Auto Ship Horses

[Ronnie Dee]

A few days ago I set Auto Ship Horses to 4 days in my profile. After midnight on Thursday (Pacific/Game Time), I checked my entries for Monday and none have been shipped. What could be the problem?

[Laura Ferguson]

Based on this thread, it looks like they ship tonight at midnight, not last night.

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=11276

[Ronnie Dee]

Based on this thread, it looks like they ship tonight at midnight, not last night.

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=11276

I read this as follows for Monday's races --
0 days = Monday 12 midnight Pacific/Game
1 day = Sunday 12 midnight Pacific/Game
2 days = Saturday 12 midnight Pacific/Game
3 days = Friday 12 midnight Pacific/Game
4 days = Thursday 12 midnight Pacific/Game

Common usage has midnight being the moment that a day starts. In addition, if midnight was used by the Steward to mean the moment a day ends, then 0 days would be after (4 hours after) the races were run on Monday.

[Ara Davies]

I read it the same way Ronnie did, because of the 0 day thing Em mentioned.

[Regina Moore]

I have my horses set to ship five days in advance, and the Monday entries shipped out early this morning.

[The Admin]

So it looks like we missed the auto-ship day by a day. Is that the consensus? Are we shipping a day late? Or does it ship on the "right" day and the explanation is incorrect? What do you guys think?

[Ara Davies]

I'm fine with the way it stands right now as long as it's explained thoroughly. So as of right now, "four day shipping" means:

12:00 AM Friday morning (for a Monday race)
12:00 AM Sunday morning (for a Wednesday race)
12:00 AM Tuesday morning (for a Friday race)

That ends up working out to 92 hours before race time. Since four full days is 96 hours, I'd much rather see it stay like this than change to "four day shipping" happening 116 hours before race time, which would be 4 days and 20 hours.

For a Monday race, three day shipping would be Saturday morning at midnight, two day shipping would be Sunday morning at midnight, and one day shipping would be Monday morning at midnight, twenty hours before the race.

Is that right?

Edit: whoops, fixed the math.

Edit 2: wait fixed it again, I started by saying four days and ended up calculating three days. Now it's right!

[Regina Moore]

One day difference isn't a big deal to me, but I was intending that five days in advance of Monday to mean Wednesday, rather than Thursday.

[Ara Davies]

I think if we consider the shipping to be how many hours before race time rather than what specific day it's a lot easier. Horses that shipped this morning at midnight Pacific shipped four days and twenty hours before the race which is pretty darn close to five days (which is what shipping this morning was considered to be).

[Ronnie Dee]

I am fine with either interpretation as long as it is explained thoroughly. In the explanation, I think adding in the number of hours (as Ara did) would make things crystal clear; e.g., 4 days is 92 hours from post time (or 4 days is 116 hours from post time in the other interpretation).

[Ronnie Dee]

I think if we consider the shipping to be how many hours before race time rather than what specific day it's a lot easier. Horses that shipped this morning at midnight Pacific shipped four days and twenty hours before the race which is pretty darn close to five days (which is what shipping this morning was considered to be).

Just to clarify, is the below interpretation the one that will be used (and is being used) for auto-shipping?

Auto Shipping Days - Actual # hours before post for shipping (assuming 8 PM post time)
1 - 20
2 - 44
3 - 68
4 - 92
5 - 116
6 - 140
7 - 164
...

[The Admin]

Here is the bottom line....

The original post in the FAQ forum is what was intended, but a slight coding error cause it to be thrown off (because of racing being run 20 hours into the day at 8pm PT). The intention is that auto-shipping happens on the date that is X days prior to the date of the race (where X is the number of days you set as your auto-ship preference in your profile). So if there is a race that runs on March 30th, and your preference is "4 days in advance of the race date", that would mean they ship on March 26th. 1 day would mean they ship on March 29th (one day prior to the race date of March 30th).

The discussion about hours before a race (20 hours, 44 hrs etc) was very interesting and compelling. But it all falls apart if ever there were races that ran a different time of day (for example 3am PT).

The goal is to communicate as much as possible in each players' time zone. So whatever the calendar date is when a race is run, auto-ship will occur at some point during the day X dates prior to that.

I hope that the whole confusion was born from the code not doing what we said it would do. Now that is should do what we said it would do, perhaps the confusion will go away.

Please watch Auto-Ship for the next few days/races and make sure it does what we expect. I think the wording on the profile page is accurate, but if there is a need to be more clear, let us know.

Thanks.

[Regina Moore]

I have my horses set for five days out, and my Wednesday horses shipped early this morning, which is what I intended.

Thanks!