Is Simflation Really a Problem?

Original article written by Kim Plausible posted 9 years 2 weeks ago

I’m not an economics kind of person. I use a calculator to do basic math - as in if you ask me what twenty four plus sixty seven is, I will open the calculator app on the home page of my phone where I leave it specifically because I can’t do basic math. When I started college (which was only last year, because I am young and vibrant and not at all old and experienced, cough cough) my college advisors looked at my AP Calc grade and standardized test scores and refused to let me take anything lower than Calc II, until I got the one and only F of my academic career. After that, I was allowed to take Practical Applications of Mathematics, which the dunces of the mathematical world take because all you learn in a semester is how to figure out a driver’s license number from a person’s name and date of birth. My math credits in college came from classes in stalking techniques.

I did take macro-and microeconomics in college, but they were both taught by the same professor and had nearly the exact same students in it. We took the class because he gave out the exam before the exam and your class participation grade could come from bringing up politics and listening to him rant for an hour. My credits in those classes don’t show that I’m particularly well-educated but that I’m observant and exceptionally lazy. So before I begin, you should know, I know diddly about economics.

Nevertheless, I have been asked my opinion, and so I’m dredging up what little I remember and what little I could find on the internet, mixed with my own personal experiences, to delve into the subject of simflation and whether or not it’s a problem.

To break this question down, let’s look at what we’re actually dealing with. Inflation is when the purchasing power of a monetary unit decreases. This affects the poor more than it does the rich because the rich still have enough money to buy what they need even if their money is worth less, while the poor might not. Say for a number of years, a dollar got you a gallon of milk. But then suddenly, a dollar only got you half a gallon of milk. A family that only gets five dollars a week and still needs a gallon of milk now has to spend a larger portion of its income on that milk and really feels it, and may have to give up other important things like meat or car rides to be able to afford it. Whereas a very rich family just buys the milk and barely feels the pinch at all; maybe they buy one fewer cocktail during their five star vacation in Maui over the winter.

In the sim, we don’t need milk. What’s scarce in the sim is winning horses. What happens when the purchasing power of a sim dollar goes down is that poorer players have less access to winning horses.

We also want poorer players to be able to make money. And you make money by having winning horses. So when poorer sim players have less access to things that help them make money, the gap between rich and poor becomes wider.

There’s also the fact that our earning power in the sim is fairly arbitrary. For instance, we get raises in the real world to compensate for inflation because ideally employers are competing for talent and want to pay people who are good at their job to stay on. They have to worry about purchasing power, too, and if their dollar purchases less talent, they up their wages to keep that talent around.

But in the sim, when the purchasing power goes down, our earning potential stays the same. Purses don’t get raised because that would contribute to the problem. So what happens is that our purchasing power decreases and with that decrease our ability to better our barns decreases, so every win becomes more difficult to achieve and gets us less in terms of rewards. That’s obviously kind of a problem. It breeds frustration, and frustration is not fun.

Taking a step back from the smaller picture of what’s scarce in the sim (winners), this whole economy is also a game, and what’s scarce to us as players is fun. That’s why we play the game, to have fun, and it’s the job of the game to provide that fun - or at the very least, the opportunity to have that fun.

Now what’s fun to each player is subjective, but the sim goes out of its way to hype up one particular kind of fun, and that’s championship races. We make sure they’re more fun. There are whole days dedicated to it, live race calls, articles, giveaways, contests, the whole shebang. We don’t, for instance, hype up claiming races, winning races with one dollar horses, or competing with Alexandra Jaysman purchases.

The Steward has gone out of her way to address this skewing of fun by adding the Claim Game, which, honestly, is pretty dang cool. And I will be curious to see it in action, because I haven’t yet. But unless it’s being actively talked about on the forums, in the chat room, and being seen as really a fun accomplishment, it’s not going to quite compete with the hype surrounding championship racing.

Now when I was urged to examine this issue, the argument was made, shouldn’t new players be content to simply compete at whatever level they can for a few years until they get lucky and make a break into the upper echelon? Absolutely, yes, there’s an element of that, but in the same breath that message mentioned that the top 50 players have all been playing at least four real life years and most of them much, much longer.

