July 26, 2023

Hellow everyone!

We've been impressed by the number of questions you all had for our game dev team! It took us some time to read them all, classify them, and choose the ones that sounded the most relevant to us... for this first batch of answers!

We are thrilled to get to answer your questions. Through this initiative (and the ones that are coming!), we would like to strengthen the special bond that already exists between you, our loyal players, and us, the game dev team.

For this first session of answers, we decided to focus on some hot topics that have been discussed a lot lately. Our goal is to give you some insights into our project strategy and the future of Howrse. In order to best answer you, some questions have been combined into one big topic. The following answers have been divided into five sections:

⭐ A quick update about the rewarded videos on the classic version;
⭐ Trophies & collection;
⭐ Communication with players;
⭐ Interface and user experience;
⭐ Vision of future.

If you don't see your question answered today, rest assured, it still lays safely by us, we will do our very best to answer a maximum of questions in the following months.

We enjoyed answering you, and hope you will appreciate our answers. To recognize the different teams who answered the questions, we will be using the following emojis:
📢 Producing team
🎮 Game designers
💻 Programmers
🖌 Artists
🗣 Community Developers
☎ Customer support

So now, enough talking, let's get to the point!

Happy reading!
Your Howrse Team

Rewarded videos & bug resolution process

Are some bugs going to get fixed anytime soon? I haven't been able to play the rewarded videos on my PC in months.

💻 ☎ Yes! We have a whole bug-tracking system that enables us to report bugs to the programmers and fix them as quickly as possible. We fix them all week long to optimize your gaming experience. In recent weeks, for example :

🔹 We fixed an issue that prevented players of the Italian version from cancelling cow farming in their equestrian centre.
🔹 We added a warning when a Solar System Starry Aura is replaced by a Wind Starry Aura.
🔹 We have corrected an interface issue that prevented certain actions in the equestrian centre.

We carefully study all the feedback you send us via the https://support.owlient.eu/ platform. If the issue raised cannot be solved directly by the person replying to you, it is passed on to our technical team, who will prioritize it according to the level of impact (How blocking is the issue? How many players encounter it? etc.). Depending on the level of priority, the problem will either be corrected directly on the current version of the game, or it will be dealt with by our teams in one of the next game updates.

Trophies & collections

You had a lot of questions about this precise topic. We have read them all, and instead of picking a couple of questions, we decided to answer them as a whole, to try to cover all your interrogations. We hope our answer will help you understand our intentions and the reason why we are changing these features.

🎮 Our initial goal with the Trophies & Collections redesign was to separate gameplay feats, such as winning competitions or completing contests, and the various collections one can pursue in the game. We wanted to prevent you from losing trophies you had already earned. We also wanted to make them more motivating by adding rewards for completing them.

We are still standing by this design; however, it seems like we underestimated your attachment to the visuals attached to each trophy and your ability to share that information on your player sheet.

We heard your feedback and are working to make both things come-back in the game as soon as possible.

We are also working on these topics:

🔹 Increasing the quantity of new trophies that we add to the game related to other features besides contests & divine horses.
🔹 Creating collections for Golden Apples and Helios Rays.

Communication with players

You recently sent out a survey to players to get feedback on the game and what the player base would like to see as possible changes or future features. Is there any plan in place to increase transparency regarding this feedback and how these suggestions are being evaluated or addressed?

🗣 We understand you are curious about the survey data, and we might work on a new format to share with you some insights and data we collect from them! Surveys are the best way for us to collect your feedback and have a clear view and understanding of your expectations. But this is not the only system we use to know more about your expectations; we are also constantly reading your messages on our social networks, right here on Discord, or on the remaining forums. Once collected, the communication team classifies your comments and passes them on to the appropriate person or team.

We are working way ahead of the events. To give you an example, the game designers' team already knows what they want for Winter and is working on the 2024 events! That is one of the main reasons why you don't necessarily see the changes you request appear immediately in the game. Everything you say is, however, recorded, and the game dev team always tries to implement the relevant features you might request when there is a small place for them in our timeline.

Why do you keep the Discord server in English only?

🗣 The main purpose of this official Discord server was to offer a safe discussion space for all of our Howrse players who lost the access to their forums. The decision to have an English-only policy is primarily aimed at ensuring effective communication and moderation.

We understand the frustration some players might feel, when it comes to write in a language they don't fully master, and are aware that it might sometimes be difficult to clearly express their mind. We have worked and are still working to find a solution that could suit the maximum number of players. Not only that, but we've looked into Discord translation bots, and were not fully convinced by the ones we tried.

Tl;dr: The Discord server will remain in English, but we are looking into solutions to allow you to write in your native language 😉

Will you make a holiday workbook for the 2023 summer period, like last year on Facebook?

🗣 We are so thrilled to see that you liked our previous holiday activity book, we've put a lot of effort in it. In case you hadn't seen in yet, the 2023 edition is already out and ready for you to complete! You can download it right here:

EN - https://howr.se/EN-HolidayActivityBook2023
FR - https://howr.se/FR-CahierdeVacances2023
DE - https://howr.se/DE-BuchMitFerienaktivitaten2023

Don't hesitate to share with us your progress right here on Discord, or on the other social networks with the hashtag #HowrseSummer!

