Updates
* Added a safety check for saving silks to prevent saving an empty style.
* Updated some database indexes for performance.

Finals purses have been posted.

We have also added an additional $100 in bonus money to each of the remaining qualifiers.

It's hard to believe we've been through 25 seasons.

First note: Withdrawals are best done digitally, this mailing checks across continents is perilous at best right now.

Second major note: No changes for the season.


Season 24 Wrap:

• horse generation continues to shift towards homebred vs sales ring
  
• Racing numbers dipped in general , which was expected with the population controls really hitting
  
• Private sales numbers tripled
  
• Auction activity also tripled
  
• We are nearing $1.5m in lifetime purse payouts which is astounding.
  
• We are just shy of 40k lifetime races and 5m training runs in the database
  
• We saw a big uptick in active stables during December, hitting upwards of 850 active account -- that number has dwindled down but we've kept quite a few. Welcome to all of you reading this!
  
• Total race entries continues to climb while the # of horses running shrinks (by design).
  
• Roughly 18% of the 3yr old horses bred are still active while the senior crops stay strong.
  
• Also noteworthy that the 2yr crop is bigger than previous seasons and we already have 1000 yearlings in play.
  

Finally: we will be looking at adjusting categories and balance for season 26 (mostly around ensuring the race options are being used effectively). We've not heard much regarding wanting smaller or larger purses (And the tokens attached to it) so it feels like we have the balance approximately correct at the moment which is exciting.

Happy racing!


Two promotions will be available for a limited time to celebrate the 25th Anniversary.

First: from now until the 5th we will be giving out a free 30 day basic subscription to any user without an active subscription.
Second: from the 5th to 12th we will be giving away bonus credits!

Fixed the title of the Stable Manager page (was Manger) -- Thanks Pete

It has come to our attention that horses were being rested without the fee actually being drawn from accounts. In order to correct this we will be immediately returning all horses from rest (Rather than charge stables for every horse that's in there currently).

*Action from players needed*
If you want a horse to remain in rest you will need to send them there again.

*When*
The horses should be returned in the next hour or less.

Season 19 schedule will be finalized shortly.


Changes include:
Juvenile

• Increased Juvenile Maiden purse by 25%
  
• Increased Juvenile Added purse and upgraded them to gold tokens from silver [purse differential will be significant]; also removed bonus credits
  
• Increased Juvenile Graduation Added purse by 70%
  

3yr

• Increased 3yr Graduation Allowance purse 150%
  

Senior

• Introducing Senior Graduation Allowance races -- these will have sizable purses $8 + 12
  

Championships

• Qualifiers: Purse increases and specifically we are going to make the final two rounds of qualifiers worth more via bonus credits to encourage entries. [$100 in bc for each qualifier]
  
• Juvenile: 125
  
• 3yr: 125
  
• Senior: 100
  

Absent:

• We did not include the new distance in the schedule, decided to increase purses for existing races instead.
  

Other:

• added a link to view race history under the dropdown on race details page.
  

We are regularly reviewing the championship purses as we watch participation and nominations. As a result of one of the most active series seasons in the history of the site we are able to bump the purses:

Juvenile Finals are now $1500 each
3yr Olds are: $1420
Seniors are: $1420

Thanks for playing.

• Fixed a bug that wouldn't allow users to update stripe payment on mobile.

• Now forcing horses into the default group when retiring.
  

• Fixed bug with mares leaderboard page
  
• Added deceased indicator on both mares and sires leaderboard pages
  
• Added notification if you do not have any active subscription to the alerts section
  
  

Following up on this original post:

https://www.sportofkings....aspx?g=posts&t=4148


1) The schedule was compressed from 4 to 3 months.

2) Recovery time has been adjusted
-- penalty that was previously applied between 2 and 5 days has been removed so most horses merely need the 2 days off now
-- for now we will not be changing anything else but may revisit the amount of time a horse can go before becoming 'unfit' to match the new pace of the schedule.

3) "Over Racing" cutoffs have changed accordingly
-- type of penalty (number of races in 30 days)
-- Large penalty (5 > 7)
-- Modest penalty ( [3-5] > [5-7] )

4) Total purse money remains mostly unaffected.

5) The qualifier schedule starts earlier

6) Added a new week at the beginning of the schedule with better fillers

7) Maiden wins will not count for any age in the champs

8) The 3yr old group will now be incurring weight penalties as previously described

Behind the scenes we are working on setting everything up to transition to 3 month seasons (4 seasons annually). We know this has been repeatedly requested and this should help further create engagement, increase pace of races, and number of races daily. We will post all the implications as we wrap the final steps but expect a few things:

1) Recovery time will be reduced roughly 25% to match the reduced schedule
2) The schedule will be compressed 25%
3) Purse money - obviously with more races in a single months subscription either the average purse has to decline or cost increase, we'll listen to comments on the forum regarding this.


New Season Start Dates
1/1
4/1
7/1
10/1

Immediate Changes

• Raising many juvenile Maiden purses
  
• Adding Juvenile Maiden Allowances back: this will help more horses progress through and perhaps a few more lower class horses to stick around.
  
• Raising juvenile graduation purses
  

Future Changes being put in place

• Updating Championship Series so that beginning next season weight from a maiden win will not count for any age group
  
  
  

• Preview of breeding outcome percentages
  
• Personalized version of breeding results now available at https://www.sportofkings.us/stables/breeding_settings.aspx > Personal Results Summary
  

In an effort to help reset, or set for new players, the expectations of breeding results we have created a summary chart that using data that we started logging a few seasons ago. This data is actual results, not evaluations, and the page will continue to be updated as data rolls in.


https://www.sportofkings...cs/breeding_results.aspx

I hope this helps people better understand what to expect.

We've added a few new bloodlines

*Elusive Quality
*Langfuhr
*Sunday Silence
*Sadlers Wells


and one rare one:
*Bayern

We've tweaked the names of a few levels and added one more upper tier.




Subscriptions will stay at the same tier they were at before (based on # of horses). We did tweak the price of what is now the 'epic' plan to bring it in line. It was slightly cheaper per horse than the higher packages which wouldn't make sense.

Public Breeding Toggle added for both sires and mares

• Breeding evaluator should no longer show you horses that are not of breeding age. This was an unintended consequence of showing ineligible horses.
  
• New internal tool to measure interest in races by all possible filters to help us continue to improve the schedule. Note that we won't necessarily only focus on current interest areas but this will allow us to see areas where interest is falling short of expectations.
  

Happy Season 16 everyone.

At the end of the season all public breeding will be reset to false. This will prevent a rush to change the settings but it will require owners to actively reset their horses to public each season.