News

Happy Thursday! As we mentioned before, we’re ramping up development for future marketing in July. 

👋 Hello, Welcome Wagon!

Congratulations to our new Welcome Wagon team Acoustic, Maki, mell, and Rivendell Stables! These four players are our new welcome wagon members who will be helping us greet new players and provide a bit more help support. You will see them around in the forums, Discord, and maybe in your messages offering help or answering any questions. If you see them around be sure to send them congrats!

😁 Welcome New Players!

We have noticed an uptick in new players recently, and we wanted to give a hello to everyone. Welcome to HoFa! We hope you enjoy your time with us and have a wonderful time joining us on our development journey. As of now, HoFa is almost complete with our current plans centering around bug fixes with a splash of new content here and there. Bedouin and I are a small dev team who work mostly in our free evenings to get work done so our updates are typically smaller but we like to think we are chipping away at our work pretty consistently.

We want to help everyone join our community and feel welcome so on Monday, June 20th at 7 PM EST/game time Bedouin and I will be doing a live Q & A while I do a bit of coloring with input from you! We stream live from our Discord server so be sure to join early to meet everyone! A reminder will be sent around the time of this event so keep an eye out.

🐎 Discipline Energy Return

We have added in a request to add back energy for horses if you remove them from discipline shows. This has been added in today's update! Now you can remove horses from discipline shows and they will have energy given back to them.

🐎 Discipline Show Changes

We’ve had quite a bit of feedback about showing and after too many spreadsheets to count and testing on our testing server, we think we figured out a good solution! Discipline shows have had a few tweaks to ensure levels for horses are increasing at a better rate than before. Previously, foundation horses and horses in small shows got the short end of the stick so to say. These adjustments we will be monitoring to ensure the level gain balance for disciplines is fair compared to other paths. So what have we done?

• Discipline shows now pay out many more horse points than before. This change ensures horses at all tiers and ranks will now receive more horse point benefits than before thus increasing the number of levels a horse earns in its lifetime. To give a figure to how big the change is an untrained 18-year-old foundation tier 1 horse previously could cap out at 119,700 points or a level 48. Now, the same horse will cap out at 245,700 points or a level 61. To note, a trained horse can potentially exceed this as it moves to a higher discipline rank.
• This change also means the minimum possible horse point earnings have gone up as well. An untrained 18-year-old foundation tier 1 horse previously at minimum would cap out at 25,200 points or a level 28 (😭). Now, the same horse at a minimum will cap out at 50,400 points or level 36. To note, a trained horse can potentially exceed this as it moves to a higher discipline rank and/or places higher.
• Smaller shows have always had a bit of a buffer added to them to ensure horses in higher ranked/tiered (usually fewer entered shows) are able to level as well. For example, a horse placing 3rd out of a show of 3 will be given horse points as if it placed 3rd out of 10 horses, earning more horse points, as compared to a horse placing last in a show of 100, earning fewer horse points.

Horses entered in shows today will see this benefit at rollover tonight! Now that this change is in place, we will also be reviewing career and halter show horse point payout. Our goal is to create more balance across the game while offering alternate gameplay options based on preference and playing style.

🐴 Halter Show Changes

You asked, we considered and have finally decided to remove the 10-horse limit to halter shows. As of today, you can enter as many horses into a halter show as it allows. For example, a show with 0 entrants means you can enter 20 horses and auto-run that show. We hope this helps keep halter shows flowing well enough for those who use them to ensure no horses end up missing out on the opportunity to enter.

💞 Stud & Brood Market

The stud market was a bit of a mess, to say the least, so today we have rebuilt the stud market AND fixed that forever loading bug. Who knew loading 8,000 horses at once would overload the server. Oops! The stud and brood market is now updated and ready to be used.

🏠 Boarding Centers

As a bit of a new change, we have made adjustments to boarding centers and how you board at them. A new community hub page has been added where you can view all of the boarding centers. This page allows you to view potential centers you can board your horses at. To access this page click the blue building in the lower left of the town map or click "Boarding Centers" in the Town navigation.

