HGG Community Forums

Last month members where asked to weigh in on proposed change to the leaderboards to happen in June. Across all servers, members overwhelmingly agreed the proposed changed would be an improvement and we should add them in June. The new categories will replace the foundation, 2nd gen and lined top pointed categories. Best producer and PT will be untouched.

Silver Circuit is for lower ability horses, meaning the foals of Expros, 3rd gens from normal lines, and all horses at that showing ability and below. This is the same ability as the prior 2nd gen category just opened up to any horse of that ability range, not exclusively second gens.

Gold Circuit for medium ability horses, that's anything that is too high to be in Silver, but not cap and boosted quality horses. These are your high A and *star ability lines, that previously had no where to compete.

Platinum Circuit is for high ability. This is functionally identical to the old "lined" category.

I chose the break points by testing a large number of different possible 3 way splits and these where the ability levels that I found most often overlapped in the number of points earned per year. For example, offspring of cap quality horses seem to win the lined category in similar number to offspring of boosted horses. A level lines and *star level lines often score similar points per year etc.

Notably we no longer have a foundations only category as they caused problems (enumerated below) and given the choice between awarding foundations and awarding someone's breeding project I think rewarding the breeding project is a good deal more in the spirit of the game.



The problems being solved by this change are:
1) Foundation categories often can not run in era boards because there are no foundations of that era
2) Several of the color club foundation categories are "pay to play" because you have to pay real money to own a foundation of that club. To stay on the board you have to keep buying foundations over and over. While that was good for business, this goes against the games "no pay to win" ethos.
3) In older eras, and those "pay to play" color clubs, the 2nd gen category was only accessible to those who could breed to those foundations making competition low and gatekeeping impossible to avoid.
4) Because of the huge ability spread between foundation/2nd gens and the "lined" point category the vast majority of horses in the game had no boards they could ever reasonably compete on. You could win with very low ability horses and cap/boosted ability horses and nothing at all in between.



The proposed solution fixes those problems by:
1)All categories of all clubs are now able to run. On a whole this can mean dozens of new awards per server per season.
2)You never have to buy a foundation to compete on any club now. Buying a license or a foundation once lets you in that color club for ever, and buying altered show stock means you don't even have to buy that in the first place.
3)If you want to compete in era 3 silver circuit you can. No player controls who has access to specific eras categories with this change. All categories are equality accessible to all players
4)The kinds of horses who can win on the leaderboard is significantly expanded and much more even. That means if you have a bootstrap program you are just starting up there is a board for those horses. If you have old lines that you love but aren't exactly **star quality it's no problem, there is a board for them.


These changes come towards the end of a project started in 2022 to find and address all the exploits, bugs and problems with the leaderboard. I am aware some players are growing frustrated at the number of tweaks the LB has received over the past several years. I just want to assure everyone that changes are only being made to address those exploits, bugs and problems that were found, with the goal of making the lb as sustainable and healthy for the game as possible for the next 20 years. The only issue we have left to address is the ever increasing number of eras. Aside from that these new circuits are the last of the LB changes I foresee needing for a very long time to come.