Will you be more clear regarding the creation space? How does the voting process work?

🗣 First, we’d like to remind you that the selection of creations is done manually. We don’t automatically pick creations based on the votes. However, your votes are central in the system. For each category, we always start at the top of the votes, and we then filter some creations based on multiple criteria, which we are happy to detail here.

🔹 Does the creation respect the Black pearl rules (https://howr.se/BlackPearl_Rules)? We check for plagiarism, fan art, unauthorized use of art line, photos and so on.
🔹 Does the creation have unwanted traces, halos or stains that could damage its representation in-game? Kind reminder to our talented creators: please check that your creation is properly cropped and clean. If it isn’t, we won’t select it.
🔹 Does the author already have an entry in this month’s creation space? As most of you probably noticed, we select one entry per player to give a chance to everybody.
🔹 Is there a suspicion that the creation was made by AI? If there is a strong one, we won’t take any risks.

The votes are the first thing that we look out for when selecting creations. If the community placed a creation on top of the votes, we have no reason not to select it. We have a team specialized in detecting plagiarism and compliance with the Black pearl rules.

Once again, the selection process is manual, so mistakes do happen, and your tickets help greatly with fixing that. Don’t hesitate to use our customer support if you see a recent creation breaking the rules!

Lastly, we’ll take this opportunity to inform you that some categories are not as filled as we would like them to be For example, very few players are submitting unicorn donkeys, winged donkeys, winged unicorn donkeys. We also have a shortage of winged draft unicorns, draft pegasus and winged unicorn ponies. We would happily take more of these creations to keep the creation space as diverse as possible!

User interface & user experience

Again, we had quite some questions about the interface and some improvements or new features you would like to see us implement to improve your experience. It seemed a bit superfluous to get back to every questions asking if we would or not implement this feature, or this one, or this one, or... You get the idea! So we prepared again a big answer that - we hope - covers as many questions as possible.

🎮 📢 User Interface Improvements
About the questions regarding possible improvements to our website interface: each new design for one of the pages on our site requires a considerable amount of work. This is why we must balance working on interface upgrades with working on new content for the game. We have decided to focus on quick wins for the interface, while dedicating most of our dev team taskforce for new content. For example, if we ever wanted to release a "dark mode" to our site, we don’t plan to work on it in the coming months.

Black Market Items availability
You’ve asked if we could make some items available for sale in the shop: Some of these items are too advantageous for being on sale constantly. We try to make them available regularly as reward in contests, be ready 😉

Unicorn breeding
A few players expressed frustration over the chance to breed unicorns. We will work on a mechanic to improve these chances.

QoL / User experience improvements
Many questions regarding the addition of filters in searches, redirections and other "quality-of-life" improvements. We added many of these suggestions to our (already extensive) list of improvements to work on. As for the UI improvements, we have to balance working on these upgrades with working on new content for the game. We will do our best to allow as many improvements as possible to make their way into the game.

Divines & vision of the future

Are there any plans to bring back a fair and even rotation of divines? There are divines that haven't been brought back in 3+ years, while others are back yearly, or multiple times per year.

🎮 📢 We are still committed to releasing new divine horses and creating new divine series as it remains one of your favorite elements in the game, as we noticed in the results of the survey we sent a few months back. However, we are not satisfied with the fact that these horses are only interesting because of the rewards they provide and by the current limited availability of older divine horses.

We are currently working on a few things to:
👍 Make these horses more interesting and fun.
👍 Find ways to make older divines available to purchase more frequently for you to be able to complete your collections.

You will be able to see the beginning of these improvements quite soon, so stay tuned 😉

Howrse, I love your game! Are you planning on shutting it down anytime soon? That would be heartbreaking, Ngl.

📢 And we love it too, very much! For now, there is absolutely no plan to shut down Howrse. Quite the opposite, actually... We are very, very, impatient to present you the changes brought to the features we previously launched, but also the new content on which we have been working on for some months now... 😉

We know that some of you are worried about the future of Howrse, and especially the players on our smaller versions. Don't worry, we have no plan in closing any of the versions of the game!

Bonus !

Some of you were quite curious about our dev team, as individuality. We've asked a few questions to our colleagues, hoping you will appreciate their answers!

A word from...

😎 A game tester!

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
Hellow! I've been working on Howrse for almost 17 years now! In the past, I have worked on other projects like Babydow, Aquariow or Fashiown, but I am currently only working on Howrse.

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?
Yes, I have a private account since October 2005, but I don't play regularly.

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?
I really love the testing part on the test server, looking for bugs or flaws that might be hiding there!

Is there anything you would like the players to know?
Keep in mind that this is just a game, let's relax, and have some good time while taking care of your horses 😉

Any anecdote to share with us?
I signed my contract on the back of my boss in a train station!

😎 An Associate Lead Programmer

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
I have been working on Howrse for a bit more than 6 years. This is the only project I am working on right now.

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?
I actually have a personal account on Howrse, and I play regularly in my free time. I am even the proud owner of an Equestrian Centre in the Top 200 on Ouranos!

