Since June 2011, Howrse has been livened up rhythmically by contests that appear on the game every three weeks or so.

We know you enjoy these contests; they liven up your game and amuse you. You often fancy their theme or graphic design and of course the gifts they provide. However, we are conscious that you are becoming a little weary, especially our most senior players who have been taking part in all these contests since the very beginning.

On our side, the creation of a contest takes a huge amount of time. They use up most of the resources from the technical and graphic design teams into their elaboration … this is detrimental towards improvements for all the other game areas.

Nevertheless, Howrse cannot go without regular contests and animations, they are vital for the game, this is also true for the introduction of divine horses. Therefore, we’ve thought long and hard about a way to make things work so that you can have fun on the game and have things to do on a daily basis, without making you feel compelled to complete the whole contest to get the divine horse. All this, while giving us enough time and free resources to develop new features and improvement for the game, keeping it modern and making it fit your expectations.

It does not mean that your favourite contests like the Cards will never come back on the game. They will just be rarer, therefore more enjoyable.

Here is what we’ve got planned :

The Big Challenge

With the new system, everyone on Howrse will be able to take part in the Big Challenge.

All the players of a same Howrse version will have a common goal: collect a certain amount of tokens together. For example, the whole community on howrse.com has to gather several millions of tokens. The amount of tokens will depend on the versions, according to the number of players.

There will be many ways to collect tokens: UFOs, some competitions, the Grand Prix and 6 daily tasks. Those tasks will be randomly selected every day and they’ll be different from one player to another. Some will be similar to the missions we usually have in the contests (win a competition, give an apple to a horse, etc.) and can be integrated in your daily life on Howrse. Other tasks will be brand new, for example donate Equus and objects to a new player. This way we’ll focus more on the collaborative aspect of the game (and Ow isn’t the only one getting your Equus ).

The 100 objectives as they exist in the game now will disappear and the trophies will be available to everyone right after the tutorial. It would be redundant to have both the daily tasks and the objectives.

Also, you don’t need to participate if you don’t want to. There’s no obligation, you can still take part in what follows. However, the number of tokens you have collected may give you an advantage for the Festivities.

Here is a provisional mock-up of the Big Challenge.
Click on the picture to enlarge.

The Festivities

Once the community’s common goal has been reached, the Festivities are launched.

The Festivities are five days during which the community celebrates its achievement and is rewarded for its efforts. These five days are punctuated by a Lottery, a commercial offer and some advantages won by the best contributors during the Big Challenge.

The main gift you can try your luck for is a new divine horse. Some of the new tack items will also be introduced into the Lottery as gifts. During these Festivities it is interesting to keep one’s eyes open; you might be lucky and find tickets flying around as UFO’s.

In the same time, there will be a commercial offer which will allow you to try and get the divine. This commercial offer could be: Horns of Plenty, Titan’s Challenges or even new surprises
The players who have gathered the most items towards the community’s common goal will be rewarded by some benefits in the commercial offer and even a divine horse for the very best.

Of course all the players who have taken part in the Big Challenge get a little incentive with Lottery tickets given according to how many tokens they gathered for the Big Challenge’s goal.

When the Festivities are finished, a new cycle begins with a new Big Challenge to take on.

Here is a provisional mock-up of the Festivities
Click on the picture to enlarge.



The divine horses

One short word about divine horses: the divine horses that you’ll be able to win during the festivities will offer new benefits.

They will give their owner the pleasure of getting gifts that’ll be useful for his game.

If their owner is a VIP player, he’ll get an extra and specific VIP benefit from his divine horse. This benefit could be anything from making it easier to perform an in game action to increasing your usual possibilities on the game like an extra item exchange for instance. Anything is possible.

The divine horses will also give tokens that will be counting towards the next Big Challenge’s goal.



So this is it. We hope you are as excited as us about this new contest cycle and you will enjoy discovering it on the game shortly.



Alice, Julie and Maïté
Community Managers for the English, German and French versions

sorry for the mis spelling

I really like the new divine

[img] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TivKWaWp0x0/Ur2CF6nXA8I/AAAAAAAAAzU/BEHVGlIPbBo/s1600/onyx.png [/img]

Is Howrse changing the horse coats because i do not like the new ones if they are.I used to be on international too and then i heard thay were changing the coats on there and now i havent gon on since.I really hope they dont change the coats!!