When the Snow Was Up to Our Necks

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 10 years 3 weeks ago

I’ve been playing SIM twelve game years, and in some ways it can seem almost like night and day, the differences between the conveniences we have now, which we didn’t have in the past.

The following are just a miniscule sampling of ways SIM has changed since I’ve been playing.


RACE VIEWER
How did we ever get by without actually seeing the races? This is only the third year that we’ve been able to view the races, but now it seems nuts that I, for one, was fully content without the race viewer.

By the way, if you came to the game later, and don’t know how to see the races “live” (ie, without knowing how the horses finished), here’s the instructions The Steward gave when the viewer was unveiled:

“If you are wanting to see your races without knowing the results, here is how you do it. Go to the race search page, and type in whatever conditions your horse ran, whether it's 'Week 1 Arcadia Park' and select the race, or what. Obviously don't check the 'View Entries/Results' at the bottom button. Then the list will come up, click the TV icon, and watch the race!”

I do the above for the first race I watch of the night, and then after that, I just delete the race number in my browser, and replace it with the race number of the next race I want to watch. I’ve written down all the race numbers of the races I want to see before watching that first race.


MANAGING HORSES
Races didn’t always automatically split. We got that ability with SIM 4.0 in Year 24. Before that, if players were frustrated with their horse being on the also-eligible list for a race, they had to ask The Steward to create another race. There was even a thread for this purpose. Sometimes, for example, if a player asked for a second NW2 in Japan, The Steward would point out, “There’s a NW2 in Australia that only has four entries.” And then the player might protest that they didn't want to ship their horse that far for a mere NW2.

If you sponsored a race (aka “Create a Race”), you had to be super careful about making sure the conditions for the race matched the horse you created it for. It happened frequently that, for example, a player would sponsor a classified allowance race for his horse, only to find out after creating the race that his horse wasn’t listed as eligible, because though the horse ran regularly in stakes races, he hadn’t actually won a stakes race, and classified allowances are only for stakes winners. So, the player would have to ask The Steward to change the sponsored race to an ordinary allowance, or else shrug it off and waste the game points. Eventually, the last page of the “Create a Race” process began to show your horses that were eligible for the race you were creating, so you could see right away if the horse the race was intended for could actually enter. A whole lot of sponsored “mistakes” went away.

Players are now a lot smarter about filling races. While it isn’t any kind of technological change in SIM, it’s been a few years since the Steward would use horses owned by Alexandra Jaysman to get a race up to at least three entries. She used to enter “filler” horses all the time. You could always count on your horse to defeat the AJ horses.

Before Year 24, there wasn’t any such thing as schooling your horse over jumps, to see if it had steeplechase ability. If your horse wasn’t doing well on the flat, then you’d turn it into a steeplechaser, and enter it into a jump race to see how it did. If it did poorly, you couldn’t change it back into a flat racer.

The Alaska claimer circuit has only been around about half as long as I have. Used to be, you would have a horse win a maiden claiming race, and then you had a heck of a time trying to find a NW2 for a tag. If you ran an allowance NW2, you were competing against borderline stakes horses, and your little claimer had no chance. If you ran in an open claimer, your one-race winner was often facing tough old geldings that had many wins to their credit, and sometimes six-figure earnings. When The Steward would complain about all the marginally decent horses sent to Greener Pastures, some of us players would complain that we had nowhere to run the horses that weren’t good enough to compete at allowance level, or open claiming level. So, one day, there were tracks in Alaska, with nothing but claiming races. Though I think the Steward was worried the circuit wouldn’t work (she threatened that we players had better be filling those races), two tracks quickly doubled to four and, finally, claiming was an active part of SIM, since horses could be claimed for low prices actually similar to what they were worth

Group training, vetting, and horse whispering have been around just a few game years. I used to go into every single horse and walk it two days before race day. It’s already hard to believe that I ever did that.

After a race was over, and you wanted to ship it to a farm, the shipping page used to show all the farms alphabetically. Since I ran all breeds and types, my horses ran all over the world, and I had cheat sheet I'd created, where I’d researched where the closest farm was to each track, so I would know where to ship each horse after its race. It was such a wonderful thing when the shipping page was changed so that the farms were listed by closest distance to the horse’s current location, rather than alphabetically. I happily threw out the cheat sheet.

Mixed breeds didn’t have a Steward’s Cup until Year 29. I think that was the same year the All Weather circuit got its Steward’s Cup races.

For breeding, the bloodstock agent, Anna Liza Doolittle, didn’t come along until Year 30. So, we couldn’t ask her about a mare’s quality, or get nick grades for crosses, until then.

It was also year 30 that we got the ability to ask assistant trainer Mary Weather about equipment. Before then, players pretty much tried to decipher equipment needs from the running lines after their horses were racing – never mind that some things, such as front or hind bandages, weren’t going to be revealed by the running lines.

It’s such a lovely thing that, when Steward’s Cup nominations are open, I can filter my Racing Barn to see which horses aren’t already nominated to the Steward’s Cup, because they’d been nominated in past years. Used to be, I had to go into every horses I thought was among the leaders in its division, and check to see if it was already nominated or not.


STATS
We couldn’t always sort columns. Now, when looking at almost any table of data in SIM, you can click on the heading of a column once or twice, and it will sort in ascending or descending order. This is a huge benefit if, say, you like buying a particular player’s horses, and want to sort the sales list by players. Or, are looking for horses by a particular sire. If you’re working out horses to determine equipment, you can sort their workout times to see which piece(s) of equipment had the fastest time. These are just a few examples of the many, many ways one can use this convenient sort feature.

When looking at entries for steeplechase races, the horse’s win/loss records used to include their flat races. A number of years back, they started showing just the record for races over jumps. The earnings, however, still reflect flat races.

It was some six or seven game years ago that the “Results” page in a player’s home office started tallying the stats for that day’s racing, as well as being able to sort the column by finish position. Before then, when I ran 50 horses on a Wednesday night, I had to go down the alphabetical list of every horse that ran, and count up how many were winners, how many were second, etc. I so love that I no longer have to do that.

We used to only be able to see our racing stats for the current year. Then, quite a while ago, we got our stats for all years that we’d been players. Later still, we got the breeder stats. The player rankings came along within the past three or four game years. Before then, you could only see which players had the most money.

For stallions, we didn’t always have rankings in the stud book. In fact, for mixed breeds, it was a while before the stud book broke the breeds down into distance types.

The Top 50 workout rankings came along just this season.


See, way back in Year 23, when I started SIM, things were a lot more difficult, in terms of the lengthy processes one had to go through to play the game. In retrospect, to borrow an analogy, it was like walking ten miles to school with the snow up to our necks.

Yet, despite all the improvements and conveniences, it still holds true that having an outstanding horse in one’s barn is just as elusive as it was before. It’s still just as dangerous to one’s success to take a black-or-white attitude toward any aspect of SIM, or to assume that a+b is always going to equal c.
The ongoing puzzles are still there, and that’s a huge part of what makes SIM such a great game. The other huge part is an administrative staff that is constantly thinking in terms of improvements to make SIM even more fun to play.

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