Disappointed in the State of Things

Raine [Platinum || 282 posts] on 8/12/2022 2:50 pm

This is a very difficult post for me to make. I feel like concerns about features and gameplay aren't really being heard and that there is an underlying fear in the community to discuss it because of potential backlash. That being said, I am increasingly disappointed in how HoFa is seemingly doing all it can to bring new features and players while ignoring the often heavy lag in game and old bugs that have been collecting dust. I will be linking to bug reports but only to ones I originally submitted.

 

Lag has been unbearable lately. Feeding, watering, showing, etc. have never taken this long. It is detrimental to the experience. Even with options to mass feed, water, groom, show, train, etc. it can take multiple minutes for pages to update. Bugs that have existed for a long time are still broken while new features are being quickly tweaked. The white genes have been broken on many of my horses since December 2021-(https://horsefable.com/bug-report/383). I was asked to stop breeding the horses with broken genes at the end of June, which I have kept up with by staying mostly frozen, but after being told in June there would be a fix pushed soon - there hasn't been one. There are other issues with the white over grey gene that exist as well that have not been fixed-(https://horsefable.com/bug-report/602). There are still multiple issues with clubs, crossbreed campaigns aren't always registering generations correctly is, in my opinion, the most severe at the moment. There have been issues in the marketplace of items disappearing into the void and, to my knowledge, compensation or the return of items to said players taking multiple days to longer.

 

I have no doubt these aren't all the issues currently with gameplay given the amount of bugs in the bug box, these are only ones I can speak on as someone who has experienced them. It really feels like a slap in the face as a member of this community for so long to have things seemingly pushed aside in favor of bringing new things, which in turn create more bugs. I have no intention of relinquishing support of HoFa. You're stuck with me. My frustration has been slowly building in the form of unanswered questions, of when are these things going to be fixed. I love this game and I want to continue loving it, but right now it's just hard. I know that real life exists and we unfortunately cannot spend all of our time with our little horsies but the length of time it has been taking to get things fixed is gruelling on the player base and I am not suggesting all time be spent on HoFa only from a development perspective. I do feel as though priorities at the moment are skewed.

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Kaye

Post Count: 128

8/12/2022 2:59 pm

Could not agree more. There's no point in adding new features when the basic functionality of the game ... isn't there.




Caledonia Acres

Post Count: 7

8/12/2022 3:38 pm

New features are fun and all but if the bugs arent being fixed, it kind of makes them a mute point.  Little things that only affect a handful of people are being completely ignored, even though it really impacts game play.  For example, the campaign drop downs are still not working right.  We are 5 colts away from completing our campaign but still cant register then generation 3's.

The lag has been concerning.  I have finally frozen most everything but my halter and career horses. 

 

I get that new features are much more fun to code and far more exciting than bug squishing.  Pretty soon the bugs are going to overrun the game and the playerbase may not have the paitence to wait it out.



Rhea

Post Count: 98

8/12/2022 3:48 pm

I wholeheartedly agree with you.

For one I too am very frustrated with having to work around things that haven't properly worked in a long time. But I also really dislike how sometimes things get changed (I guess in an attempt to fix something?) without there being an announcement / a developer blog that tells us that something did change. At least as long as you're in the discord server, you at least sometimes know when things got 'fixed'. But I can't even imagine how confusing it can be for players that don't have discord.




Alfalfa

Post Count: 64

8/12/2022 4:56 pm

It's always hard to voice criticism, especially when I truly care about the staff and community of this game. That being said, I agree with Raine and the other commentors. 

While explore and wild horses are fun, they are not what keeps me coming back to the game daily. That is strictly due to my goals to better my own herd and reach the highest competition tiers the game offers. To progress. 

Currently, HoFa isn't fun to play on a daily basis. Many of the features that I interact with daily, such as Herd Management, Mass Actions, Mass Equip/Un-Equip, Shows Arena and Halter Arena just... don't work great right now. On top of the mentioned extreme lag issues, there are sorting issues, entering bugs, shows that don't regenerate when they should, still being unable to equip and un-equip from the horses' page, horses tabs taking forever to load, etc. I know staff is aware of the issues and fixes are being implemented, but as others said, it's frustrating to see the time going to new features when the core gameplay isn't working smoothly. 

To the HoFa staff: I love y'all and y'all do a great job running this game and being attentive and updating things. I want to continue supporting this game!! It's just frustrating that when you logon to play, there are numerous roadblocks that you have to deal with daily that take away from just being able to play and enjoy my pixel ponies.



Maki

Post Count: 515

8/12/2022 6:51 pm

I don't want to be the one to say it but maybe the server isn't meant to handle thousands of horses 



Astral

Post Count: 170

8/12/2022 8:53 pm

I agree with all of the above.  It's super frustrating to have the little things getting overlooked, as others have said.  I also agree with Maki that perhaps we have too much load on the servers at the moment?  Is there a plan in place should that occur?



Spellbound

Post Count: 61

8/14/2022 11:51 pm

Thank you for saying something. Although some of the current bugs don't apply to me, I had no idea some bugs were causing a hold up from other players to progress in their breeding programs. I'm glad this was mentioned more as a warning for future issues that come up. I actually stopped playing and froze all my accounts for quite a while when there was that bug that wouldn't load the offspring list of a horse. I had to completely stop breeding because I only keep the best foal and it was really difficult to find and compare mulitple foals after a few weeks. The bug made the game unplayable for me and it lasted for quite some time, I really hope it doesn't happen again in the future with a new update.

I'm still waiting for the pedigree bug to get fixed and hope it doesn't turn into a disaster of lost data...if ya'll are old enough to remember Horseland and how "broken lines" tanked the value of your horse...



Qeni

Post Count: 73

8/16/2022 11:49 am

I agree with the lag because it's something you have to go through every day to mass take care of your horses. The game seems designed for you to return multiple times during the day, with the careers and all, but it's nigh impossible to take care of your horses from mobile. The Horses>Manage tab takes a good minute to load on desktop, and on mobile I lost my patience after 10 minutes of it loading. You'd literally have to mass take care of your horses early in the morning from desktop to be able to return on mobile to send your horses to do careers.

I like this game a lot and I love the community on here, it's just that the experience has been more and more frustrating since the rebrand :(

Edited 2 times



Kimchi Salad

Post Count: 41

8/16/2022 1:30 pm

I have been feeling this as well lately! I was really surprised at the pushing of new features when we still can't add tack from a horse's page. That seems like a pretty basic gameplay function that is for some reason still not in place? And i recently tried to sell a club without realizing that club transfers just don't work? So i worked out a sale and then lost it bc that bug still isn't fixed. :/

I do love this game and am on almost every day, but more focus on bug squashing and updating some broken features would be appreciated.



Person

Post Count: 2

8/23/2022 1:37 am

Well, if i knew what you are talking about, i would agree. but seeing ive only logged on like ten times so far, i havent noticed very many of these. i am very much hoping to not run into any of these. but i have noticed a large amount of lag ingame. i so far am thinking that this is a really fun game, but this does make it less enjoyable.

i must admit that the wild horses and stuff are fun, but if its just being used to cover up the larger issues than i am sure it could have waited. 

also, i may be wrong but i dont belive the mods reacted to this at all. i am really hoping to not get in trouble for this comment. :/

idk. im crazy


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