The italicised text is smaller and definitely harder to read than the original text without zooming in, especially on lighter backgrounds.

The game is hardly accessible to people with disabilities as it stands; but I have no eyesight issues and I STILL struggle to see some text now without deliberately focusing on it. Huge oversight on Howrse's part for their community. I get they want a more modern, cleaner, interesting look - But I wish they would stop fixing what isn't broken.

On the subject of the objectives - I think perhaps the instalment of a code that bars objectives such as 'groom a Divine' if you don't own any Divine horses would be beneficial, especially to players who don't purchase Passes (since their odds at simply winning a Divine is significantly lower).

I've lost count of how many disappointed reviews and tickets I've made this far. If not for the money I've already spent on the game I would have left long ago. I do hope Howrse begins to take into account the views of its players - I long for the day when it brings me joy once again.

I'm still strongly against using passes to increase the reindeers' skills. This will just allow pass buyers to race to the top and win all the competitions by increasing their reindeers' skills with passes. I'm a non-pass buyer so for me, my reindeer are still useless because they'll never get enough skills to win comps from rides. And even if they did somehow manage to get enough skills, someone could easily just increase their own reindeers' skills with passes to win against my own reindeer.

Please remove the option to increase your reindeers' skills with passes. It makes the competition too unfair. They can get their skills from rides like the solars. That way, we must build up their skills over time and everyone has a fair shot at winning because players don't have the opportunity to suddenly spend their passes on increasing their reindeers' skills so that they can have reindeer with skills that are hundreds, or possibly thousands of points higher than everyone else's reindeer.

Even though you have made this change to give the reindeer a purpose, the reindeer are still very much useless to most players because they have no chance of winning a competition unless the players will continuously waste thousands of passes on them to increase their skills. And in all honesty, wasting thousands of passes to keep winning like that is useless because you're still not going to get them back even if the reindeer do get a few hundred passes from placing at the end of the competition period.

Completely agree ShadowKokufu. Felt this way before they decided to go through with the change. Just another way they’ll make more money from the game, so unfortunately I doubt it’ll change.

It would make a lot more sense to only win skills by rides. There couldn’t be any complaints that way as the only way you’d lower your chances of winning would be by skipping out on daily rides. Though the only issue I could think of there is who would be decided the winner if a lot of people are on the same amount of skill gains...

Which also begs the question, I wonder if we all get the same amount of skills per maximum hours in daily rides.

I agree that if people are able to get a massive advantage by paying passes, it could make this based on wealth rather than other factors, which would be a shame.

Having said that I do hope that passes will be less of an advantage than we are fearing

I've been doing some testing on preprod. It looks to me like the comps are all the same energy requirement, and prizes within placings (1st, 2nd etc) are random across quite a wide scale.

One thing I haven't been able to work out yet is if there are different levels of comps for more and less skilled deer. If there are, but the prizes are still in the same bands (which it is looking like might be the case) then souped up deer might just end up against other souped up deer.

It is sad though, if people can get an advantage from spending passes. As ShadowKokufu says, it might not be worth spending passes to win the passes you'd get. In that case it might end up being people winning who have the money to spend and aren't actually going to care about the pass prize. That would be a shame.

My personal preference would be to have the skills gain from rides, but to be able to allocate it as we can with some other divines. That way it would bring in elements of skill/knowledge about the game. It would also make allocation of time a bigger issue: do you do comps to win this month, or rides to build your deer up for next month?

<font color="0066ff">Oops, forgot to add this here before XD </font>

<img src="https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/all.static.owlient.eu/media/user/6be60161d9fcdf479922fd29ccf3dc48.png" style="padding: 0px 20px 40px 0px;" height=150 width=150 ALIGN="right"/><div style="border-radius: 8px; text-align: left; vertical-align: middle; padding: 40px 40px 40px 40px; background: url('https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/all.static.owlient.eu/media/user/a648ab1cbbb2044285d27f13dc4222c7.png') top center no-repeat ; height 0; background-size: cover;"><div style="border-radius: 8px; text-align: left; vertical-align: middle; padding: 30px 30px 30px 30px; background: #F8FCFD; color: #0086A8; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br/>Did you visit your reindeer horses today?
Did you notice any changes on their pages or on other pages?

Check out the full list of updates in the change log!

Check out the full list of updates in the <a href="/jeu/log">Dev's corner</a> change log!

Best wishes,
The Howrse Team</div></div>

How often will the list of top-winning reindeer be updated? My Blitzen has earned enough to be the no.2 on the list as it currently stands but the list has not updated for at least the two hours.

Please let us enter the reindeer horses into competitions.