If you look at a game and it advertises “Live race calls! Championship races! So much awesome!” but then you find out, only through trial and error, that it’s going to take you five real life years to get to the point where you can join in that fun, do you still invest time and money in that game? For the effort and money you put into it, would it be easier to find sources of fun elsewhere? Because for us as players, it’s the fun that’s scarce, and if it’s easier and more economic to have fun elsewhere, then we will.

We could say, but, you don’t have to be a top 50 player to compete at that level. And you’re right, but you still have to be pretty dang rich and experienced. I looked up the winners of the Triple Crown and Steward’s Cup races for year 40. A more accurate picture would look up all the top five finishers, perhaps, but in the interest of saving myself time, I just looked up the winners because they are listed in the Sim Museum.

Year 40 triple crown races went to Art Vandelay, Susie Rydell, and Ali Weasley. Susie is in the top 50 and is an absolutely ridiculously talented trainer and breeder. Art Vandelay’s total wealth isn’t listed. I can tell you he earned more than $6,000,000 last year, which would likely qualify him for being on the top 50 list or very near it. Ali’s wealth also isn’t publicly listed, and neither are her earnings, but I can tell you her last Steward-bred purchase was Breeze, who she bought for $23,000,000 in 2014. So I’m gonna go out on a limb and say she features on the top 50. So far we are three for three.

Steward’s Cup winning owners and their current bankrolls were: Donnie Hidalgo ($5mil), Josh Lamp (Top 50), Paul Heinrich (Private), Keith Maidlow ($72k - $2.3mil earned last year), Norman Architecture ($6.8 mil, just barely outside the Top 50), Lee Cara (Private - $15mil earned last year) and Ricky Stamm (Top 50), Susie Rydell - 2 (Top 50), Laura Ferguson (Top 50), Nini Hunter (Private - made $3mil last year), Xander Zone (Private - Top Earning Owner last year), Robert Forston ($38k), Kris Bobby (Private - Earned $4mil last year), Gigi Gofaster (Private - Earned $9mil last year), A.R. Roberts (Top 50), Scott Eiland ($3.7mil), Louise Bayo (Private - Earned $10mil last year), Brandon McNulty (Private - Earned $4.7mil last year), Amy Atkins ($2.8mil), Melissa Mae ($189k - $2.4 mil earned last year), Jon Xett (Private - would be shocked if he’s not in the top 50), Faith Powers ($153k), Peihe Sun ($6.7mil - also right outside Top 50), Danny Derby (Private - $9.4mil earned last year).

But even that isn’t quite a complete picture until you see how people came to own the horses that won those races.

Of the Steward’s Cup winners last year, seven were bred by the Steward, nineteen were bred by the owner, and just two weren’t either of those things. The winner of the Steeplechase Distaff was originally claimed by Faith Powers for $32,000, and Fourzen, the winner of the Steward’s Cup Sprint, was given by Mike Bryant to Keith Maidlow, possibly in a trade or some such. That leaves only two of the twenty eight SC winners that were ever available for open sale. All of the Triple Crown race winners were homebred.

But hey, you might be able to breed a Steward’s Cup winner and still be poor, yeah? It’s a possibility. Of the homebreds, about five of them came out of rather surprising mares, meaning, mares I looked at and went “wha…” Until I looked a little deeper and realized that most of those mares had a whole ton of class somewhere in their bloodlines. Forward Mover’s dam is Vele Di Scampia’s, and her granddam is Seven Wonders who gave birth to Seven Keys. Color Me Red’s dam, Find the Power, is the granddaughter of Extremist. Which leads me to conclude, probably, you can’t enter the Steward’s Cup game without being among the top players and having access to some pretty fancy mares or the daughters of some pretty fancy mares.

So yeah. You kinda do have to be pretty dang successful to play in the most hyped-up part of the sim.

Is that a bad thing? Again, only the players can say whether they are willing to wait several real life years to compete in the most exciting and publicized part of the game. Only the owner of the game can decide whether she feels that’s an adequate time to wait.