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?
I take the most pleasure in developing contests and events, but also useful features in the everyday life of our players, such as the detailed mode of breeding, or the automatic limitation of training times during BLUPs to avoid a loss of time in the days of my horses.

Is there anything you would like the players to know?
Thank you for your loyalty after all these years! Pro-tip: If you want the game to go faster, get rid of the horses you no longer care for! The servers will thank you 😉

Any anecdote to share with us?

I once tried to chain BLUP alone Quarter Horses in B100 and reach a genetical potential that would be high enough to sell them for 100 Passes each. I managed to keep up with the teams... 3 days before giving up on the time it took 😅

January 19, 2024

Hellow everyone!

New year, new answers!

As promised, here is the second batch of answers to the questions you asked our dev team. This second batch will also be the last one for this Q&A session. However, don't get mad if your question hasn't been answered: we will give you a new opportunity to ask us in the near future!

Once again, we divided your questions into 6 categories:
⭐ Game features & future;
⭐ Commercial offers;
⭐ Art;
⭐ Cheating;
⭐ Communication;
⭐ Howrse Team.

We would like to thank you once again for your enthusiasm and hope you will find the answers you are looking for in our Game Dev Q&A #2!

As a reminder, here are the different emojis used for you to recognize the different teams who answered the questions:
📢 Producing team
🎮 Game designers
💻 Programmers
🖌 Artists
🗣 Community Developers
☎ Customer support

Let's get started!

Happy reading
Your Howrse Team

Game features & future

Can you change the new feature of teams to set a maximum for sales and cover GP so that they can't reduce it once it's set to a number? Because right now people are getting scammed out of being able to use the horses they bought left and right because they put for sale and then the GP gets lowered, so the buyer can't use the horse.

🎮 We are aware of this issue, and we are working on a solution to prevent this problem.

Are there any plans to rework the daily genetic curve?

🎮 It would be very complex to rework the daily genetic curve and above all very risky: both on the side of the reception of the players and from a technical point of view, with many possible side effects that would be difficult to anticipate. We therefore think it is more cautious not to change this aspect of the game.

How do you determine and prioritize upcoming changes and new features?

📢 Our number one priority is obviously to keep the game functional, stable and alive the whole year long. And it’s already a pretty nice task that takes up a lot of the team’s time!

Then, for the time remaining for the team, we prioritize the new features by putting into perspective the following two elements:

🔹 The contribution of the new feature for players and/or for the game
and
🔹 The estimated cost of development.

Once this prioritization is done, we take the topics in order, and we strive to deliver them as soon as possible!

We are particularly proud of the new game mode: Ascent of Olympus, and the warm welcome you have reserved for it tells us that we are on the right road!

Only one question, will you ever add Exmoor ponies? And will they be fluffy chonkers!!? They are such sweet lil guys, we need some!!!!

🎮 We can't agree more with you: they are so fluffy and so cute! We will think about it.

Will you add a random system of marks on the coats (legs and face marks)?

🎮 We would really love to, and it has already been discussed and considered in the past years. Unfortunately, the technology we use on the game and the format used for the horse images prevent us from implementing it on Howrse. At least, not without massive development work.

Can we get back the function of sending divines to Safe Haven, or at least get a “toggle on/off” feature for certain divine perks?

🎮 We don’t have plans to implement it for the moment, but we have seen your many remarks and questions. We understand the issue some of you are having, for example with Tarpan, so we are trying to figure out a solution for this problem.

Do you consider building on a lore for Howrse, and thus creating original divine horses tied to this lore? With the freedom you could have on the concepts themselves, it could provide new interesting mechanics directly tied to the game itself, different from mini-games to earn Black Market objects.

🎮 📢 We have already made some preliminary thoughts on the subject. It would require a massive amount of work to be well done. According to our studies, this is something that would not necessarily interest many players. Considering the prioritization matrix showed above: Moderate interest + high cost = low priority feature

This being said, only fools never change their mind. 😉

Will the lootbox system in the game ever be improved or ended?

🎮 We are working on an adjustment for the number of divine fragments in our luck items to reduce the random aspect of it, and are thinking about more possible evolutions of those items.

Commercial offers

What are the plans to include items like Knight's Equipment and the Coat of Iris in the black market? They are currently the best items for the Grand Prix, yet you don't offer them.

🎮 We are aware of this, and some things are going to change a little bit. However, some items are voluntarily kept away from the Black market because their price in Passes would be too high to be sold there.

Are there any plans to bring more availability of some items that we currently can’t purchase until promos are available? For example, BP, Magic Hat etc. Also, the access to tears, wand and Apollos lyre privileges more often? A lot of people agree that all three of these are sought after and are popular. I could see it being a good hit.

🎮 Halloween customization items are sold during the Halloween period and can be won regularly during our events and from some divine horses. However, we don’t plan to increase the availability of privileges.

Why are all new Black Market items excluded from the item exchange? Will the possibility to trade them ever be added?

🎮 This feature is the source of too much traffic and cheating, so we have decided to stop adding items in it.

Will Jade be available in Titan’s Challenge this year?