New for boarding center pages, we have added an option to select via the drop-down a boarding option: DIY, Part, or Full, as well as which horse to board. For upgraded users at bronze level or higher, on this page with the same options, you can board all possible horses in the center rather than selecting one by one.

On boarding center pages for center owners, we have updated the information to include more than just horse names. Now you can view the horse name, horse owner, and the option to manually kick the horse if it has broken any boarding rules.

✉️ More Emails

As we get more and more new players we have realized we are in need of more educational emails to be sent to them. In the coming weeks, we will be creating an email series for new players that highlights what we love about HoFa as well as valuable gameplay information. If you have any ideas as to what would have been most helpful to you as a new player, let us know! 

🌟 Other Changes

As a cosmetic change, the General Store and Construction now have tabs on the pages vs. the previous dropdown. We believe this is a bit cleaner but also helps everyone visualize all their options. 

🦟 Bug Fixes

• For what seems like the 100th time, we’ve put in the fix for the Enter All 1. This time, we’ve extensively tested it and feel that we’ve conquered most of the issues. Please put any new issues in the Bug Box as usual.

🔮 Upcoming

When we made the announcement about BreyerFest, we talked about some of the things we wanted to accomplish before then. 

From that post: 

Before July, our priorities include (in no particular order):

• Reduce the number of bugs in the game. ⭐
• Make sure the game is faster and can handle more players online at the same time. ⭐
• Fix quests and add the next quests. ✅⭐
• Make some changes to discipline and halter shows based on feedback we’ve seen. ✅
• Rebuild Herd Management so it works better for larger herds.
• Release the first version of the explore system.
• Add the Hall of Fame back into the game with more categories than before.
• Complete the Feature Requests system.
• Add in referral prizes.
• Add in a tutorial email series for new accounts. ⭐
• … and more! (our list is quite long)

✅= complete, ⭐= in progress

Beyond this list, we have a few things on the horizon:

• Grade Images will be uploaded for all those requested by 6/14. We expect these to be in at the beginning of July
• A new face will be joining the HoFa family soon. What could it be…?
• We’re working on entering the next series of quests but this is a lengthy process and could be several updates from now.
• We plan to release club halter shows! More details on this soon. 

Expect another update soon as we continue to chip away at our ever-growing list.

Cheers, 

Bedouin & Curly

Happy Friday everyone! It's officially the weekend!!

Quests

After much deliberation and training of the locals, we believe we officially have them all worked out on their job duties. Quests should now be fixed so they no longer repeat, leave blank pages, or do any other number of strange things they used to do. With this complete, we are now able to input new quests and expand upon HoFa lore, storylines, and NPCs. 

🌈 Spectral Token Addition

We decided that while spectral tokens are great as they are, they could be much much better. Today, we are launching the ability to pick variations using spectral tokens. This means every marking has variations possible to choose from. Using a spectral token now gives a variation option when a marking is selected. As a note, for KIT genes only one marking will display as the selected variation. For example, a ToRn with variation 2 will only show tobiano variation 2, not roan.

With this change, Spectral Tokens are on sale in the general store until June 12th at 11:59 PM EST/ Gametime. We hope this gives everyone enough time to purchase tokens and explore all the new possibilities!

🐴 New Item: Face Re-Roll Token

A new item can now be found year-round in the General Store, the Face Re-Roll Token! Often we have heard that foals or foundation horses are just so wonderful, buuuuut you’d like them better if you could make a few tweaks. The Face Re-Roll token adds the ability to randomly generate a new face marking on one horse. Any guesses what other items are coming soon?

👀 Community Feed

We can all now more easily stalk each other! Just kidding, the community feed has been added to show the most recent forum posts and replies so we can all keep up with what’s new in the forum. This also comes with a fix so the most recent replier displays as the person who replied, not the original poster. We hope this helps kick-start some activity on the forum to help build the community.

📋 Select All in Mass Equip

We dislike having to click so many things and have made mass equipping a bit easier. You can now mass select all in the Mass Equip rather than checking boxes one by one. We hope this helps those of you who have a large number of horses or if you’re like us, those who hate having to click more than needed. 

