Reflecting on 3 Years on the SIM

Original article written by Calia Mendez posted 3 weeks 2 days ago

Late last night, after many months paying only the barest attention to the SIM, I remembered that maybe it would be a good idea to check my SIM bank account. And, what would you know, there's just over $10k left— with daily fees and boarding, that means tonight I'll end up in the negative. I've had an auction I've been picking at for more than a SIM year now that I still haven't yet had the motivation to finish adding to, and $20k is enough to buy another week or so to finally sort that out. And what better topic than to reflect on my time on the SIM as a whole?

I know what everyone says about waning motivation for the game (and a lack of funds). Cut down your stable, sell what you can and send the rest to AJ, etc. Long-term that's always been the plan. I've had some good luck with stakes winners (including my first!— maybe my only?— Steward's Cup and Saudi winner), but that's never raked in enough cash where I felt like I could cut my claiming string. The last few years I've tried to take that leap, filter all my productive and lower racers into my auction and pick through all of my mares that have proven less-than-stellar, but that takes far more effort than entering and I just don't have the motivation right now finish it off.

Part of it shifts back to the changing conditions from when I began playing. My racing string, aside from a few generous free TB leases here and there, has been made up entirely of Arabians ever since I was a new player. The Arabian sprint division was particularly weak— I remember Regina's Moore's since-vanished guide calling it something like "one of the softest in the game", and I was given specific advice in a few private conversations to invest in Arabian sprint claimers if only to fill claimers. It was a great place to test the waters for breeding, too. Top stallions went for $20k, far more realistic for my small new player budget than just about any division of thoroughbreds.

I originally had no plans to go into mixers. But the Trial Park of my time as a new player was a slaughterhouse— a situation that would later be revealed to be caused by someone misrepresenting themselves as a new player. I've found the math I saved in my documents: an arbitrary sample of 3 of the weeks during that period showed win rates of 71.8%, 77.7%, and 86.5% for that specific (non-legitimate) player and OTB rates of 96.9%, 97.2% and 100%. Because multiple horses were usually entered in these races, 50%, 55.6%, and 51.6% of these placements were a situation in which that person took both 1st and 2nd place. With the way that purse structure works, this is a tiny, tiny fraction of that Trial Park money that ultimately ended up in the hands of actual new players.

Under these circumstances, Arabians were far more logical than Trial Park thoroughbreds, and this can be seen in the disparity between my earnings. I joined, I believe, W14 of Y56; my Arabian statistics for Y57 were $517k from 202 starts, compared to $277k from 146 Thoroughbred starts. I recall my most success with Thoroughbreds during that period coming from the Alaska 2 year old claiming circuits.

Which, I worry this may be interpreted as some sort of criticism of the SIM. It's not my intention. It happened three years ago, now— I've had time to establish my stable, and I have. I've had stakes winners and a nice set of broodmares I've cultivated out of claimers and auctions. I kind of liked the idea of specializing in such a specific little corner of the game and I still do. And I don't hold the SIM team responsible for missing such an outrageous form of cheating that they never should have even had to consider it.

But it did happen, and looking back on it, it was the single most influential thing for me in my time on the SIM in that it was what made me go for Arabians. I've dipped my toes back in Thoroughbreds from time to time, mare leases and an interesting horse or two in a dispersal, but it's just never really amounted to anything.

And now Arabian divisions are getting tighter too. There's still sometimes races that are empty enough to toss in a horse for a paycheck, but not reliably like there once was. I have stakes horses now, but the stakes races are far more competitive than they were. That's one thing that's fun about the SIM, watching the generations of horses get better and better. But it also means that the horses I spent my first few years hoping for don't go as far as they did.

Stud fees are up, too. They've always taken up the majority of my yearly budget, even with the in-house stallions (a sprinter and a router, one in each Arabian division) that I've invested in. That $20k for a top sprinter stallion has gone suddenly up to $35k just in the last few SIM years. And that $20k was always a bargain— average offspring earnings almost always beat it— but that only counts for so much at the end of the year when a foal is costing twice what it did. I was holding out hope to strike it rich with a great stallion prospect, but the two I've gotten to the $350k mark have ended up throwing such poor foals that I only keep them around as a benchmark to figure out how my new mares hypomate.

Now, that is something that can very directly be fixed by a smaller, more selective group of broodmares. And then that loops back to the motivation issue; at this point I'm so eager to cut broodmares that I'm not planning on spending time angsting over which stay and which go, but it's still a matter of going through manually and checking which to sell. Not all blue hens and star mares and formidables are created equal.

I gave a smaller racing string a try last year, too; around 15, compared to the 50ish that I had usually been running. It didn't help with the motivation much. But then again, there was so much going on for me outside of the SIM; people, animals, life events. I graduated college. And maybe the knowledge that there were all those pixel horses I was leaving unraced, all of those I'd have to sort through and decide whether to put in the auction, was bothering me more than the actual few minutes I was having to put in a week to enter those I'd decided to race.

But I do want to give a smaller stable I try, right? I always remember back to how fun it was to win my first grade 1, with an Arabian filly that I had bred myself— Alexstrasza, still my favorite mare. I think I bred her on my birthday. She was my first great racehorse, and although her foals so far haven't been spectacular (I still hope Tip the Scales might be a stallion prospect someday, but his chances of getting to that magic number aren't helped by my forgetting to ship him to that second GPS stakes after he won the first), she's one of my best-lineaged and best-hypoing mares. I keep asking myself, wouldn't I be so sad to see her go to someone else in a dispersal?

Now I'm not sure, really. I raced her for her whole career. I bred her first few foals and got to race one, half-hearted as it may have been. Would it really be so disappointing to let someone else get a shot?

But I also know I'm the sort of person who comes back to games. I don't think there's ever been a single browser, simulation game that I've never come back to, and the SIM has definitely captured my attention more strongly and more consistently than most. I don't want to come back years later and regret that I let all my Arabians go after working so hard to establish that stable.

Maybe there's a certain appeal to starting over, years in the future when one day I remember this game exists. Maybe I'll finally get to try Thoroughbreds. Or maybe selling off most of my stable is exactly what I need to make things feel new and fresh again. Maybe sitting here and writing this, remembering all the fun I've had here over the last three years, is exactly what I need to get back into it. I still don't know what I'm going to do, but it feels like it's helped to write it out.

And I hope there's something in here that'll help someone else out, too. Maybe a look at the way that the price to earnings ratio can shift, however slightly, over the years. Or some options that newer players can consider looking at during times when Trial Park is rough— or just when it feels like the right time to try something new. Or more of a cautionary tale, perhaps, about when to sell off the horses that aren't cutting their weight.

But any way it goes, best of luck to all. And it's true what they say— the horses aren't real, but the emotions are.

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