🎮 There are no specific plans for Jade at the moment, except for the possibility to get this divine horse in the next Christmas packs.

Will there be ever an option for us to buy Hestia’s gift?

🎮 We cannot add the option to buy Hestia’s gift, it isn’t our intention because it would force unicorn breeders to buy it to keep up with the rankings. We want it to remain a rare item in the game.

When does Howrse plan to bring back Bucephale's/divine tack?

📢 No spoil... But we heard you, and it's coming soon!

Hello, are you going to change some dress of horses because many races this look like is it hard to differentiate them, thank you.

🎮 No, we are not planning to do that.

Are there plans to change the default horse graphics again?

🎮 There are too many breeds for this, and it would take way too long. This is not something we are planning to work on right now.

Art

Do you have an art department/team or is it a one-person job?

🖌 There is an art department within the Howrse team with several people for different roles: manager, concept artist, 2D artist and UI (User Interface) designer. There are also a few freelancers working with us depending on the needs we have.

Who is the artist or artists behind the coats for horses, divines and companions? I love your style and would love to follow them on Instagram if they have a page there.

🖌 Thanks for the compliments, they have been forwarded. However, the team is quite shy, so we don’t have any Instagram page to share.

Cheating

Do you plan to do more about cheaters? I'm talking about people who are scripting, to automate the work of their horse, and particularly people who are using several accounts.

☎ Ensuring a fair game environment for all players is one of our top priorities. Last year alone, a new code of conduct has been released, massive amounts of bots have been banned, and thousands of players who engage in scripting and/or pass trafficking have been sanctioned.

While cheating management is a non-ending battle, we plan on perpetuating our efforts to fight it without impacting the experience of players who respect the game’s rules. You can therefore expect us to continuously improve cheat management actions, tools, processes, and communication for the years to come.

Why were warnings before karma docks/bans removed?

☎ While we continue to use warnings for minor offences or very specific situations, we have decided to stop using them for major offences.

When a player decides to go against the game’s code of conduct to gain unfair advantages over other players, a warning is generally not enough to stop them from continuing to do so.

Also, do you even consider lowering sanctions for already banned players (perm bans to temporary ones)?

☎ It really depends on the situation. If a player feels like their sanction is undeserved, they are free to send a ban appeal ticket to our customer support. Upon receiving the request, the sanction will be reviewed by a different person than the one who applied it. Once the review is done, the player will be informed of our decision.

To be perfectly transparent, it is rare for us to lower or remove sanctions, as each one is applied after a thorough investigation. We do not give preferential treatment to anyone, no matter their seniority, financial investment, or closeness with the team.

Last but not least, I would like to add that sanctions are always applied for a reason. Except for ensuring a fair game environment on Howrse, we have absolutely nothing to gain by sanctioning players.

Why do the docks and sanctions differ across servers? Aren't the rules for trafficking, multi-accounting, scripting detection systems and sanctions supposed to be the same across all servers? Aren't the punishments supposed to be done automatically through your detection systems, and not manually?

☎ It is true that for numerous years, sanctions were server dependent. This was done to give us the flexibility to adapt to server specific cheating trends.

This has changed recently, and most sanctions are now the same for all servers. Some exceptions might remain on servers that still have forums. Sanctions can also vary depending on the number of misdeeds done by a user, but this has always been the case.

While detection is automated, our team always reviews and sanctions such cases manually. This is why we could – and still can if necessary – apply custom sanctions.

Communication

I know recently that you have been moving more towards the times. Like interacting more with the community and bringing the community to discord. I wondered if there are any plans to be more interactive? For example, live streams, specific channels/hang out on certain days. Much like the Friday Fun Topic that used to occur on the site in the forums? Also wondered if there are any other plans on allowing the community to interact more? For example, topics like other games or voice chats people can interact in? I am not sure about anyone else, but I am a gamer and play other games. It would be super cool to connect with others among other games too. Maybe ways that there can be partnerships made between Howrse and other companies?

🗣 Thanks for noticing that we are moving in the right direction. We do have plans to keep this going for even more interaction, such as doing more Q&As. There are no plans yet for live streams, but regarding the fun topic/channels to hang out in, we have recently opened the language forums, opened by moderators, where players of a specific language can hang out together, this depends on the moderators’ availability, but it happens regularly. Voice chats are not something we want to implement, as they are difficult to moderate and don’t really fit the community’s way of playing.

What happened to the ambassador program? We haven’t heard from them in years…

🗣 The Ambassador program was quietly discontinued.

We launched it in 2018 when we were working on the new monetization on Howrse and have asked the Ambassadors for other feedback a few more times after that. However, due to time constraints and a lack of subjects we could consult the Ambassadors on, we stopped using it.

If we ever were to use a similar program again, we would start from scratch with new elections or a new system.

Howrse Team

How many of you manage the game on all versions?

📢 There are over 40 people working on the game in total, if you count all the teams (production, game design, development, art, testing, support and community management, marketing).

Are you hiring devs that could work remote from NA? (haha... unless? 😉 )

📢 We are not hiring at the moment and if we were, it would be in France, not North America. Feel free to try your luck at any of the Ubisoft studios we have there!

