Ah, finally I have the opportunity to respond to this ^^' I'm so sorry it took me so long! I've been thinking about it for a while, just wanted to make sure I wasn't putting off any too-important things in order to get it done cx
Whew, I sure do have a lot I missed responding to! Let's see here:
Divisions
The simplest way I see possible is to just divide the placement up by a certain number; setting qualifications will mean that a certain division may not always fill. If the cutoff is training, physical stats, placings, or anything like that, there will almost definitely be some horse that doesn't make the cut -- and if the cutoff is fluid and depends on the outcome of the show itself, it seems that simply cutting up the class from a standard number would have more or less the same effect. I can see where it may be tempting to look at a class with horses that have training of 25, 23, 23, 22, 22, 21, 18, 6, and 4 and be tempted to divide that up so that all horses over 20 training are in one division, but then the horse with only 18 training will have hardly any competition anyways. Although I'm still not entirely opposed to that, and it can occur with any means of dividing a class to a degree, it's certainly something to think about. One way to consider divisions with a set number is to divide them before running random events, in which case horses with high training and physical stats would be doing better than horses with low ones anyways; however, the division system I'd suggested based on the barrel racing one operates after the runs have been made, not before -- all horses in the class compete against each other, and it's just the division of prizes that ultimately breaks the class into groups, which is quite different from anything I've ever seen in any other disciplines but I also feel it functions relatively well. While you're right, caf., that a 12-time barrel champion would never go up against a 5 year old greenie, my experience with barrel racing has been that that is because the 12-time champion would never enter the low-level competition the greenie would be in anyways. As far as I understand it, if the champion's owner did decide to put him in that class, they would compete against each other and then be divided up afterwards, based on time, so that the greenie still has a chance of winning his division if his time is good enough compared to others with times low enough to wind up in his division. My personal preference for division side would be to divide them when 3-4 horses could be in each of the first two divisions, but no additional divisions can be made until both divisions have at least five horses, if that makes sense. So a discipline with 9 horses entered would be split into two groups for judging: 5 and 4. Same with 10 horses. Only with 11 horses does it break into a new discipline, 4-4-3. That way there would always be enough horses to drum up some real competition in each division but we don't have to wait for a large number of horses to enter before we can start giving the non-scorers a place to show their stuff, haha. Of course, that's simply how I envisioned it, and since the showing part of RVEC isn't really my realm anymore I'm happiest to go along with whichever route the RVEC members think they would like the best cx
Prize Money
Excellent points here. Fundamentally, I don't think I'd want to have the first place of the second division winning more than the fourth-place horse of the first division, but having them win less than they would have gotten if they had just competed in the first division seems kind it kind of defeats the point anyways. Perhaps a standard 25c less than the 3rd place position and it goes down from there? How we balance this will depend primarily on how divisions end up being made so we can figure this out in detail later ^^ I do want to make sure horses aren't being penalized prize money-wise for being swept up in a system the owner didn't sign on for; after all, if you're placing 4th regardless but winning 100c more in one division, shlacking a 1st place title isn't going to make that lost 100c feel any better cx Perhaps some kind of "grand champion" and "reserve grand champion" monetary prize for the horses who place first out of everyone will help prizes feel a little better earned without having to toss pennies to horses scoring well in lower divisions?