🌟 Welcome Wagon Applications

We have received lots of applications for the Welcome Wagon and will be reviewing them shortly! Messages about application status will be sent in-game to everyone who applied. We greatly appreciate everyone who applied!

🦟 Bug Fixes

We destroyed some bugs recently.  

• Forum posts now show the most recent replier, not the original forum poster.
• The scenario of a horse losing all its energy but not entering any shows when selecting halter and no discipline shows in the Enter All should be fixed now.

Be on the lookout for more updates soon!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly

Hello everyone and happy mid-week!

🥳 We’re Growing!

We have officially marked the beginning of our HoFa marketing for BreyerFest with this article from the BreyerFest Blog. We are beyond excited and thankful for HoFa to be able to participate in BreyerFest and are sure both old and new players will enjoy what's up our sleeves. With this blog post, we expect new player numbers to increase and there to be plenty of questions. We welcome all of our new players and are glad you are here! 

In the coming days and weeks leading up to BreyerFest, we ask everyone to help us answer questions, direct new players to resources, and contact staff with any way we can make learning about HoFa easier for everyone.

✨ LIMITED EDITION: Enchanted Lake Tack sets

From a time before HoFa, the English Enchanted Lake tack set was an item created by players to fulfill their need for purple tack and to live out their mermaid dreams. After much speculation, panicked manufacturing at the capital, and many…many… layers later, Will has managed to get his hands on this tack set once again. Today, the English Enchanted Lake tack set is being re-released along with a new Western version! These sets of tack have a higher bit cost than typical tack but offer a very generous twin boost and a show boost. Will has only successfully managed to receive enough stock to keep the tack sets on sale from now until June 12th at 11:59 PM EST/ game time. Best to stock up, it’s unknown when the sets will be available again.

🌟 Welcome Wagon Applications

As a reminder, applications are open for the Welcome Wagon!

Welcome Wagon members are selected by admins and serve as helpers to answer questions and welcome new players on Discord and in the forums. Members of the welcome wagon are selected based on previous interactions, profile review, activity, and application. As payment for helping in the welcome wagon, members will be gifted a platinum membership while as a member. Welcome Wagon members will have their membership reviewed once a month to maintain eligibility.

Those who join the Welcome Wagon will also be considered to potentially move into other roles on staff such as moderation, event planners, and more.  If you wish to apply to the welcome wagon, please follow this link to fill out an application. Applications will close on June 10th at midnight EST/game time.

🐴 NEW: Splash Variation!

Our Splash of Color contest winner, Brumby, created a wonderful new splash design that is now available in all breeds with the splash gene. This is our 5th splash variation with only one more variation to go! 

🔮 Upcoming

Per usual we are busy planning and working on a large number of additions to the lands of HoFa. In the coming months, we expect to become busy with more new players and ramp up content production.

• Quite a few varieties of tack are on the horizon, some of you have actually already found where it was secretly hidden.
• New breeds and breed re-dos are coming down the pipeline! Who do you think is next?
• Work on bug-squashing and new content creation is coming along smoothly. Bed and I are working overtime to ensure we get as much done as possible as soon as possible!
• As we work around the site we are now moving into a new phase of accessibility review using a few new tools we have discovered. Our goal is to make these changes by the end of the year and have HoFa more accessible for screen readers and players with disabilities so they may more easily access the site.

We want to thank everyone for sticking around while we work in the background and update a bit less frequently. We promise plenty of work is going on that is coming soon!

Best,

Bedouin & Curly

Happy Saturday!

Today is the day! Dutch Warmblood is now available to everyone via the foundation store! Be sure to run on over and buy yourself a few (or a lot)!

Cheers,
Curly

Hello everyone! 

Today begins the release of the Dutch Warmblood into the foundation store! Dutch Warmblood is now available to players with gold and platinum upgrades. On Saturday at noon, the breed will be fully released for everyone to purchase at the foundation store.

Cheers,
Curly