HGG Community Forums

This is the story of how me winning a million hbs in the lotto took me from never having spent more than $20 on a game before to opening my wallet and life to HAJ.

I joined Mesa in May of 2021 due to a facebook ad. I made twenty foundation horses on May 6th (19 mares and one stallion) and bred them. I thought the game had promise but I couldn’t figure out what to do and anything I wanted to do required both patience and hbs, neither of which I had. I make it to May 8th before not logging in again for almost a year.

Eleven months pass and, for whatever reason, I logged in again April 14th 2022. I bred my horses, make a few more, and poke around. I buy a small barn. Sometime in late April (when the pastures were closed,) I win a million horsebucks in the horse creation lotto. This changes how I play the game. I no longer have to wait until tomorrow to make another horse, nor do I have to worry about if I should test horses, or whatever. I start making a lot of horses. A lot of horses.

Because I’m making so many horses, I want a premium membership. That means I spend real money to get that membership. I can’t buy pastures with game money, so I also spend real money to put my horses somewhere to breed. I don’t yet know what GMTs are, but I do see if I spend at least X amount, I get them as a free tip, and I like that idea. I don’t know what IVs are, so I don’t know I can squirrel away money, and I just spend it all making horses.

As I make more horses, I need new places to put them. I buy more barns and pastures. I run out of in game money by May 6th. But now I’m invested. I have how many horses? I should breed them. Do I really have to wait again? No way. So I buy in game money with real dollars.

After doing all of this, I came to forest to see if I could start an account without spending real dollars using pointed creates. I can and, on forest, have plenty of IVs within three weeks of trying. However, the pointed create game requires knowing what is going on (and having the confidence to charge a lot) and, as a new player, I couldn’t figure out/understand what I was supposed to be doing. Further, it required me taking up some lovely person buying a random horse for 75K on the forums. Even my “starting with no real money and seeing if I can do it” journey gets that 75K seed money.

Based on this experience, I think it would be helpful to dramatically raise the amount of money new players get. The whole conversation about pointed creates exists to solve the underlying problem of new player poverty. I think if you give new players money, they have things to do, which makes them invested, and makes them come back (and eventually spend real dollars.)

I don’t think this will be harmful to the game, as new players won’t know how to spend a lot of money well. They’ll make plenty of stupid mistakes (I gender swapped my high papered stallions into mares and then they didn’t pass SBA), test things they shouldn’t, and otherwise burn through cash. However, in that process they will be doing things (not be bored) and getting invested in the game.

There are three ways I think this could be done well:
1. Every log in, for the first 30 log ins, an account gets 10K hbs. This is enough to create and test two horses with enough left over to get into minor trouble (shows, buy an auction horse, etc.)
2. Give new accounts a larger chance of winning the horse creation lotto and consider giving out more large prizes. (I’d be interested at the correlation between million point lotto winners, retention, and spending real cash. I think it’ll be statistically significant but, ultimately, I’m guessing off my n of 1.)
3. Make the achievements give a good chunk of change.

I would also propose that any account which is being flooded with money per my proposal would not be allowed to convert cash to IVs. There is no realistic way an account should be at 9,999,999 hbs in 30 log ins, so that restriction shouldn’t hurt new players (but limits the experienced ones with new accounts.)

I have had a terrific time on HAJ and I’m grateful I was given the imaginary money needed to get me hooked. It is hard to know how good this game until you learn it…which I could only do once having a massive amount of hbs.

Thank you to all the creators, mods, and helpers. This game is just great.