Lesson Ponies
Well, the thing about lesson ponies is that it's really not meant to be a supplemental income; I thought of it for the horses OutFoxed mentioned in the original post, the one about bad horses needing a "job," the ones that will never be in the money anyways because they just don't have the skill set for their discipline. As far as I understand the issue, these horses don't have the ability to place in the money anyways or they wouldn't be a problem; they wouldn't add anything to the show cycle because they're already so bad that unless they're just class fodder (which I never like when that happens anyways) they're not going to have a whole lot of value there. Obviously there would be no requirement for a horse to be a lesson pony other than being entered as one by the owner, and it's not like it'd be a permanent thing that couldn't be undone when the owner changed their mind (no fees, penalties, anything like that), but if we implement this I'd like it to really be for the people who figure it's not even worth entering this particular horse because they know they'll do so poorly that they'll just lose money if they do. Having it as a form of supplemental income alongside of shows I think may get to be a little much, and penalties are pretty hard to come up with in shows since they're all judged differently and I don't want to necessarily throw an entire show based on one penalty I didn't check thoroughly enough, so for something that should be as simple as adding lesson ponies I'd like to avoid having to come up with new penalties for them if at all possible cx I'm really not a huge fan of any placing system for lesson ponies, either; I don't want it to feel like a new division but rather an alternative to entering horses. I don't think I'd even require tack from lesson ponies, though I'm sure most would have already gotten tack at some point. While I'm okay offering varying amounts of money to people using their horses as lesson ponies based on the pony's individual ability, I'd like to keep this simple and doable by not charging entry fees, not having to worry about RNG, not having to worry about placings, and just letting people enter their horse as a lesson pony and reap a small reward for giving up their opportunity to show that week ^^
NPC Horses
You know, I'd completely forgotten AI Bank horses were a thing. I'd just been thinking back to when I was still running everything by hand and had to generate five random numbers plus attitudes for each NPC horse I put in it, haha. NPCs are fine with me and any system caf. wants to use to include them I'm perfectly fine with ^^
Associations
All of that looks really good! For an official guide I may want to make sure to emphasize which things are actually highly encouraged (can't really say required because of the way associations are set up on RVEC) and which are just suggestions if you want to take your association a certain way, but I think having that as a template for associations is a really great idea and should hopefully help a lot <3 I'll try to make some comments when I have the chance!
Discipline-Specific Barns
Aha, the hard thing about discipline-specific barns is that it never really looks like it has an advantage if almost all other barns are discipline-specific as well cx I've actually been thinking lately on how bad breed-specific barns have it -- if a horse isn't their breed specialty, they may as well not even bother adopting it since it won't do anything for them. So where discipline-specific barns get a bonus in shows of their specialty and also have a wide array of potential horses to choose from, breed-specific barns get a bonus when they breed horses of their specialty and have a very narrow window of horses from which to build up their stock (unless they get lucky during an event that produces a lot of horses of their specialty or have the money to import horses or breed to the AI Bank), which I think creates a decent bit of disparity between the two and would explain why the vast majority of our barns (maybe 85%?) are some type of discipline, dual discipline, or showing specific type ^^' My thought to fix this was to perhaps give breed-specific barns the option to change any horse's breed to their own as long as the horse's color doesn't have to be adjusted to make that color accepted in the breed (while other showing-oriented barn types would be stuck with the horse's original breed; type-specific barns could choose any horse breed that falls under their type, etc.), but that would make breed-specific barns a little overpowered I think if I didn't give showing barns a bit of a boost as well. So if that were to happen, I wouldn't be opposed to buffing showing barn bonuses as well, but I don't want to do it so much that it's a surprise to see a horse outside of a showing barn win; after all, a good horse from an unspecialized barn not only can but should beat out mediocre horses from a specialized barn a decent portion of the time. A training bonus could work, but I see it being a little difficult to implement in gradations without significantly overpowering horses that get it -- for example, if the buff was that horses in discipline-specific barns were guaranteed to get at least 1 point in training each session, it would either have to be all across the board (horses in dual-discipline and showing type barns get it too) or in gradations, which would mean that discipline specific barns get at least 3 points, dual-discipline 2, etc. which seems a little overpowered to me. Of course, if you have particular ideas here, please let me know! I'm definitely very curious, my only thing is that I don't want to implement anything that'll make training too much more difficult (since it can get a little time-consuming) or showing too much in favor of showing barns when breed-specific barns do have a lot of good horses ^^
Regional Qualification
I think it makes perfect sense to change the qualification criteria to a percentage ^^ 25% also sounds like a perfectly legitimate criteria to me!
More on Associations
Since I'm not quite a member of the community as much as I am its moderator, I'm afraid I can't really say which are most desired by the community as a whole -- however, I don't think you can quite go wrong with any! Breed associations have always been more popular because I think people tend to think of them as a "higher level" of type associations, while type associations give you a lot more freedom in influencing the kinds of horses that appear on RVEC. Color associations have never been too popular but I think that may be because they only recently acquired any degree of influence on RVEC so really, I think any of those would be well-received as long as you put out association imports and mascots for people to have access to horses of that specialty! On that note, I think some type of rare breeds association would be absolutely wonderful from a personal standpoint and would fit perfectly well under a "type" association if you wanted to include all of them cx I can't join it myself of course but I'd be happy to do my best to keep up with producing rare breeds for the association's promotion!
