Hello, everyone! We’ve got quite a lengthy update today so get comfortable, grab some coffee or tea, and get ready to hear what we’ve been working on. 

Table of Contents: 

• State of HoFa

• Remembrance of Vega 

• Artist Update

• Achievements

• Mass Crafting

• Rock Paper Scissors

• Feature Request System

• Road Map

• New Ingot Items

• Stable Filters

• New Mass Actions

• Art Updates

• Small Tweaks

• Bug Squashes

🏛️ State of HoFa

We’ve been quiet the last couple of months as Curly and I completely needed to unplug from the game to reset. As most of you know, we’ve been working on HoFa continuously since November 2018 and although updates ebb and flow, we are always doing something behind the scenes. This year, we just needed to step away to focus on what was going on in our lives. With a recharge comes new energy as you can see in this lengthy update!

From Curly:

Curly has been in graduate school for the last 2 years and graduated in May with her master's degree in Leadership, Education, and Communications 🎉🎉🎉. She’s also been in the process of leaving her full-time job, supporting her husband as they move due to his new orders, and working on her health treatment plan. Lots of transitions and lots of logistics! 

From Bedouin:

I’ve been working on several businesses of my own to get traction and make money outside of HoFa. Last month, Vega, my GSD who is in the game, passed away suddenly due to some illnesses she was struggling with. Vega was my best friend and it really threw me for a loop and made me unmotivated for everything. I’ve been slowly getting back into the swing of things which is reflected in this update.

🐶 Remembrance of Vega

I usually never talk about personal things but in honor of Vega, I wanted to tell her story especially since she’s part of HoFa. 

Vega was a kind soul in a dog’s body. She was the perfect best friend and was always glued to my side. To me, she was more like a child who was always watching me, there for me through thick and thin. In early March, she stopped being able to walk and was getting sick multiple times per day. She could no longer keep food down. I took her to her primary vet and they ran many tests and since she was progressing every day, she was sent to the UGA ER. They diagnosed her with myasthenia gravis secondary to a thymoma (a mass located in her chest), megaesophagus, and aspiration pneumonia. Thousands of dollars later, the mass was gone, she could walk again, and we had an action plan. About 3 weeks later, she regressed and eventually got aspiration pneumonia again, this time with an antibiotic resistant bacteria that she had caught while in the hospital. Her last day on this earth was April 30th. 

To remember Vega, everyone who has been active in the past month has been sent 3 Vegas. As a bit of background on this particular item, the HoFa staff surprised me for my birthday a couple of years ago by commissioning her to be added to the game. 

🎨 Artist Update

Now that we’re past the sad news, let’s get on to what everyone has been waiting on! AN UPDATE ON OUR ARTIST SEARCH! 😲😲😲

The answer is YES, we’ve found a new horse artist. We found her over a month ago but we’ve been getting a head start on our backlog of art. Our aim with working on the backlog is to have several bases in the processes of being colored and fitted for tack all at once while also optimizing this process. Previously, horse art bases were done one at a time on a rolling basis; sometimes, some took longer than others which caused delays. With several on hand and in the process, we aim to have a consistent uninterrupted release schedule.

We are aiming to release the first new base on August 7th with monthly new releases after. We’ll be posting sneak peeks on our social media channels so be sure to follow us there!

Wonder who is galloping into HoFa next?

🏆 Achievements

Starting today, you can work towards achievements. You’ll find your achievements here. Each time you complete an action in game that aligns with a category, you’ll receive 1 point. Each category has 7 types of achievements containing 4 levels in each. You can track the levels within the types by how many cowboy hats are filled.

Achievements will be displayed for all to see on your profile. Some achievements have monetary rewards, some have item rewards, and others have permanent rewards. You’ll have to wait and see what treasures await you as you complete each one. (Yes, it’ll tell you once completed - this reward is not a mystery. 😁)

There are several different categories of achievements:

In the future, achievements will make their way into the Hall of Fame so you can see where you stack up against others’ progress.

📙 The Guides: New Ingot Items!

Special thanks to Reed LePage some ancient knowledge has been preserved in the Town Hall library. Reed was able to find several copies of some guides pertaining to wild horses and crafting and a collection of interesting rocks. These items can be equipped to yourself and offer generous bonuses. The guides and rocks are available for purchase at the General Store.

Antique Tracker Guide: An item that when equipped increases wild horse encounters by 3x for 24 hours.

Lucky Rock: A rock, when used, increases the chance of finding minerals in the mine by 3x for the next 24 hours.