Bonus!

Some of you were quite curious about our dev team, as individuality. We've asked our colleagues questions, hoping you will appreciate their answers!

A word from...

🎠 A Lead Community Developer

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
I've been working on Howrse for 11 years now, starting as a community manager. I'm only working on Howrse right now (as a Lead Community Developer), but I spent some time on other projects developed by the studio in the past years.

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?
I do have a personal account on Howrse, that I created before my job interview to be prepared, and I'm still using it after all this time. I don't always play regularly: it depends on the free time I have and the contest that is on (the Cards and the Mazes are my favorite). I must say that I became addicted to the Olympus Ascent in the past months, so I've been playing more again.

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?

Most recently, I'd say it was the Olympus Ascent. It was really exciting for the whole team to work on a new game mode, testing it internally and then with testers and players, and seeing it improve over the months from the paper prototype to what we have now in the game. I'm so happy with the finished version and really proud of what the team delivered.

Is there anything you would like the players to know?

Thank you all for making this game keep going for so long. I'm really grateful for that. The Howrse community is really unique and keeps surprising me, even after all these years.

Please note that while we don't answer everything you say, we do read what you say on the different communication channels. Keep that in mind when you express criticism in a not so nice way.

Any anecdote to share with us?

When I started, I was the community manager of the German server, which means that I was using the Ow account to talk to players on the forums.

I took this monkey thing to heart, because that's when I started eating a banana every day, thanks to the fruit at the office. And I never really stopped. 😅

🤠 An Economic Game Designer

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
I've been working on Howrse since 2011, that's a little bit more than 12 years entirely spent on Howrse ^^

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?

I do have a personal Howrse account. I keep playing every day without exception, even if I am less active than I was a few years ago.

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?
I love working on the creation of new events. But also on a less noticeable aspect: everything about rebalancing on the main game or in events.

Is there anything you would like the players to know?
We can give the impression of not being generous when it comes to rewards. But we always strive to keep the best possible balance between pleasing you so that you keep wanting to play, and not jeopardize the game economy and thus allow you to play for years to come.

Any anecdote to share with us?

I was a very well ranked Howrse player before becoming a Game Designer. It was through an ad posted directly on the game that I decided to apply. My strong knowledge of the game allowed me to be hired!

🏇 A Senior Concept Artist

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
I've been working at Owlient for 15 years now. I have worked on many project like Aquariow, Babydow, Mojow locow and Dragow. Today, I am fully dedicated to Howrse, just like the old days ^^

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?
Arf, that's a trick question! Yes, I have an old private account, but I am not very active any more.

My personal life gives me less time to play, and to be honest: I was too bad. Because I don't like to hurt animals, I kinda stopped playing.

Yet, I remain very involved, since I draw every day our dear quadruped friends.

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?
All challenges are good to take on Howrse.

Not only to make each horse unique, regardless of the theme, but also to make sure that the community is always excited by our creations.

Is there anything you would like the players to know?
First, I'd like to thank them for their loyalty and investment at all levels on the game. This game would not exist without its community.

And I'd like to thank them when they let us know in the comments that they like our illustrations, it is always a great satisfaction to see that your work is appreciated.

Any anecdote to share with us?
Oulaaaaa an anecdote... There are so many when you've been working for 15 years in a company!

A memorable one among many others: the Celestial Eye horse. I had scribbled a horse with a goldfish head (as a joke); I was really convinced that it would not be validated, considering the poor thing's head... But it was eventually integrated in the game! 😄

Probably not the classiest horse in the game, but for me, it was very cool to make such an atypical horse from a crazy idea.

There are now a lot of Trophies listed on the Trophies page and more being added all the time. Are there any plans to redesign the page to make it more usable/easier to navigate? e.g. ability to bookmark trophies you are working on, hide trophies you aren't interested in etc.
📢 🎮 Yes, we are currently reworking the Trophy page to make it more usable, but all the functionalities you mention might not make it into our redesign.

Are you ever going to return to the preview for Helios Ray, as in, getting to see how it looks on the actual horse page before applying it?
🎮 We will seriously consider it. :)

Are we ever going to get more trophies for regular gameplay objectives?
🎮 Absolutely! We are planning to add more trophies regularly, as we've done recently, and we'll keep adding trophies related to different aspects of the game.

Can you change the BMI selection default from passes to items that are in inventory (if you have it)?
🎮 Yes, we will address this issue.

Are you thinking about ways to make the dragon divines nicer to take care of?
🎮 This is not planned right now, but given the number of votes, we'll consider it and see how we can change it.

Why does the game continuously add animations that are not affected if you select the "turn off animations" setting?
🎮 💻 For gameplay and technical reasons, it is not possible for us to turn off all animations in the game. However, rest assured: Animations in Howrse don't come near the threshold putting people suffering from epilepsy at risk. We will be more specific in the option panel allowing to turn off animations and specify that it only applies to non-gameplay animations.

Is there going to be a repeat event of the one to remove horses from the game anytime soon, but with a better concept?
📢 🎮 This is not planned right now.

