Today, we recap our BreyerFest trip, reveal referral prizes, list some explore tweaks, show off some fancy new grade images, and more! 

Contents:

• BreyerFest Recap
• Referral Prizes
• Explore Tweaks
• Strawberries N’ Cream Tack
• Grade Images
• Halter Show Clarification
• Small Tweaks
• Bug Squashes
• Future Update Schedule

🐴 BreyerFest Recap

Thank you to everyone who came to see us during BreyerFest! We had a blast talking to current players and even meeting a few of you who have joined after chatting.

During BreyerFest, both Bedouin and I spent most of our time in an outdoor tent and managed to keep everything moving smoothly. Kentucky heat and storms have nothing on us! 💪 Although we didn’t stray far from the tent, we did manage to hit a few iconic spots such as the Clarion, Big Barn, and catch a chuckwagon show. We want to give a shout out to our tent neighbors, Pat’s Ponies and Wise Choice Tack and Supply, for helping us navigate in-person vending and answering our questions. Overall, BreyerFest was a huge success and we hope to return!

Thank you to all our players, new and old who have supported HoFa thus far. We are so thankful we have a welcoming playerbase to help guide Bedouin and I toward game changes and ideas that make HoFa unique and fun for all!

🥰 Referral Prizes

You can now track your referral prizes! When you use your referral link on the Referrals page to refer people, that referral will count towards your incoming referrals. Once the referred player completes the intro quest, they will count as a Referral Point (RP) that you can then spend in the shop on that page. Once points are spent, they will be removed from your total points but still show up for your monthly and lifetime points. 

If you have any previous referrals, they will show up here. Although this feature hasn’t been in place, referrals have still been tracked. 

Currently, there are only 2 prizes: money and ingots. We have plenty more planned including some HoFa merch! Before we launch all prizes, we’re increasing security around the exploitation of multiple accounts so we can better monitor if someone creates accounts just for referral points. Once that’s in place, we’ll launch the rest of the prizes. 

🗺️ Explore Tweaks

Our first round of tweaks have been completed for explore!

• The injury rate has been greatly reduced.
• Horses now gain horse points by moving around explore. Note that this IS affected by PS stats so discipline horses would do well with exploring. Explore horses need to be trained just like discipline horses. 
• When you select a horse, you no longer have to click the checkbox to confirm. 

Now for the wild horse timer… This has always been in place and is currently 15 minutes. It worked well when browsing the game and not having wild horses show up when you’re still on cooldown. This doesn’t work as well for the new explore system so we’ve made some adjustments:

• The timer only starts if you’ve captured a horse, not if you’ve encountered one.
• Horses will no longer show up if you’re on cooldown from capturing one. 

As usual, we’re monitoring all feedback about the game and taking it into account for updates. We’re also seeing any comments about injury rates, item drop rates, etc and will continue to adjust over time. This is still a new feature and as we all know, it can’t be perfect right out of the gate but can get pretty close with adjustments over time.

🍓Strawberries N’ Cream Tack

Here in the HoFa headquarters, we tend to have a bit of fun every now and again. Yesterday, we posted to our socials that we do have a favorite for Barbenheimer weekend and were asked if we would release the tack set featured in our post. Everyone can show their support for our favorite movie coming this weekend by purchasing the Strawberries N’ Cream pink tack set in the general store! The tack set is currently on sale until midnight July 24th.

🦄 Grade Images

Brumby has been helping us catch up on our image backlogs and has completed a beautiful set of grade images! As a note, Norwegian Fjord grade images for base colors are currently on pause as we work through re-doing Fjord code for their bases which requires re-doing their coloring. Also, greying stages and grey bases are also on pause as we work through code. 

⭐ Halter Show Clarification

In the news post announcing show changes, we announced that halter shows would run at midnight. This is not the case. They are actually scheduled to run at 12pm EST/game time.

⚒️ Small Tweaks

• In explore, the horse’s energy color now changes when it reaches certain points.
• On the create shows page, it now says that shows will run at the next show run after 24 hours have passed instead of at midnight.
• Added descriptors of what to fill out in the fields for a bug report. Hopefully this helps clear up some confusion about how to make a bug report.
• The community feed on the Community page now shows the content of the most recently posted reply if there is one.
• You can now see a breakdown of where your horse has earned its levels. This is on the Achievements section of the horse page.

🦟 Bug Squashes

• Bug #1121 - Treating all injuries now works.
• Bug #1134 - Fixed a typo in the Shetland registry.
• Bug #1119 - If you change your email and have to re-verify it, it will no longer send out a welcome email and new player private message.
• Bug #1128 - Fixed encrusting issues from the last update.
• Bug #1138 - After selling a horse, it should no longer appear as your active horse when loading explore.
• Bug #1123 - You should no longer encounter blank error boxes in explore.
• Bug #1139 - Fixed a time error in the code that occurred when creating shows between 12am and 1am.
• Bug #1131 - Put in a fix for getting two horses when capturing.

🗓️ Future Update Schedule

Over the past month or so, we’ve been frantically trying to get the game in a ready enough state for BreyerFest. We managed to hit our goal which is super exciting! But we’ve also been going at an unsustainable pace for our small team. 

We will be reducing our update speed to two development updates per month instead of at least one per week. This will help us bring larger, higher quality updates to the game. 

Next Update: August 3

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly