score in that level or discipline, maybe, that players would do that. But as Argent pointed out, players who have really good horses KNOW those horses will sweep the lower levels clean and they do it anyway.

I thought maybe if it was limited by genetic potential (low limits) that would alleviate the issue, but there's a larger spread of GP in adoption center horses than I thought, plus the issues of GP not being discipline specific.

Limiting it by training would be a terrible idea as it would exclude the mediocre horses from EVER competing and would likely make our problem worse and drive away new players in droves.

Setting age limits on the shows is up to individual discretion. Most people don't do it. A lot of people have horses that are very well trained before they even hit two, and it would make filling less popular shows even harder, when it's already hard as heck.

So I guess the root of the problem is that some players know their horses will beat all level 1 horses and enter them anyway for whatever reason. Some player genuinely don't know where their horses should be. The second group could be helped. I don't understand the first group's motivation.

I suppose it could be sorted out by points, especially if Larissa puts an end to the immortal show horse/stud stored on a second account. However, we already have it sorted by points per start and the problem exists. Relatively inexperienced level 10 horses competing against Grand Master Champions is not the largest issue at play. It's those inexperienced horses with good genes, good confo, and 99%+ training showing in level 1 on the way to level 10 that's the largest issue.

[Nate]

And as an example, here are the lowest and highest winning scores at each of the levels for Western Pleasure on the first page of the entry results. They go back about a month since WP is a single-entry event and sometimes has issues getting enough horses for shows to run.

1: 36-48
2: 38-54
3: 42-52
4: 43-54
5: 36-54
6: 40-57
7: 41-53
8: 42-56
9: 43-55
10: 45-54

These scores do not have a clear order of progression. A horse who scores 45 on average could reasonably win or lose at literally any level. A horse who has a shadow of a chance at winning a level 10 show should not be capable of losing a level 1 show, and yet they can.

[Xant’hippe]

When any one person enters any one horse in any one competition, the likely purposes are to
--see how the horse is judged vs. existing competition.
--make money by placing 1-4.

Not even the computer can "suggest a level" without some public show activity as a basis.

As for one of those "super horses" coming along and beating all the level 1s (or 2s, 3s, 4s), the "super" isn't eligible for low levels after a day or so of that. Fortunately, "supers" don't come along every day.

For me, the real discouragements lie further up the levels. As Scythian/I have already mentioned.

[Weaving]

Totally out there comment which I imagine would be quite difficult to implement, but I'm gonna throw it out there anyway... Wasn't there a plan for discipline books? Now I don't know how specific these were gonna be, but if they did work like GP and give a numerical score, then that could be a good way to cap which horses could enter which competitions. This is all hugely hypothetical as I have no idea how the discipline books are going to work, but for example:

Horse 1 has a GP score of 35000 but has a dressage score of 40000, so it could only enter level 3+ dressage shows from the get go.
Horse 2 has a GP score of 41000 but has a dressage score of 29000, so it could enter any level dressage shows from the get go, however it has a harness racing score of 49000, so it could only enter level 5+ harness racing shows

So that could work better than the straight GP points system suggested as it would prevent Horse 1 wiping the floor with Horse 2 at dressage and vice versa for harness... Of course this all hinges on how the discipline books work (and whether it would make it too easy for people to know what their horses will really excel in...) [/musing]