Will we ever see an item that would allow you to trade fragments of one divine for another? Kind of like a Themis scale?
🎮 Again, this is not planned right now, but it's an interesting idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

Is there any intention to improve the communication with the player base (when there's for example an issue/bug, or when there are changes)?
🗣 We are constantly trying to improve the communication with the player base. The Q&A sessions are an example of it, we implemented them last year when the community requested them as we thought it would be a good idea to create proximity with players.

We are working more closely with the producing and game design team to improve the general communication around new features and bigger changes to explain the reasons behind the changes so that everyone can understand them better and avoid situations such as the trophy update.
We are always in direct contact with the programming team, which can be very helpful when there are major bugs on the game so that we can keep updated.

Thanks to Discord, we can easily have direct and privileged contact with the community, and we want to keep using and growing this channel.

Our goal is to have a consistent communication while also respecting the specificities on the different versions. The discrepancies you noticed in the forums can be related to different schedules of the persons handling the forums, some specific initiatives, and sometimes just human error. Mistakes happen!

Anyway, rest assured, improving the communication with players is one of our main objectives.

Please do something about your partner offers. Most of them do nothing, but just take our time and ask private questions. They look like scams.
📢 We are aware of issues regarding the partner offers. We are actively investigating them with our external partners and will keep you updated on the progress on the topic.

Would it be possible to add a feature that allows us to have insight into the number of votes received for our artworks in CS?
🗣 While we understand where you're getting at, we do not plan to add such a feature in the Creation Space.

As mentioned in a previous answer regarding the creation space, we try to take only one creation per player per month, even if there are several in the top votes, which means that if one of your creations was selected, chances are really high that your other creations were well-placed in the ranking and will have their chance in the following months.

We'll try to showcase some of the creations that almost got selected at the end of each month, as Cocow did for April, so that you can get an idea.

Can we have a filter for the sales for companions?
🎮 We will look into the feasibility of adding this filter.

Could we ever see the Dev team use an Upvote Platform where users suggest ideas and players vote on them then Dev team responds / marks "done, working on it, not possible, etc»?
🗣 📢 For now we'd rather focus on the tools and communication channels we have at hand, but that's a great idea, and we'll keep it in mind.

Are there any plans to increase the number of drachmas and/or obols we can currently have on hand?
🎮 The maximum number of Obols & Drachmas you can have has recently been increased to 15. We hope you like this change!

What are the current efforts to attract new players to the world of Howrse?
📱 📢 We understand your question about the decline in the number of new players in the game. One of the main reasons lies in the game's longevity, which has been live since 2005. With such a long history, it naturally becomes more challenging to consistently attract new players, and campaigns reactivating former players are often more effective. However, we continue to invest each month in acquisition to bring new players and are committed to continuing our efforts to maintain and grow our player base.

Will you give players the opportunity to vote on which divines they would like to see in the lucky items, Black Friday, and the Ascent of the Olympus in the future?
📢 🎮 We're considering a version of that. Stay tuned!

With about 300 divine horses, is it possible to make a search tool to look which horse gives which item?
📢 🎮 Nothing is planned for the moment on this matter.

Are mods getting checked for activity?
🗣 We do check mods for activity, though not as regularly as we wish, and we understand it can be inconvenient for players when a moderator hasn't been online for a while. Thank you for raising the issue. We have started to do a thorough check on all versions.

Will you raise the separate the limit of 6 crops between meadows and greenhouses?
🎮 We are already quite generous with the number of allowed crops, so can't allow this without putting our economic balancing at risk.

When will the old trophies return (the old design to be specific)?
🎮 We will not be reverting to the old trophies, but we are working on a way to address the concerns expressed when we switched to the new system.

Are there any plans to run old events like the Plants, Potions and Treasure hunt? I really loved their concepts.
📢 🎮 Nothing planned for the moment on the subject.

Bonus!

Let's keep introducing to you our beloved Howrse team! We hope you enjoy these little interviews from the team.

A word from…

🎮 A Game Designer

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full-time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
I have been working on Howrse for almost 16 years, not necessarily exclusively though. I have been a game designer on Howrse for 8 years now.

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?
I have a personal account on which I play almost every day, so that the game stays concrete and alive for me. It helps me for my work, because as a game designer, I spend a lot of time in Excel files and arid documents for programmers.

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?
Among other things, I really like working on the new divine horses series. From the moment we have chosen a theme, there is a work of documentation to define in general the horses that we will put that I appreciate very much. Creating a new gift mechanic is also a fun challenge.

Is there anything you would like the players to know?
Little tip for horse owners of Sherlock Holmes: It is possible to win almost all his games of the mini-game of the divine Sherlock Holmes and Stellar by showing strategy. For example, until you come across red boxes, you should not reveal two boxes next to each other. Also, it is better to avoid starting with the boxes on the edges of the card or those in the middle.

Here are two examples of an unlucky yet effective strategy!



Any anecdote to share with us?
I am not now (but who knows what the future holds), but I have been a rider for a long time. What I prefer in riding, besides the relationship to the horse, are hiking and dressage.

🗣 A Community Developer

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full-time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
I've been working on Howrse for 2.5 years now, and it's the only project I've had at Ubisoft.