WEG Event
I think a mini-event would be really cool! Since you're in charge of showing and all that I'll leave the details of that to you but if you want it to be bigger than just a showing event I'd be happy to work with you to create some adopts and team events and such, just PM me ^^
Whew, I sure do have a lot I missed responding to! Let's see here:
Divisions
The simplest way I see possible is to just divide the placement up by a certain number; setting qualifications will mean that a certain division may not always fill. If the cutoff is training, physical stats, placings, or anything like that, there will almost definitely be some horse that doesn't make the cut -- and if the cutoff is fluid and depends on the outcome of the show itself, it seems that simply cutting up the class from a standard number would have more or less the same effect. I can see where it may be tempting to look at a class with horses that have training of 25, 23, 23, 22, 22, 21, 18, 6, and 4 and be tempted to divide that up so that all horses over 20 training are in one division, but then the horse with only 18 training will have hardly any competition anyways. Although I'm still not entirely opposed to that, and it can occur with any means of dividing a class to a degree, it's certainly something to think about. One way to consider divisions with a set number is to divide them before running random events, in which case horses with high training and physical stats would be doing better than horses with low ones anyways; however, the division system I'd suggested based on the barrel racing one operates after the runs have been made, not before -- all horses in the class compete against each other, and it's just the division of prizes that ultimately breaks the class into groups, which is quite different from anything I've ever seen in any other disciplines but I also feel it functions relatively well. While you're right, caf., that a 12-time barrel champion would never go up against a 5 year old greenie, my experience with barrel racing has been that that is because the 12-time champion would never enter the low-level competition the greenie would be in anyways. As far as I understand it, if the champion's owner did decide to put him in that class, they would compete against each other and then be divided up afterwards, based on time, so that the greenie still has a chance of winning his division if his time is good enough compared to others with times low enough to wind up in his division. My personal preference for division side would be to divide them when 3-4 horses could be in each of the first two divisions, but no additional divisions can be made until both divisions have at least five horses, if that makes sense. So a discipline with 9 horses entered would be split into two groups for judging: 5 and 4. Same with 10 horses. Only with 11 horses does it break into a new discipline, 4-4-3. That way there would always be enough horses to drum up some real competition in each division but we don't have to wait for a large number of horses to enter before we can start giving the non-scorers a place to show their stuff, haha. Of course, that's simply how I envisioned it, and since the showing part of RVEC isn't really my realm anymore I'm happiest to go along with whichever route the RVEC members think they would like the best cx
Prize Money
Excellent points here. Fundamentally, I don't think I'd want to have the first place of the second division winning more than the fourth-place horse of the first division, but having them win less than they would have gotten if they had just competed in the first division seems kind it kind of defeats the point anyways. Perhaps a standard 25c less than the 3rd place position and it goes down from there? How we balance this will depend primarily on how divisions end up being made so we can figure this out in detail later ^^ I do want to make sure horses aren't being penalized prize money-wise for being swept up in a system the owner didn't sign on for; after all, if you're placing 4th regardless but winning 100c more in one division, shlacking a 1st place title isn't going to make that lost 100c feel any better cx Perhaps some kind of "grand champion" and "reserve grand champion" monetary prize for the horses who place first out of everyone will help prizes feel a little better earned without having to toss pennies to horses scoring well in lower divisions?
Lesson Ponies
Well, the thing about lesson ponies is that it's really not meant to be a supplemental income; I thought of it for the horses OutFoxed mentioned in the original post, the one about bad horses needing a "job," the ones that will never be in the money anyways because they just don't have the skill set for their discipline. As far as I understand the issue, these horses don't have the ability to place in the money anyways or they wouldn't be a problem; they wouldn't add anything to the show cycle because they're already so bad that unless they're just class fodder (which I never like when that happens anyways) they're not going to have a whole lot of value there. Obviously there would be no requirement for a horse to be a lesson pony other than being entered as one by the owner, and it's not like it'd be a permanent thing that couldn't be undone when the owner changed their mind (no fees, penalties, anything like that), but if we implement this I'd like it to really be for the people who figure it's not even worth entering this particular horse because they know they'll do so poorly that they'll just lose money if they do. Having it as a form of supplemental income alongside of shows I think may get to be a little much, and penalties are pretty hard to come up with in shows since they're all judged differently and I don't want to necessarily throw an entire show based on one penalty I didn't check thoroughly enough, so for something that should be as simple as adding lesson ponies I'd like to avoid having to come up with new penalties for them if at all possible cx I'm really not a huge fan of any placing system for lesson ponies, either; I don't want it to feel like a new division but rather an alternative to entering horses. I don't think I'd even require tack from lesson ponies, though I'm sure most would have already gotten tack at some point. While I'm okay offering varying amounts of money to people using their horses as lesson ponies based on the pony's individual ability, I'd like to keep this simple and doable by not charging entry fees, not having to worry about RNG, not having to worry about placings, and just letting people enter their horse as a lesson pony and reap a small reward for giving up their opportunity to show that week ^^
NPC Horses
You know, I'd completely forgotten AI Bank horses were a thing. I'd just been thinking back to when I was still running everything by hand and had to generate five random numbers plus attitudes for each NPC horse I put in it, haha. NPCs are fine with me and any system caf. wants to use to include them I'm perfectly fine with ^^
Associations
All of that looks really good! For an official guide I may want to make sure to emphasize which things are actually highly encouraged (can't really say required because of the way associations are set up on RVEC) and which are just suggestions if you want to take your association a certain way, but I think having that as a template for associations is a really great idea and should hopefully help a lot <3 I'll try to make some comments when I have the chance!