Please let us train up the reindeer horses' skills.

Please let us choose if we want to sell our reindeer horses or send them to the Safe Haven.

Please let us do more with the reindeer horses than just making them sit in a corner and collect dust outside of the holiday season.

Because the holiday season only comes once a year, and we've had these horses for more than 3 years, and it's high time that things change with them.

They have changed, from today. They can now enter special competitions and earn equus, they gain skills from doing rides and you can further customise those if you want to.

Unfortunately some requests I made for them in testing didn't come about, for example the hit parade on their page being changed to reflect the type of comp they can enter and the number of wins and places they build up. But it's a start

So question about the reindeer. If you have five reindeer and they all rank between 11-50 on the 15th, do you get 20 passes total or 20 from each reindeer?

Or since it says "reward reindeer owners who won the most Equus" does it take what you win from all your reindeer and combine it for your final score?

Should you just focus on one deer because that's all that will count? Or could using all five be beneficial?

From the ranking list that appears on each reindeer's page right now, it seems that each individual reindeer is a separate entry, so what your Blitzen earns is separate from what your Comet earns.

i dont have the deer how do i get them

I just learned about it and am ticked off! (Largely due to th fact I only have half of them and was not able fully understand how to prepare them!)New to the competition. So apologize. But if my memory is correct, were not Fjord ponies originally trained for this? So they should take part in it too.

How do u get the rain deer they are my fave animal and i dont have any

don't click this if you don't want to see spoilers

It was fun on Prepod with 20,000 passes to burn.

Here, maybe I'll enter the occasional comp but more then likely will act as a filler because I don't want to waste passes on it

Hello - where do you get the reindeer? Sounds awesome!

The reindeer I got came from the christmas events and were basically free (some had to be acquired with certain progress through the event)

So... you can only pay passes to get more passes.... I-

And is it just me, or does it not even seem worth it? Since it costs 1 pass to raise 1 point...

I agree with you 100% here. I am not able to buy passes because i am a college student who has to pay rent and other bills first before i can do anything. I only have money from financial aid because where i live, no one is hiring for me to get a job. But yes, this will cause all the top players, who are all VIP AND buy passes a lot will get the rewards. I think that this game needs to be evened out. I really do not play anymore because it seems that if you are not VIP or a top player, you will not succeed in this game. I have trouble with people using my studs because i do not have a lot of time to train them up.

I second that the passes to improve skills should be removed.

I don't exactly have a problem with people using passes to increase the reindeer's skills (I almost never buy passes, and buy very small numbers on the rare occasions I do), but I really do wish that they were at least a bit more useful than normal horses. If someone has 100s of dollars to spend on passes to skilling up their reindeer (or has cracked some secret code to making that kind of coin without using real money) and wants to use them that way, more power to them. I mean, at least it'll keep Owlient in business. I knew this game wasn't "fair" to non/rare pass buyers when I signed up and honestly, I've been happy with how many passes you can rack up without paying real money. But for goodness sake, extend the ranking and give out ten aging points to places 51 to 3000 or something. All this really did was make the reindeer go from being *less* useful than normal horses to being *as* useful as normal horses for 99.9% of players. Technically an improvement, but an underwhelming one. Even the ones who manage to get passes out of them will undoubtedly sink vastly more into skilling them up than they'll ever recieve back.

Is this a new thing that will continue even after Christmas like a once a month contest or just a December thing?

As proposed, please give the participation prize, 20 passes (or even 10 if needed!) to every reindeer who enters at least X competitions each month.
As it is, only 50 players in a server will take something home, and it's going to be those who have the most passes to invest in reindeer (and thus sinking the passes in skills)

Where do I get my reindeer

Actually looking at who's on the leader board it seems skills might not be a massive factor. There's some original Blitzens in there (ones with skills from the tree decorating event), but also ones with just the 500 in everything. So far I haven't seen any with pass-boosted skills.

If this is running 15th to 15th then I'm guessing this first contest will only be a week. I am worried that people spending passes will be a factor.. but personally I'm going to wait a week for first results before getting too worked up about it.

I'm glad that we can take care of our reindeer divines now. I like how cute they are and I gave them all backgrounds. The reindeer divines are perfect for AP farming and completing some objectives but now I can earn some equus as well. I don't like divines that you can't take care of like the Yggdrasil divine, So I'm very happy with the changes.

I was expecting the classification to take into account the cumulative winnings from all your reindeer, but that would mean that those with more reindeer have an advantage as well.

I'm guessing if one person is first and second though they will win both prizes? Which is like the Gran Prix so I guess we can't complain too much. It will be interesting to see how much the skills influence.