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The Dichotomies of Player Competition
Original article written by Regina Moore posted 13 years 3 weeks agoThe saying goes, “It takes all kinds….”
Yes, the world is made up of all kinds of people, with all sorts of different personalities and agendas, and so is SIM.
Horse racing is competition, so it only naturally follows that players are in competition with each other, using fake horses as their tools to show how much more skill and talent they have than their fellow SIMsters.
A little while back, on the Forum, somebody made the point that SIMsters are actually competing against themselves, rather than other players. That makes a lot of sense, too, when one considers that the 1000 or so players that show being active in SIM at any point in time have a wide variety of SIM experience, a wide variety of bankrolls, and a wide variety of talent in their racing, training, and breeding barns. Someone who has been playing for one game year can hardly expect to have the success of one who has been playing ten years and has the depth of talent to show for it. One who has never gotten higher than 500k in their bank balance, regardless of how long they’ve been playing, can hardly expect to compete on the same level as a player that has tens of millions. One who has a few dozen horses in their racing barn is going to have a different focus than the player with hundreds of active racehorses.
When skilled players report win stats in the neighborhood of 30%, give or take, that’s something that anyone can admire. When I start feeling my admiration turning to envy, all I have to do is remind myself that my perpetual 16% win clip is pretty admirable, too, considering that I race all my own homebreds. That includes the inevitable deadbeats that haven’t hit the board in a half dozen starts, but I keep trying to turn them into winners, and believe it’ll happen for each horse eventually.
At the same time, I’m also somewhat in awe of those players who seem completely clueless regarding their stats. Their focus is simply to enjoy the game, and they don’t need black-on-white numbers to dictate how much fun they’re having. How freeing that must be. But, ultimately, it’s an outlook I don’t have any desire to emulate. For me, a big part of the fun is being able to analyze results a few dozen different ways, and enjoy knowing where I stand, and where I still want to eventually be.
Some players have had publicly expressed bouts of discouragement at various times. The player who is happy with any win is hardly going to feel much sympathy for the player who going off on a rant because their star performer could only get fourth in a Grade 1 stakes. Or, as Eric Nalbone put it so nicely in an old Forum thread where players were grumbling about how their horses performed below expectations in the Steward’s Cup, “just having a horse that legitimately belongs in a big race is an accomplishment. Win or lose, if they earned the right to be there and square off against the best of the best that's really all you can ask for. Anything past that is out of your control, you just see how the race shakes out.”
It is amazing how, amongst all this competition for the top spots in a wide variety of races, there’s such civility, sportsmanship, and generosity between players. There’s players who will pay to sponsor a stakes race, knowing their own horse will likely get beat by better. There are players who offer up very nice mares for lease. There’s players who will give away decent youngsters in contests and such. The DTD Program for newbies is an incredible act of generosity on the part of various veteran breeders. I can’t imagine myself ever being so generous as to give away, or otherwise relinquish, one of my youngsters that I have high hopes for. Or rather, ask me after I’ve had a couple of Triple Crown winners and won a few dozen Steward’s Cup races, and maybe I’ll feel differently about letting a merely “decent” youngster go.
As a newbie, I was amazed to receive a couple of stakes level gift horses from veteran players when I first joined SIM. There was also a time when a veteran was asking for a certain type of broodmare on the Forum. I had a couple that met the request, and since they’d been given to me, I offered them for free to the player. That veteran insisted on paying me 50k each for them. A newbie doesn’t easily forget such acts of generosity.
We all want to beat each other. And we all want each other to have a whole lot of fun, so we can keep beating each other.
Some of us are taking very careful measurements of what we’ve accomplished and not yet accomplished – measurements that matter only to ourselves, though if we’re really proud of them, we’ll make sure others know about it. And then there are those who don’t even care about finding a yardstick.
No matter where we are in our game play, or where we want to be, we’re all SIMsters. Confident, angry, elated, discouraged, generous, annoyed, hopeful, and a myriad of other emotions. But mostly, simply enjoying SIM.