Discipline-Specific Barns
Aha, the hard thing about discipline-specific barns is that it never really looks like it has an advantage if almost all other barns are discipline-specific as well cx I've actually been thinking lately on how bad breed-specific barns have it -- if a horse isn't their breed specialty, they may as well not even bother adopting it since it won't do anything for them. So where discipline-specific barns get a bonus in shows of their specialty and also have a wide array of potential horses to choose from, breed-specific barns get a bonus when they breed horses of their specialty and have a very narrow window of horses from which to build up their stock (unless they get lucky during an event that produces a lot of horses of their specialty or have the money to import horses or breed to the AI Bank), which I think creates a decent bit of disparity between the two and would explain why the vast majority of our barns (maybe 85%?) are some type of discipline, dual discipline, or showing specific type ^^' My thought to fix this was to perhaps give breed-specific barns the option to change any horse's breed to their own as long as the horse's color doesn't have to be adjusted to make that color accepted in the breed (while other showing-oriented barn types would be stuck with the horse's original breed; type-specific barns could choose any horse breed that falls under their type, etc.), but that would make breed-specific barns a little overpowered I think if I didn't give showing barns a bit of a boost as well. So if that were to happen, I wouldn't be opposed to buffing showing barn bonuses as well, but I don't want to do it so much that it's a surprise to see a horse outside of a showing barn win; after all, a good horse from an unspecialized barn not only can but should beat out mediocre horses from a specialized barn a decent portion of the time. A training bonus could work, but I see it being a little difficult to implement in gradations without significantly overpowering horses that get it -- for example, if the buff was that horses in discipline-specific barns were guaranteed to get at least 1 point in training each session, it would either have to be all across the board (horses in dual-discipline and showing type barns get it too) or in gradations, which would mean that discipline specific barns get at least 3 points, dual-discipline 2, etc. which seems a little overpowered to me. Of course, if you have particular ideas here, please let me know! I'm definitely very curious, my only thing is that I don't want to implement anything that'll make training too much more difficult (since it can get a little time-consuming) or showing too much in favor of showing barns when breed-specific barns do have a lot of good horses ^^
Regional Qualification
I think it makes perfect sense to change the qualification criteria to a percentage ^^ 25% also sounds like a perfectly legitimate criteria to me!
More on Associations
Since I'm not quite a member of the community as much as I am its moderator, I'm afraid I can't really say which are most desired by the community as a whole -- however, I don't think you can quite go wrong with any! Breed associations have always been more popular because I think people tend to think of them as a "higher level" of type associations, while type associations give you a lot more freedom in influencing the kinds of horses that appear on RVEC. Color associations have never been too popular but I think that may be because they only recently acquired any degree of influence on RVEC so really, I think any of those would be well-received as long as you put out association imports and mascots for people to have access to horses of that specialty! On that note, I think some type of rare breeds association would be absolutely wonderful from a personal standpoint and would fit perfectly well under a "type" association if you wanted to include all of them cx I can't join it myself of course but I'd be happy to do my best to keep up with producing rare breeds for the association's promotion!
WEG Event
I think a mini-event would be really cool! Since you're in charge of showing and all that I'll leave the details of that to you but if you want it to be bigger than just a showing event I'd be happy to work with you to create some adopts and team events and such, just PM me ^^
