Event | Now | Soon |
Horses Locked in an upcoming race - automatic scratching | at Midnight Pacific time on the day of the race - that is 20 hours before post time on Day 1/3/5 and 13 hours before post time on Day 2/4/6 | 24 hours before the post time - all races, all days |
Betting Open | at Midnight Pacific time on the day of the race - that is 20 hours before post time on Day 1/3/5 and 13 hours before post time on Day 2/4/6 | 24 hours before the post time - all races, all days |
Auto Ship Horses | at Midnight Pacific time on the day of the race - that is 20 hours before post time on Day 1/3/5 and 13 hours before post time on Day 2/4/6. So, when you choose to auto-ship horses 2 days in advance of a race, it actually ships 2 days and 20 (or 13) hours before the race | Auto-ships exactly the number of days you choose before post time |
- Races close for entries sooner than before. But all races will have the same amount of entry time and will have the same amount of open betting time.
- You won't have to convert midnight Pacific time to your own timezone
- You may want to increase your auto-ship time because 1 day will actually mean 24 hours rather that the 37 or 44 hours it means now
- Since auto-shipping can happen throughout the day, you could enter a horse in tomorrow's race at 2:25pm, and it would auto-ship 5 minutes later. If you then scratch that horse at 2:35pm, it will have already shipped. This only would happen when you enter a horse in a race that is sooner than your auto-ship lead time.
I'd like to do it soon. In working on this update, I was surprised by how much extra work was in the code to make stuff happen at midnight. The new code is more elegant where key events are related to post times, rather than an artificial trigger of midnight in a single timezone. The code is now done, but we are waiting to implement it until we hear your thoughts and concerns. Change can be unsettling, but if we didn't change, the SIM wouldn't have timed workouts, would have races one day a week, no claim game, no pick 6... and the list goes on. These changes are intended to make timing in the game simpler to understand and to pave the way for future enhancements. Please let us know what you think.
A side thought about auto-shipping... It hit me that it might be most useful if auto-shipping happened based on arrival time at the track rather than departure time. In other words, if you chose auto-shipping of 1 day, your horses would arrive at their tracks 1 day before post time. Whereas currently, they leave their current location 1 day before race day so horses that are far away won't make it in time. I have no idea if we can pull this off, but it was a thought I wanted to share for your input.
Thanks as always for your involvement and enjoyment of the SIM!