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?
I do have a personal account and I use it mostly to play the Ascent of Olympus! I'm hooked on this mode and try to master it as best as I can.

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?
I actually love working on the Creation Space! I'm in charge of selecting creations each month, and I'm always excited to see what the community has been drawing in the past month. Of course, it comes with challenges such as the growing use of AI or copyright abuses. Overall, though, the community is both talented and very respectful of the Black pearl rules, and it makes selecting creations a real pleasure!

Is there anything you would like the players to know?
Vocalizing your feedback and writing it down in a structured way makes us love our job! Legit criticism, whether it's good or bad, helps us genuinely improve the game and suggest improvement to the design team, even if it doesn't always make its way in the game. So thanks to the vocal minority whose feedback is valuable to us and always will be.

Any anecdote to share with us?
After being hired at Owlient, I learned that my little sister used to play the game for years when she was a kid, and I had no idea about it!

💻 A Senior Programmer

How long have you been working on Howrse? Are you working full-time on Howrse, or do you also work on other projects?
Technically speaking, I do not only work on Howrse: The team in which I am working, works on several tools that revolve around Equideow, such as the Support platform, the management of our game servers, etc. But in general, I’ve been working on Howrse since 2012.

Do you have a private Howrse account, and do you play Howrse regularly in your free time?
I do have a personal account, but I only use it during my working hours to test a lot of little things, not necessarily to play. I am more a collector of beautiful horse coats than a good equestrian center director!

What part of the game did you have the most fun to work on?
I like tools that help people, so I would say the Help Center. It’s not really an aspect of the game, but for me, it’s important that people can find an answer to their questions on Howrse. Especially since some players really have an impressive knowledge of the different mechanics of the game.

Is there anything you would like the players to know?
I would like to thank all the players who get involved in the game, whether they are breeders, equestrian center directors, Help Center advisors, moderators, or other. This game is also built by your actions and our motivation to always seek improvement is you.

Any anecdote to share with us?
I have at home an object that I consider collectible: Howrse's board game! I keep it very carefully and even if I love board games, I wouldn’t dare open it.

Once the Greek Gods of the Olympus are done with Zeus, will they start again with Athena, so anyone who didn’t get her has the chance, while everyone who already won her gets to start immediately with 25 fragments of the side divines in the Boss Room? Or how will it work?
🎮 Yes and no. We are going to try something new with the Ascent once the Zeus season is done. We are not satisfied with the current version of this mode, as too few players play it each season.
Starting in January, we are going to make the mode intermittent. This means that right after the Zeus season is done, you will not be able to play the Ascent for 3 weeks. Then we will inaugurate a new boss series for a 3-week season. Then there will be another 3 weeks without Ascent, then there will be a "rerun" season with the old Greek gods' series starting again from the top, meaning Athena. Then 3 weeks off, then a new boss from the new series, etc. We are going to try this approach and see if it performs as well as we'd like. We don't expect it to be the final form of the Ascent of Olympus as there are other changes we'd like to make that will have to come later.

Are you planning to add the fragment preview to the mobile version of the game? When you are in the middle of a round, you can choose paths for fragments. On the classical version, it is possible to see which route gives which fragments. On mobile version this is not possible. And especially for the 'in between' fragments that cannot be seen from the overview page.
🎮 We are planning a bigger change to the mobile version that will address this issue.

How does the inclusion of non-divine Special Horses fare? That Yggdrasil and the Legendaries won’t show up is clear, due to how they work, but what about the fact that we have yet to see any Wild horses, Chimeras or Pet Horses? Are there any plans for them to show up at some point?
🎮 We want to avoid giving away Divines which give Passes in the Rowgue, it's already very easy for cheaters to get "free" passes, and it's hurting the whole game and thus our ability to maintain it, so we want to avoid digging our own grave (and yours as well).

Are there plans to introduce new events, or are we doomed to have the same ones over and over again?
🎮 We are hard at work on finishing a brand-new event, which you should be able to play as soon as January. The ambassadors tried it last summer, and we made some modifications based on their feedback. Initially, our plan was to release this new event for the 20-year anniversary, but more pressing and less visible priorities prevented us from doing so. This event will last 3 weeks and will be playable in parallel with our classical events.
We also have plans for more new events, but given our current bandwidth, it's very unlikely that we will be able to release any in 2026.

Since the Creation space is ever expanding, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the ray you are looking for, if you don't know it by name. Would you ever consider adding more filter options besides just the colours? Maybe a small, standard set of tags that the artists can choose from when submitting a ray, such as "outdoors", "indoors", "under water", "space" etc.
🎮 We are very aware of this issue, and we really want to improve the discoverability on the Creation space. We started working on a tag system like you describe, but we had to pause it due to (again) more pressing priorities and haven't found the time to advance on this subject for a while. We hope we will be able to soon, but as always, we can't commit to anything yet.

