I notice in the 1st patch that detailed stats were made available for all skill levels. Was this considered a bug or just a request from the breeders?

I understand that seeing these has made a breeding operation much "easier" or more specific, but surely in a game that is marketed as a simulation, on the harder skill levels these stats should be hidden and up to the player to determine what sort of horse they have?

Discuss.

i love them
you can now see when you breed a monster

Exactly. Not very realistic when it's been nowhere near a racecourse.

I only use this so I don't waste my good names on rubbish horses!! Got fed up in SO4 of wasting my good names on absolute rags...

its a great addition IMO i no you cant please everyone all of the time
its especially good for the lge

And you don't have to look at them if you don't want to.

Agree with Exxplozion and PJR - I haven't played the league myself, but its a level playing field for everyone after all!

Yes it maybe a simulation game, but there are many aspects that people would use in breeding/determining the best foals, not just racing times. There are masses of physical traits that would be used to determine the horse potential etc, such as specific length and angles of bones that are often considered a good guide to a horse. These types of things would be very difficult to incorporate into the game. Many of the people involved in real life have a vet in tow to assess x-rays etc of the horses in question to help them make decisions. My point is, the masses of information that one would have to go through to choose a horse if the game was actually trying to “simulate” reality would be significant, and would probably be a drag on game play. But at the opposite end making a decision based solely on watching races/track work, work isn’t very realistic either. Providing a small array of stats that help but don’t guarantee anything seems a good balance between the two to me.

This.

I don't think it is balanced. The original stat bars of speed, stamina and acceleration are there to make up for anything we can't "see" but without guranteeing anything.

You can't tell a horse's consistency or guts from an x-ray, that's ridiculous. That's stuff that only comes out on the racecourse.

As far as I'm concerned this is a change that is totally aimed at the league players / massive breeding operations but at the expense of the single player experience. Makes it less like the world of horse racing and more like a number crucnhing computer game when you can see under the bonnet.

Well I guess since you are talking about single player games, in which, obviously you are only competing against yourself, the remedy is simple. As others have mentioned, don't look at the additional stats. they don't pop up automatically and there is nothing else you are missing by not looking at the page.



You seem to have missed my point. I was simply showing that substantial effort is employed to understand everything about the horse, Not just watching it race.

Here is an article that gives a reasonable guide to effort involved in assessing a new horse.
http://www.quora.com/Glenn-Craven-What-do-you-look-for-when-buying-race-horses

As you see, in the eyes of this expert at least, the track performances at this young age is hardly the most critical decision maker. And all the effort expended is precisely to work out things like the potential, which I think most people find the most useful of the additional stats when they have a young horse.