Thoughts on Geldings

[Tenacious Equine]

So I have some thoughts on the upcoming gelding feature.

Firstly, I don't think that geldings should get a competition bonus- as in, a boost to their competition scores regardless of their stats.
I do think, however, that geldings should score more consistently than stallions or mares.
From my observation, there is about a 9-10% difference in the lowest and highest possible dressage scores a horse can get. For mares and stallions, they score pretty evenly throughout the range. Regardless of what you do, your best competition horse can have a bad day and score far below its personal best.
My idea is to cut off the bottom 20-25% of that range for geldings. This does not mean that they won't still have bad days, but their bad days will look considerably less drastic than the bad days of a stallion or mare, and they would be more likely to consistently place than their peers.

So where a stallion might have a dressage score range from 39% to 49%, a gelding would have a range from 41.5% to 49%, instead of having an overall boost (which would look more like a 41.5% to 51.5% range) or even just a boost to the high score, which would increase the range..

The second part of this idea which would require a lot more work would be having a gene that controls how much their consistency increases, within that narrow range. Say that every horse currently in game gets a 21% "gelding bonus" that they can pass down, but some of the foals will have slightly better or worse genes- within the 20-25% range in this hypothetical- meaning that it would be possible to breed specifically for lines that benefit more from gelding (though the difference wouldn't be very significant).

My second idea is that geldings should get a small training boost, which would just speed up the training process for geldings and enable players to get them into competitions sooner (and working on the next horses they need trained!). This boost could be either fixed or variable, possibly controlled by either the "gelding bonus" gene I suggested earlier or increased by player courses or a real-money purchase, and it would just make geldings more convenient to work with.

[BlackOak2]

This has always been a somewhat hot topic. Here is my brief input.

I've always liked having incentives for geldings and sterile mares. More so, then breeders. Breeders are great, their number one effectiveness being that they're able to produce. But I don't like the fact that the only REAL incentive for a gelding or sterile is to have a small boost to training or a small boost to evenness in competitions. I always thought it rather lacking. Felt that it was anyway.
We can make competitions strictly for geldings, for mares or for stallions. So I rather like the idea of giving them a competition boost overall. We'd be loosing the ability for these horses to breed. Personally, I feel it only fair that by losing something that is... arguably... so useful and important, that they be given back something that is, or can be, just as useful.
Using such a horse strictly as a grinder, once gelding and sterilization comes to us, feels like it'll flood the market, bottom out the earning ability (for sales) and leave us with a rather unremarkable overflow of rather useless, unbreedable (and likely fully untrained) stock. By giving them a base boost to competition, they have the ability back, to make themselves useful, beyond mere grinding ability. And for breeders, instead of making them compete against unbreedables, simply create breeder-restricted competitions. Thus creating a whole new pool of competition (in a few different definitions. ).

All that said, I trust our admins will have thought this through by now, quite thoroughly and once given to us, will likely be best for the game, the game economy and our game improvement.