HGG Community Forums

First some context
Our leaderboard payout system has always had an issue. It heavily favors first place finishers. That means the player that wins the most GMTs will naturally win a good chunk more gmts than the player that wins the second most. The GMTs tend to concentrate at the top. At first this was not really an issue. The difference was minor.

On bluegrass in year 120
Top Player won 7.53% of all GMTs
The top 5 players won 27.31% of all GMTs
129 players won GMTs.

By year 140 on bluegrass those stats were starting to shift
Top Player won 13.76% of all GMTs
The top 5 players won 34.89% of all GMTs
98 players won GMTs

By last season things have gotten very dire
Top Player won 25.83 % of all GMTs
The top 5 players won 56.43% if all GMTs
A measly 71 players won gmts.

The top player on bluegrass last season won 1000 gmts alone. The number 3 player won a larger percent of the pot then the number 1 player did back in year 120. It is clear things have reached a crisis point. I hope we can all agree this is not how the leaderboard should be operating and this system is clearly unfair.

The cause
I very much want to be clear here that the cause is not players trying to curb stop everyone else in the game. Over time players have gotten better at the game and barn sizes have crept up. The nature if our current system means that GMTs concentrate at the top and that any player playing competitively will eventually squeeze out other players. This happens on every server and has been happening for years even though the players at the top change. At fault here is the system I have created, not the players who learned to play the game well. This one is entirely the fault of my design.


Finding the solution
I have been watching this problem growing for real life years now and an ongoing conversation has been happening on our community discord FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR about how to tackle the issue has been happening. Why has the conversation taken so long? You name it we have gone over the idea. Handicaps, making an amature division, making winners ineligible the next season, removing gmts all together, linking them to just total points instead of the lb, capping the gmts that could be won per account, limiting club your total club entries, limiting the number of clubs you can compete in, etc. We have gone over it all and many things multiple times. It took as an entire year to find a solution we could all agree on. In the end it was incredibly straight forward.


The proposed solution
In order to fix the problem of GMTs concentrating at the top and too few players winning GMTs, we are going to spread out the GMT payments and give them to more players. It's so simple I am not sure why it took us a year to come up with it.

The game will continue to give out the exact same number of gmts, and nothing about how the leaderboard is ranked will change. You will not need to make any changes to your program or strategy.

- For regular clubs 1st to 6th place will each win one gmt (same total number, new distribution)
- For the primary era 1st to 5th will win 2 gmts, 6th to 10th will win 1 each. (again same total as before)
- Futurity will have no changes to payouts
- On bluegrass server it is necessary that we decrease the number of horses a player can have per LB category from 5 to 4 because the top players are so massive and can easily take all 5 slots otherwise. Mesa server needs to stay at 5 to help it's boards run. Forest will probably drop to 4 in the future but does not require that yet,

Why this is the winner
- Many of the suggestions "punished" players for doing well which is not the intention. This lets our top players stay at the top. They will win just as many awards, just a smaller percentage of the GMT pool.
- There are no new strategies to learn or complicated new lb systems. Everything works the same as before making this by far the easiest system to transition too.
- The current payout allows a single player to win every single gmt in a category. This will be impossible after the update. Category gmts WILL be shared.
- I always want the gmts to go to as wide a range of players as possible because that is the best thing for the overall health of the community. Giving the community 6 chances to win a gmt instead of 3 doubles the number of players who can win something.
-We did a bunch of testing on discord and tons of players will benefit from this change while the top 25 GMT winners won't see massive hits to their gmt wins. Many will even increase in payout as the gmt prize pool gets more evenly spread out across all winners.
-The number 1 players will see a big drop in gmts won, but will remain the number 1 players. They will instead win a much more reasonable number that is more inline with the rest of the community instead of double what the number 2 player wins.

Timing
It was not my intention to mess with the payouts in December however when the perfect solution presented itself right before I was due to do a bunch of work on the leaderboards I asked the Discord community. They unanimously wanted to just to get it all done at once, and get this distribution problem finally solved. If you have different feedback on the timing please post below!


A note on bullying
While it is rare, sadly we do occasionally have players who decide to target other players to push them off the leaderboard. Whatever reasons they may have for doing this I want to be clear that I consider this behavior immoral, player harassment and against the spirit of our game. The only way this happens is when bigger barns decide to bully smaller barns and that is simply not ok. If you are caught doing this there will be consequences.

To that end, I will be adding a new rule to the leaderboards, that intentionally using multiple accounts to take all the slots is considered cheating. Obviously some players have multiple accounts and accidents will happen. I am not going after those players, though please self regulate your play and remove your horses if this happens. Instead this rule will be in place so if I do see this kind of unsportsmanlike behavior I can make things right.

Feedback
As always constructive and respectful feedback are welcome and appreciated. While this is the plan, if the forum community can come up with a logical reason why this change should not go in I would love to hear it. However, please note I am not looking for alternative suggestions in this thread, because we have probably already discussed the same idea over the past year and found it would not work. Please keep your feedback to the change in GMT payouts presented here only.


And again as a reminder about the merging that will happen in december check out these threads.

Bluegrass
https://bluegrass.horsegeneticsgame.com/forum/discussion/63535/stop-light-system-for-club-and-futurity-health-december-merging-reminder

Forest
https://forest.horsegeneticsgame.com/forum/discussion/94527/stop-light-system-for-club-and-futurity-health-december-merging-reminder

Mesa
https://mesa.horsegeneticsgame.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/10149/stop-light-system-for-club-and-futurity-health-december-merging-reminder