Purely out of curiosity, I also decided to look at the opportunity for players to purchase non-champion but still winning-type horses on the sales page. I searched for thoroughbreds for sale, because I don’t know anything about mixers. There are 643 winning, non-retired horses on the sales page. 484 of those are being sold by Alexandra Jaysman and I assume are only visible to New Players, because they aren’t visible to me. I got out my trusty little calculator app, and that leaves 159 winning horses being sold not by Alexandra (but possibly still being sold on the new player sales page.) There are 6,499 not-retired thoroughbreds being sold right now by people other than Alexandra Jaysman, and 159 of them are winners. That’s 2%.

Let’s say there are 765 owners in the sim competing for those 159 horses. The top 159 owners get one horse a piece. That leaves 606 owners, or 79% of the sim population, without a winner and thus making half as much or less than the top 159 owners.

But that’s not how it is. The top owners have enough money to buy all those horses and then some. Ara Davies has ~$85,000,000. Emily Mitchell has ~$82,000,000. Those horses would have to cost more than $500,000 a piece to stop them from being able to buy literally all of them and leave 764 players without winning horses.


You could argue, that’s not an effective measuring tool because chances are if those horses are on the sales page they’re probably not all going for $500,000 dollars, and the majority of them are horses that the top players don’t want, and owners can only buy five horses a day. So the argument sort of becomes, just because the top players have the power to literally keep everyone else out of the game, that doesn’t mean they will. And winning horses are at a premium so they are less likely to be put on the sales page in the first place, so that analogy really isn’t perfect.

I know. It isn’t. But I think looking at those numbers still illustrates the answer to the original question I was asked, which was, is simflation really a problem?

It’s not a problem in and of itself. It’s a problem if you are the type of player who would like to be competitive in the sim purely by racing and not by charity, gifts, writing articles, or stumbling onto a champion on the Alexandra Jaysman page - all pretty rare things in and of themselves. It’s a problem if you are a poorer player and you want to compete for really nice stock. It’s a problem if you want to become a championship style runner in less than a few real life years. It’s a problem if you want your game to be more accessible to people rather than being the kind of game that takes three or four real life years to get to the funnest part.

If you are content to have to write articles or win contests or race in claimers for years and years to get to the most fun part of the game, then it isn’t as much a problem for you. Absolutely, owners could decrease their frustration by simply accepting that they will not be able to compete at that level for years to come. But we can’t just expect people to do that. If it’s not fun, they should absolutely go find a better way to have fun and they are allowed to express their frustration that something they have spent so much time and money on isn’t fun for them.

We should be honest with new players and with how we talk about the sim. “Just like real life racing, there is next to no way you will be competitive at this sport without throwing a ton of sim-money and time at it, and PS it will still take three years or more even then.” That’s a realistic assessment of the sim. If you get lucky and manage to get into a big race before then, it was just that. Luck.

It’s easier for me because I’ve already been at that level and now, after two real life years away from the game, I’ve returned to find all my best horses in other people’s stables and next to nothing in my bank account. (All by my own design and to no one’s fault but my faulty nervous system; thanks for nothing medulla oblongota.)

What am I doing? I’m playing the claim game. But I already have my trophies. I’ve already been in articles of Daybreak. I’ve been in race calls. I’ve made multimillion dollar deals for foals and mares. I see race results full of small checks and I consider it just part of the game, but I also know not everyone will want to play that way for years on end before they get to be in a race call, in an article of Daybreak, before they have a trophy glittering on their sim mantle. (Wouldn’t it be awesome if the trophy page actually looked like a trophy room? That would be awesome!)

Yes, being content with claiming races would keep people from being frustrated with claiming races. But being content and having fun are two different things. Is it as fun as Daybreak, trophies, and race calls?

Duh. No. And this is a game that makes money by providing fun. So yes, simflation is a problem if it gets in the way of the game providing what is scarce to us as players - respect, achievement, feeling of accomplishment, success, and fun.

P.S. Consider this my official petition for a 'general' section in the Feature Race.

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