HGG Community Forums

I think using bluegrass for statistics is good, maybe include stats from all three servers?

This season the cap on pastures did effect my breeding.

As a newer player, I was breeding auction foals and dumping them to make hbs for everything in the game. Since it isn't against the rules. And honestly if I wasn't able to (spend real life money) work out trading with other players for hbs I would have maxed the pastures and dumped foals this season too.

Established players have amazing show herds that bring in thousands of hbs everyday. They also have the room to dump unbreedable horses into their show herds and continue their daily show bonus.

As a new player growing a good show herd is very hard. Hbs are needing for breeding, buying horses, and ivs for barns. And this is an amazingly slow process with very low daily show bonus.

Knowing there is a cap now, I've been a bit more selective, and I know how fast hbs go so I'm minding not spending all my hbs. However now it's closer to the end of month I'll finish breeding majority of unbred mares in hopes to add more bootstrap fillies.

I know as time goes on (in 3 to 5 months, if im lucky) I'll be breeding my project lines. The more foals that don't pass ba, the more I'll want to breed to get breedable horses.

I'm working on bootstrapping and I have a few studs for this so chances are I'll use all my slots. Currently I've completely used 3 pastures and over half of my others.

In short if I wasn't able to spend real life money on this game I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am. Adding a cap on pastures (which I do understand and feel 3x is a fair cap) is a strain for new players who don't have a big daily show bonus. Auctioning horses/foals is the best way to make hb for a new player, in my experience.

Also if I hadn't spent real life money to get to where I am, I would feel like maybe this game wouldn't be worth playing. As a free game it seems real life money is some what needed to get a head, and really enjoy it. Other new players have made this same type of comment(s) as well. In addition to questioning if continuing playing is worth it.

I'm addicted to Hunt and Jump (Mesa is the only server I'm on) and I feel lucky I'm able to spend real life money, if I wasn't I'm not sure how long I'd last as a player. As hbs go fast, building a daily show bonus takes a lot of time, pastures can't be bought with hbs (and now there's a cap and an issue with auction foals).

Sorry this is long, just some of my thoughts. Maybe the players who are abusing the auction process could have hb fine, or some kind of hb penalty? It doesn't seem right for everyone to have stricter restrictions due to a couple players, as chances are they will abuse the auction even if we could only used them once.

I really do appreciate you, Ammit and the team, who make this game possible and continue to work hard so it's enjoyable for everyone.

I'm confused about how they created so many excess foals? Also when you initially brought this up I naively thought people were using the pastures a few hundred times like I was. I didn't realize that were making 15 million hbs a month on that. That's pretty crazy.

15 million is what they could do after the cap. You could breed and dump up to 12 times a season before. That same person who did 15 million could have done 75 million before the cap. Even at 2x, it will be 10 million auction profits in a season for them so it is not like you can't still make some money by breeding and selling foals. Just not to the same level.

I only started playing a couple of months ago and became addicted very quickly, similar to LookingGood I only stuck around because of the progress that was made with real money. When I first started, there was almost zero progress. I made as many horses as I could with the starting HBs, showed them twice, and then there was literally nothing to do until a week later on Sunday when the weekly HBs came in and I could show the horses another two times. I wondered why people even played this game if the progress was that slow. I would have quit within a week or two if I had not found a solution.

When I researched how to make HBs, the whole pasture breeding/auctioning thing to get some working income was talked about as if this was the normal way to play the game. I did it a bit, as well as regularly spending a LOT of RL money on more HBs, barns and pastures. I was checking in throughout the day every day, very active in chatrooms, having a lot of fun and expecting to play and support the game for a long, long time.

Now hearing the tactic suddenly called abusive and other very negative terms when there was no indication of this view before is really upsetting and I have literally almost completely stopped playing the game over the last few weeks. I very much would have been fine with it just being called an unintended use of pastures or something similar, but now I feel that several of us are being implied to be bad players. The fact that Ammit felt the need to state that there will be no fine/punishment amplifies the idea that there was something terribly wrong/evil with the tactic that we were led to believe was the normal and accepted way to play.

I am fine with the fact that it was unintended and we want to cut it down. I am just super uncomfortable with the way it was referred to so negatively in the forum threads.

I appreciate your kind reply. I really hate giving any kind of negative feedback at all, I know you work hard to keep this game running for us, and it must have been super stressful to make the decision to change how pastures work after the image generator caused such an unexpected overload, and knowing ahead of time that it might cause some negative feelings. I also went back to reread again and see that when you used the word "abusive" it was in reference to one person who went pretty crazy with the auctions.

"I made as many horses as I could with the starting HBs, showed them twice, and then there was literally nothing to do until a week later on Sunday when the weekly HBs came in and I could show the horses another two times."

Yes, I made creates until I reached the point limit. Without the HBs that I bought with real money that was used to make the majority of those creates, it would have taken a LONG time to build up enough daily income to be able to play more than five minutes per week on Sunday when the weekly allowance rolled in. About three months later of daily play, with approximately 1,200 horses in my barns and pastures and maybe half of them with 100+ points on them, I have a 10k daily payout which wouldn't even allow me to use all of my daily herd helpers. (Though this DOES encourage selectivity and planning ahead, which I appreciate.)

Perhaps I am just completely clueless about how quickly progress was intended and I do apologize for that and any other possible goof-ups, but as a working adult, I am absolutely grateful for the option to spend RL money, because it has allowed me to play at my own pace and feel like I am actually getting somewhere. I can't afford to play "the long game" with my free time at this stage of life.

As a brand new player (this week!) coming in with a fresh perspective, I can contribute the following thoughts:

1) I’m glad that the pasture breeding is being limited, because it definitely feels like the market is saturated. I find myself feeling like it is more chance than anything that someone might bid on the few horses I auction, even if they are decent quality compared to others. It also sounds like a loophole that needed to be addressed.

2) I do feel like starting out is very slow. Had it not been for the generous offer of $50k hbs from an established player for a horse of my choice, I would have been very frustrated after day 1. Even with the gift, I wish there were more “new player” incentives since I’ve already made it through almost all of the ones you get in the beginning. And I’m not someone who has much time every day to play, either.

3) I wish there were more rewards/incentives for small barns that wish to focus on quality from the onset. I don’t have it in me to “churn and burn” foals now to get the hbs I need for a steady income so that I can focus on quality “later,” and I don’t have the means to spend real money to buy them. I appreciate so much that this wonderful game is free, but I wish it was still a bit more accessible in the “free” version. The biggest thing for me here is that the free version doesn’t allow you to paper your horses, so you’re kind of flying blind if you’re trying to breed for top quality. I have a decent set of show horses for income, but that’s all luck from making new horses!

Just my two cents!

@Ammit I'm very confused right now. You said that pastures were being capped at 2x capacity for breeding, but mine still say the cap is 3x capacity. Between a funeral yesterday and today's post-work brain I need help. Was the cap just not changed yet?