Will we ever see a private/personal coverings page similar to that of a team's private coverings page? This would be where a player can post/see/use coverings from any studs they own, and it would only be accessible by that one player. This would add ease for covering mares, instead of specifying the name of each mare from each studs' page every time you want to cover privately. I mainly have this issue with draft horses, as my whole AP farm is drafts, and there are never any public coverings, really. That's hundreds of times that I have to copy a mares name into a specific studs page!
🎮 For private coverings, it's not preferable: you may agree to offer a covering to a mare with a low Genetic Potential (GP), but not agree to a high GP one. So it's better to keep the current system with a reservation for a specific mare. Yet for personal coverings we agree it would be easier to have the same system as the team coverings, we'll add it to our backlog with no guarantee beyond that.

Is there any concern about the optics of so much more “pay to play” content? There have already been nearly double the number of paid offers in 2025 as there were in 2024 and there are still two months left in the year, which could be seen as a cash grab and discourage players who don’t have so much disposable income. Multiple new divines have been released in paid offer packs only just in the last 2 months.
🎮 We see Divine horses as an optional gameplay, they are never needed to train horses, breed them, collect coats or play events. We did increase the quantity of Divines we release, but on the other end we also increased the quantity of Divines players can get for free (through the Ascent of Olympus and as the Final Prize in some contests). Howrse is one of the rare free-to-play games where earning hard currency (Passes) is quite easy, and the more (and the better) you play, the more hard currency you can get, meaning that you can also afford more Divine horses if collecting them is what interests you.

What happened to all the different events we used to have? Now we only seem to have a couple that keep rotating. Are there plans to redo old events like Excavations, Object finding game (forgot name, we had one for Amira), Potions, Wandering horses, Decorating a Christmas tree... and many more I'm sure I forgot about.
🎮 When we decide to discontinue a specific event, it usually means that it's because it is not popular enough or that it is too costly to produce. Overall, modifying and producing older events or creating new ones is very time-consuming. When we focus on events, it means less time to improve other game features, modernize the UI, improve the mobile version, make the game easier to learn for new players etc. For the past few years, our priority has been to focus on these topics, and that means less time for variations in the events we propose, but we hope that in the future we will be able to spend more time improving the diversity of events you get to play in Howrse.

Will we get another change concerning the graphics of the horses’ coats, since too many breeds still look alike?
🎮 We are currently looking into this but can't promise anything yet.

Will keyboard controls/input ever be implemented for players who have long term physical issues, want to prevent physical issues, or want a different way to control their game?
🎮 Thank you for bringing this subject to our attention, we will investigate if there are improvements we can make in that direction.

Can we expect more updates to the new trophy system in the future (such as allowing us to display specific trophies on our profile pages, or adding new trophies for maybe HR's or missing divine series such as the Japanese, Celtics and Maoris), or do you consider them pretty much finished?
🎮 Yes, it's on our roadmap, but it may be a while before it makes it into the game.

Will there ever be an option to change the specialisation of our Equestrian Center? I know some people would love to do this, but it's impossible without resetting the entire account.
🎮 We'll add it to our long to-do pile.

Are there any new breeds or competitions/disciplines that may be coming available soon, or other major gameplay updates/refreshes?
🎮 Not in the near future, but it's definitely in our plans to find ways to refresh the main gameplay.

Will it be possible to see beforehand which daily mission we can trade with?
🎮 It is not planned for now.

Will all servers be 'pulled together' when it comes to available breeds? The available breeds differ per server, some servers have way more breeds than other servers.
🎮 It's our goal, yes, and we haven't been consistent in progressing toward it, but we will work toward improving this aspect.

Would you consider making it easier to offer coverings? For example, by adding the cogwheel-symbol, allowing breeders to choose a price and offer coverings until the stallion is out of energy (like how the competitions work with the VIP perk)? This would be a lot more efficient, and you wouldn't have to choose the price for every new covering when offering multiple from one horse.
🎮 That's a good idea, we could also add a field to select the number of coverings to offer.

Will draft horse team get a ranking in the future? They're not much different from other breeds, and the rewards could be specialized to Phanes egg and Zeus Lightning Bolt, and a 3. breeding item?
🎮 It is not planned in the near future.

Are there any plans to improve the way that breeding farms can be customized and organized? Such as custom tab colors or being able to choose the order of tab colors rather than a pre-set color order, moving multiple breeding farms to another tab at once, moving a whole tab and its contents to a different tab slot rather than only being able to move farms individually to a different tab, etc.
🎮 We plan to improve how breeding farms work in the next few years.

VIP perks like auto comping, training, feeding, and I don't know what else is just available on the app while desktop players would have to pay 1k passes per month to have them as well.
At the same time desktop players can see fragments on the paths they can choose, which is relevant especially on threshold 3.
Are there any plans on making features from one "version" of the game available to the other one as well?
🎮 We are planning big improvements to the mobile version that should reduce the differences of possibilities between both versions of the game.

Will there ever be consideration (or is there a plan in the works) for re-hauling the "Retired Golden Apple coats per species" Collection? On servers like International, it is legitimately impossible to complete, since some coats have 1-5 copies each. I would LOVE some insight on this.
🎮 We would really like to improve this part of the game, but we haven't found the right format yet.

Will it be possible to get a guaranteed coat if you create a Golden Apple?
🎮 It is a fair idea, we'll add it to our backlog of improvements.