On Sun, 2023-03-26 at 13:18 -0700, Yachay Wayllukuq via agora- discussion wrote: > On Sunday, March 26, 2023, Forest Sweeney via agora-business < > agora-busin...@agoranomic.org> wrote: > > (I remember joining in the middle of a race and decided not to > > play for this race, which... is still the current race. > > I also would like everyone to consider repealing racing in general, > > as I don't see many players taking weekly race actions other > > than ais523 and snail... > > but that is a separate story.) > > } > > I'd be in favor of repealing horses.
I've thought for a while (since it was originally being proposed!) that the horse minigame doesn't really work. Hooves are more relevant now than they were originally, but still don't have much effect in practice – they serve as a limit on grinding dollaries but that's about it. There aren't very many possible strategies and some are clearly better than others. And when a player falls behind, it's fairly clear that they have no chance to win and no real reason to continue competing (dollaries, hooves, helmets, jerseys etc. are pretty much worthless if you have no chance to win the current race). The entire racing system seems to have originally been balanced around the "increase or decrease a specified Running horse's Race Position by 2, by paying 3 hooves" action (in the original version of the rule, this was the only time at which hooves became relevant at all). However, players have been reluctant to take that action at all – a major reason seems to be that the action is inefficient in terms of benefiting the player performing it, so the only reason to take it is if some other player is paying you to take it. And the problem with *that* is that the reward for winning the horse minigame is small enough that there's very little reason to spend assets, favours, etc. that might be useful elsewhere in the game on winning the horse minigame. (A horse race takes ages – several months – and the rewards for winning it are pretty small.) There are also several exploits. snail and I have both been exploiting the race rules continuously for several weeks (interestingly, with very little overlap in which exploits we're using). The fact that there's been very little discussion about fixing them – or indeed, people even acknowledging that that's what's happening – probably means that there's little engagement with the horse minigame as a whole. All that said, the current race is close to over, so I'd be in favour of letting it end and then repealing it. (Admittedly, that's at least partly because I suspect I'm the most likely player to win it.) -- ais523