Cookbook: An item that when equipped doubles crafted cooked items for 24 hours.

Gemology Guide: An item that when equipped doubles crafted encrusted tack items for 24 hours.

Dye Guide: An item that when equipped doubles crafted dyed items for 24 hours.

You will only be able to equip one type of item at a time, and you can find all equipped items on your profile along with the time left that the item will be active.

✂️ Mass Crafting

It’s time to get crafty with a much-requested feature: mass crafting! Mass crafting allows for crafting more than one item at a time, no more mundane clicking. This feature is only available to Bronze accounts and higher. After selecting ingredient items, you will see the number of each you own and can craft up to the lowest number between the two. Hopefully, this encourages those who hoard items to empty out their storage room. 👀🤭

Crafting 3 Citrine Blue English Pads at one time in the Craft Room.

🗻📜✂️ Rock Paper Scissors

Many of you will probably respond to this with “It’s about time!!” because we’ve been needing a second game FOREVER. Rock Paper Scissors is now available in the Game Room. It’s a simple game where you are competing against Strata Gee. For those who have never played, rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and paper beats rock. You are limited to playing 20 times per day and each time you win, you get $100. Good luck!

👍 Feature Request System

Has anyone read the Player Development Ideas forum lately? It’s a bit wild and crazy over there similar to how our bugs/issues forum was way back in the day before the Bug Box was created. The Bug Box has helped us streamline issues in the game and keep things organized for the dev team and we hope to do the same thing with ideas and requests.

Feature Requests is similar to the Bug Box in that you can create a new request and others can comment their feedback about the feature you are proposing. Feature requests have an upvote or downvote feature for staff to view the most popular requests…and sometimes unpopular ones. We moved away from the forum format to give us more flexibility with collecting and organizing player ideas and opinion data. Want to see the most popular requests? That’s possible now!

We will be moving over existing Player Development Ideas into feature requests.

Note: You can only submit one feature request per month. This is to encourage everyone to put a lot of thought into their requests.

🗺️ Road Map

Our old Road Map was a Trello board linked on our news page that would be updated from time to time. This has also been brought in game and combines Feature Requests and the Bug Box for a big overview of where the game is at. Our staff plans to use this as our project management tool to simultaneously keep us on track and everyone updated.

🔎 Stable Filters

A much-requested feature that was in earlier Eqcetera days has made its return! You can now filter your horses by tags if they’ve been cared for, if they’ve been shown, and if they’ve been trained. This lends a bit more use to tags for organization. You can find this by clicking the “View Filters” button at the top of your stable page.

📋 New Mass Actions

With the ability to now filter by tags on your stable page, it makes sense that you’d want an easier way to manage horses with those tags, right? Apply Tag and Remove Tag are two new mass action options. 

You can only select 1 tag at a time to add or remove. As a reminder, mass actions are only available for bronze accounts and up. You can find them by going to Horses -> Manage -> Mass Actions. 

🖌️ Art Updates

As some may have noticed we have recently updated some images across the site. Our most recent changes are to estate upgrades and horse page feed, water, and groom icons.

⚒️ Small Tweaks

• Forums now have pages! No more mile-long forum pages.

• The mailbox has been optimized and now has pages.

• You can no longer use horse capture items from your inventory (this didn’t work before anyway).

• With the introduction of player equippable items, energy items are now relabeled as Player Items. They’ve also moved in the General Store under the Player tab.

• There is now a “Manage Subscription” button in your account settings page if you have an active subscription. Previously, this was only available in the bottom of the upgrades tab on the Ingot Store page.

🦟 Bug Squashes

• Bug #1153 - For horses that have an offspring limit, they no longer show up in the Studs/Broods section.

• Bug #1193 - You should no longer be able to double-click the upgrade training certification button as it now has a loading function once clicked.

• Bug #1318 - Elections should now trigger if the president is inactive for 90 days or more.

• Bug #1396 - The edge of the spring map should now be accessible.

• Bug #1406 - When transferring money to another player, there is now a confirmation popup.

• Bug #1390 - The spacing of bubble gum has been fixed in some item names.

• Bug #1364 - Mailbox should now load for some players with a lot of messages.

• When you go to an item and it’s equipped, it should now tell you if it’s equipped to a horse on the page.

Whew, I think that does it for today’s update! We’ll see you in the next update on August 7th then in another dev update later in the month focusing on bug fixes. We’re aware there are quite a few waiting to be fixed!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly