Y53 AJ Rate

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Polk Buffalo
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Polk Buffalo »

Oh, am I a whistle blower now? :)
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Rochelle Bos
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

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Polk Buffalo wrote: 4 years ago Oh, am I a whistle blower now? :)
I kinda said it, but with fewer details lol
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J.r. Lewis
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by J.r. Lewis »

Polk Buffalo wrote: 4 years ago Oh, am I a whistle blower now? :)
Off to the Ecuadorian embassy with you!!!
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Mr. Lord Rich
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Mr. Lord Rich »

J.r. Lewis wrote: 4 years ago
Polk Buffalo wrote: 4 years ago As I see it farms will be of more importance.
I can retire and pension my 2 year old. Have him/her at my farm without any cost for three years before sending him/her to AJ. No real change as I see it from keeping them 2 extra years... Pensioned horses don't cost food (they eat from my pasture) and since I own the farm, there is no board.
Since no one else wrote this I am a little afraid that I am missing something here.
Am I?
No, we just didn't want to make it obvious, Captain :)
🤣

But hey this might cause players to spend 2 mill on A farm so more money taken out of the game :)
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Greg Mey
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Greg Mey »

I just see a lot of horses being "gifted" to new players.
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

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Rochelle Zahacy wrote: 4 years ago
Polk Buffalo wrote: 4 years ago Oh, am I a whistle blower now? :)
I kinda said it, but with fewer details lol
Wee, I don't have to spend my life in the equadorian embassy!
Sorry Rochelle, I missed your post about this.
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Rochelle Bos
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Rochelle Bos »

Polk Buffalo wrote: 4 years ago
Rochelle Zahacy wrote: 4 years ago
Polk Buffalo wrote: 4 years ago Oh, am I a whistle blower now? :)
I kinda said it, but with fewer details lol
Wee, I don't have to spend my life in the equadorian embassy!
Sorry Rochelle, I missed your post about this.
I got your back 😜
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Carolyn Eaton
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Carolyn Eaton »

A number of us who have historically had sales, or gifted, will take anything we've bred back either for free or for the cost of shipping that horse to our farm for pensioning (which is less than $5000).

Since I have not sold anything below an allowance runner in a few years I doubt many of mine would fall into the cost $ to send to AJ, but I do take back any of the horses I have bred as a pensioned horse.
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LA Pepper
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by LA Pepper »

How many people in the SIM are purposely breeding 'nags'??????? For myself I put a lot of thinking and research into every breeding. sometimes I experiment on a new or lightly used stud. All of this has been encouraged in the past by the steward. Yet I see quite a few claimer remarks on gallop day. I don't think ANYONE breeds nags on purpose. I imagine that even the great Nalbone has some claimers on Festivus. In fact A LOT of these 'nags' have studs with 50-60-70K stud fees and come from very sucessful stables with 100's of foals every year. And that is because, law of averages, one will be a freak. So I don't see at all how a 5K discard fee will help in any way with overbreeding. I personally like to give ALL my horses a chance to find some degree of success, but time is a big constraint and even I have GP'd the occasional unraced claimer with poor workouts even tho it may possibly (unlikely) turn into a stakes, because I simply don't have the time to keep it fit or race ready just to watch it bomb on the track.
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Eric Nalbone
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Eric Nalbone »

Pepper - I think the key is that the problem is layers deep and the cost to 'dispose' of unwanted horses is only one piece of it. You can't address the whole problem at once, so you tackle it in parts. TL/DR (unless you're super into the theory of the game, stop after this sentence): we've been down this road before, the same parties support it (ironically the ones that are going to be penalized) and the same parties oppose it (the ones who will benefit) as always and it helps to consider the changes in light of the economic reality of the game we play.

We're wrapped up in some version of the following:
  • Randomness is necessary to make sure that simply breeding the best to the best doesn't *always* produce a superstar, thus meaning that the only secret is falling backwards into that first good mare.
  • Randomness is, by definition, random, so you increase your chances of having a star by simply going crazy and breeding more horses.
  • Stud prices are way out of whack, and should theoretically be 3-4x what they are currently
  • Players are, generally, very bad at adjusting to this market pressure and increasing stud fees (because we see avg earnings per runner, not avg earnings per runner bred from a decent [star or blue hen] mare) ... that would be something like the CI in the real racing world (note: this is a computational thing and shouldn't be that hard to add)
  • The game is a closed economy with a theoretically unlimited inflow (races are run every week) and no required outflow other than the trivial (day rates, the new fee for converting to a stallion, etc.), and there's no notion of being able to use our 'money' for other things like retirement, vacations, buying a small Bahamian island, donating it all to the Gates Foundation, etc.
  • It's *too hard* for the "have not's" to become the "haves" and once you're in the "haves" category other than systemically ignoring your stable (I should know), it's hard to do anything to change that - mobility is limited, in either direction. Even if you ignore your stable for four game years, getting it back up and functioning is straightforward, especially if you can recruit assistance.
What that leads to is that it's theoretically important that any horse bred in the SIM have some prospect of being at least *marginally* useful, which is far from the case today. The incentive should be to permit breeding by anyone (this is the hope of upward mobility) such that there's a reasonable shot of the horse being useful, while making it prohibitively expensive for the top 15-50 players in the game to systemically stack the deck in their favor. To that end, when I was breeding nearly a thousand horses a year, of course I had some claimers. In fact - I probably had *more* claimers than nearly anyone in the game. Now that I'm back to breeding 200, I *still* have claimers (the key is that I have *very nearly* the same amount of Stakes and Freaks (+/- one or two a year) and I have about one fifth the number of claimers). The key was that I also had enough Freaks that I could simply abstract from all the claimers and just dominate the entire landscape anyway.

So this change, theoretically, should massively and disproportionately affect those who have chosen to stockpile mares of questionable quality nearly indefinitely, blitz through breeding them, and have zero consequences that they get 5 good horses from 2000 mares. I guarantee you - the 2000 mare breeders aren't breeding any more Blue Hen mares than I myself currently am breeding, they're just breeding 1600 more Formidables to extract 3-5 Freak/Stakes. I used to have beautifully mapped distribution curves of the likely gallop results from mares at every level that I'll dig out somewhere, but it wasn't an intuition and magical breeding knowledge or pedigree intuition game - it was a math game, supported by a streamlined research workflow that helped me leverage the wisdom of crowds, and a nearly unlimited amount of personal time (that's since disappeared) that supported a world where I bred 1000+ horses a year and had reasonable aspirations of dominating the SIM world.

I realize this is advocating *against* stables like mine (and inherently inimical to my natural evil capitalist bent that generally dictates my actions in the real world, with no apologies forthcoming from my perspective anytime soon!), but it's consistent with the evolution that I've seen over my time in the SIM. When Jess Paquette and Robin Tan had stables that were simply *completely* unstoppable because there wasn't enough randomness, the game was promising but ultimately lacking because the power was too concentrated. It's not healthy for an individual to accrue $60m in game 'income' (I topped out somewhere around $65m vs. $14m last year) ... you get really disproportionate things happening with top players like 'Wonder is the best mare in the game. I shall buy her foal every year, unless I have some idiosyncratic reason why I don't *want* that foal' ... and I can say that because I *am/was* that person.

This is the latest in a ~52-SIM year (and, by my math, ~22 calendar year) march towards creating an accessible, distributed game that people have the ability to play at all levels, whether that's brand new or 45-SIM-year veteran. Ironically, most of these changes are generally supported by the most well-off of players, resisted by the next levels down, and ultimately helpful towards creating a more equitable, competitive game.

P.S. We also have a history of actually damaging changes being quickly identified and rolled back.
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Ali Hedgestone
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Ali Hedgestone »

Very well stated Eric!
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Rebecca Rose Hepburn
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Rebecca Rose Hepburn »

I like having Eric back on the forums, he makes eloquent arguments and I can just say 'ditto'. That being said I vehemently disagree with changing it so it's 5+ to be sent away for free instead of 4+. This game is divided as Foal, Yearling, 2yr old, 3yr old and 4yr old and up. That's how the races go, and that's how the categories in your stable go. So why is the AJ requirement now 5? If you've had a horse sitting in your stable for 4 years you shouldn't have to be charged to send him away. At that point, it becomes more profitable for me to put him on the sales page for $1 and make my bad horse someone else's problem instead of putting him in AJ where he belongs; not really the more moral choice but I can see many players going that route instead of forking over the cash.
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Mr. Lord Rich
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Mr. Lord Rich »

Eric Nalbone wrote: 4 years ago [*]Stud prices are way out of whack, and should theoretically be 3-4x what they are currently
[*]Players are, generally, very bad at adjusting to this market pressure and increasing stud fees (because we see avg earnings per runner, not avg earnings per runner bred from a decent [star or blue hen] mare) ... that would be something like the CI in the real racing world (note: this is a computational thing and shouldn't be that hard to add)
100% this
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Mr. Lord Rich
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Mr. Lord Rich »

Rebecca Rose Hepburn wrote: 4 years ago I like having Eric back on the forums, he makes eloquent arguments and I can just say 'ditto'. That being said I vehemently disagree with changing it so it's 5+ to be sent away for free instead of 4+. This game is divided as Foal, Yearling, 2yr old, 3yr old and 4yr old and up. That's how the races go, and that's how the categories in your stable go. So why is the AJ requirement now 5? If you've had a horse sitting in your stable for 4 years you shouldn't have to be charged to send him away. At that point, it becomes more profitable for me to put him on the sales page for $1 and make my bad horse someone else's problem instead of putting him in AJ where he belongs; not really the more moral choice but I can see many players going that route instead of forking over the cash.
You could always pension them and just let them roam in your pastures?
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Rochelle Bos
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Re: Y53 AJ Rate

Post by Rochelle Bos »

Pete Vella wrote: 4 years ago
Eric Nalbone wrote: 4 years ago [*]Stud prices are way out of whack, and should theoretically be 3-4x what they are currently
[*]Players are, generally, very bad at adjusting to this market pressure and increasing stud fees (because we see avg earnings per runner, not avg earnings per runner bred from a decent [star or blue hen] mare) ... that would be something like the CI in the real racing world (note: this is a computational thing and shouldn't be that hard to add)
100% this
This similar to how I’d love for steward breds to be removed from a stallion’s stats 😜
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