GomezYouUp

Every time we iterate on the race schedule in @photofinishgame , there's bound to be fear. That's healthy. Especially I know a lot of players have gotten burned hardcore by massive sweeping changes in other games that didn't seem to make any sense. We aim to not work that way. We don't make changes for no reason, and we try to communicate ahead of time. But I also have to be honest, games require iteration. There's no blueprint to follow. Change will happen. In this case, what are we doing? Well, we're following through with what has been communicated for over a year. In Photo Finish, every horse has a "GRADE". That grade is not really an accurate representation of its performance. It never has been. It's more a measure of its lineage. It is a fancy icon. Something to brag about. However, as we of course were moving at breakneck speed to ship, we ended up utilizing the horse's grade as a primary way to set up and 'cohort' races. With a small population early on, we couldn't easily create competitive races - the best S horse would beat up the best A horse nearly every time. A and B horses had nowhere to run. So then, we started adding "allowances" around those grades. An A horse could now race against an S horse because it would carry less weight and be competitive. But again, for months, I conveyed in Discord, on Twitter spaces, etc, that this wasn't going to be permanent. It was merely a stopgap. Why? Because, as I said, it's not a fair representation of performance. As a horse ages, all kinds of things may be happening to it. An A+ horse no longer runs like an A+, so racing against other younger A+ means it gets rekt. As it's bred deeper and deeper down the bloodline, someone could hyper specialize a horse, say it's got awful long distance ratings but is best of breed short distance. It's still an A+, but now it performs like an S+ in its specialty. Huge advantage to a player doing this, but within no realm of reality or authenticity. So, we introduced a new system called Benchmark back in season 9, modeled after the system utilized heavily in Australia, where horses have an overall Benchmark rating that is a more accurate representation of their racing prowess. It's dynamic. If they have an awful streak of racing, it moves down. If they are on a tear, it moves up. A rating like this makes it wayyyyyy easier now to cohort horses together competitively. It doesn't mean "everyone wins" or that these races just turn into slot machines. There's still a lot of skill to find out where best to enter your horse based on what types of figures they are putting up. But now, from my perspective and the perspective of the data, we can fix the previous issue where large swaths of horses literally have nowhere to race. This is objectively a much more authentic AND fair race type than a "grade-based" allowance. Utilizing benchmarks means as horses age or underperform, they have somewhere to go. In my eyes, there’s zero difference to having an A > S allowance, which evens that racing field, compared to races that align fields similarly but just using their actual performance rather than “grade”. Which again, is in no way an accurate identifier of performance, never has been, and never was meant to be. We continue to want to do better with communicating changes well in advance, in this case, we have talked about it forever in blogs, twitter spaces, etc but maybe new players never saw it or glazed over it. And that sucks. I own that! We're still getting used to a game that has basically 3+ months of lead time for changes (timing with breeding a new horse). We'll lean into this more and more as the dust settles. Anyway thanks for riding along with us! We'll be showcasing the new race schedule hopefully early this week and can discuss and iterate plenty before it goes live a little over a week from now. Horse business.