Official Horse Phenomena > Suggestions > Post Reply     

Changing the training ages of dogs?

Player Avatar
π“Œπ’½π’Ύπ“‚π“‡β„΄π“ˆβ„―β‚ŠΛšΰ·† burn me down, 'til theres nothing left
July 7th, 2025 6:14:59am
393 Posts

Is it possibly to maybe change the ages of dogs training / retirement ages? For example; store horses are bought aged 3, retired age 21, that leaves us 18 weeks of training.


Whereas dogs are stire bought aged 2, but retire at 16, which only gives us 14 weeks of training.


Β 


As someone with both dog and horse breeds, it seems a little unfair how we get less time to train our dogs than we do our horses? Just a suggestion for maybe increasing a dogs retirement age so we have the same amount of training weeks as horses before retirement?Β 




morvsig.png

 


View Comments 1


Player Avatar
π“Œπ’½π’Ύπ“‚π“‡β„΄π“ˆβ„―β‚ŠΛšΰ·† burn me down, 'til theres nothing left
July 7th, 2025 6:15:16am
393 Posts

Bumping for visibility!




morvsig.png

 

Player Avatar
πŸ¦† Lakra 6 {Naima using [Ω†ΨΉΩŠΩ…Ψ©] 🏝 and her Alluring Abaco Barbs}
July 7th, 2025 7:46:53am
3 Posts

But don't dogs gain more points and gain them quicker?

~ Naima (forgot what account i was on, oops)




fDQQ2mG.jpg

 

Player Avatar
π“Œπ’½π’Ύπ“‚π“‡β„΄π“ˆβ„―β‚ŠΛšΰ·† burn me down, 'til theres nothing left
July 7th, 2025 8:28:26am
393 Posts

From personal experience with mine, my horses always retire with a lot more points than my dogs, so I dont think so no.Β 

I have dogs retiring on Sunday who are only at 1.3mil points (have been weekly trained) vs horses who dont even retire until 27th July who are on 2.3mil, all store bought yet dogs are drastically behind on points vs the horses. Both are trained weekly the exact same.




morvsig.png

 

Player Avatar
misa・brandenburgers
July 7th, 2025 9:17:42am
210 Posts

My dogs also seem to gain less than my horses, but I've always attributed that to me paying less attention to my dogs. My (slightly insane) tracking spreadsheet shows that my dogs lag about 200-300k behind my horses at the same point in the training cycle... so not a huge difference, but noticeable because I train the same way on the same days. I think sometimes there are less available public shows for dogs as well?

re: ages, for what it's worth I always thought the training ages were meant to reflect "real life." A horse could theoretically show for 15 years, whereas a dog prob could not.




 

Player Avatar
π“Œπ’½π’Ύπ“‚π“‡β„΄π“ˆβ„―β‚ŠΛšΰ·† burn me down, 'til theres nothing left
July 7th, 2025 9:24:30am
393 Posts

Yeah some of my dogs are ranging at LEAST 500k-1mil points behind my horses once they're at the same ages so I feel like they definitely are slacking.Β 
Personally, I dont see why they reflect 'real life' because tbh lets face it.. we have wild animals and mythical (and even none existant) that we train on here.. it's not exactly following realism, so why should training ages also follow that realism?


Personally I've seen 30 year old horses IRL still being healthy and trained, so if we were following the RL idea horses wouldnt 'retire' until well after 21 :') it's the one main reason I'd love dogs training ages to be adjusted too, because the game definitely isnt 'realistic' anymore lmao




morvsig.png

 

Default Avatar
Insomnia β€’ [7] βΈΈ K9 Unit Malinois
July 7th, 2025 12:42:27pm
6 Posts

I think the whole reason why dogs are only 2-16 is because dogs don't live as long as horses do IRL. It's more realistic for them to be 2-16(yes even if some breeds live longer than 16 haha). I mean don't get me wrong, I'd love to train my dogs longer as I lean more towards dogs when it comes to projects because...Β cheaperΒ but xD




 

Player Avatar
π“Œπ’½π’Ύπ“‚π“‡β„΄π“ˆβ„―β‚ŠΛšΰ·† burn me down, 'til theres nothing left
July 7th, 2025 1:54:05pm
393 Posts

Still, the game itself is no longer super realistic especially with the random wild breeds etc we can 'train' so I dont feel like realism should really be the only reason we get less time to train dogs




morvsig.png

 

Player Avatar
Kuwait | ⚧ G.S.D.s For Trans History Month ⚧ |
July 7th, 2025 2:25:59pm
3,083 Posts

I like having the 2 week "break" between training each generation. It gives me a "breather" to focus on other dogs of different lines and ages on the same account.




giphy.gif

 

Player Avatar
Administrator blitz πŸͺ¦ when you wanna be somebody else, change your mind
July 7th, 2025 7:29:09pm
6,742 Posts

In order to best answer what I think is the core reason for this suggestion based on the OP and subsequent comments, instead of giving a response to the age request, I'm going to address the points discrepancies between horses and dogs instead. As this might get long, I'll try to add a tl;dr to the end.


As we all know, show crons, specifically the horse one, have been having issues for months. This is something I'm still working with Sam to sort out, which is (hopefully) getting there sooner rather than later. At its worst, horse show crons would fail to fully run 4-5 times/week (although it hasn't been that bad in over a month).Β 


When a show cron runs (horse or dog), this is the order in which it does things:
1) Finds the shows that it needs to run that night based on date.
2) Assigns the entrants in the shows their "placing" and awards the corresponding points based on the tiered points system that Sam developed I believe dating back to when the game opened.Β 
- for horses, it's top 100 entrants. 1st place gets 2000 points, 2nd gets 1980, etc.
- for dogs, it's top 50 entrants. 1st place gets 2000 points, 2nd gets 1960, etc.
3) Awards any milestone animal achievements (eg. 1 mill points) to the animals.
4) Deletes all the shows that ran that night.
5) Logs the date/time it finished running.


When it's "failing", it's basically taking so long due to the number of entrants in the number of shows that it ultimately times out before it can complete the 5 steps I've outlined above, I'm guessing in the process of doing step 2 (although I have no real way that I can think of to confirm that). So when I wake up and see it hasn't run fully because it didn't get to step 4 and delete the shows, I'm having to have it start from step 1 and go through its paces again. So if, say, on its own it gets 3/4 of the way through step 2, that same 3/4 of shows assigns placings and awards points a second time.


And again, it's the horse show cron doing this 99.9% of the times there's a cron fail, not the dog one. The dog one I only remember failing once in the past two months off the top of my head.


Why is it always the horse cron? Well, as of me writing this post, there are 2310 dogs to the 5244 horses currently of training age on the game. This is also why dogs only do top 50 placings vs. horses that have top 100. There's always been more horses than dogs trained on HP. But there's more than double the number of horses for roughly the same number of shows, so more entrants to run which obviously would take the cron longer to process.


During Double Points Month, the horse show cron failed often, likely because people went "woohoo double points!" and were buying/training more animals than during the "normal" months (I'm guessing). Which bogged down the cron more, causing it to fail more, causing me to make it run a second time often. So horses ended up with like 4x the points instead of 2x the points for the double month, while dogs were nice and reliable stayed in my good books and didn't make me run them a second time so were only getting 2x the points.


I realized that as the reason for why my own horses and dogs had such vastly different points mid-June, and decided to adjust the dog cron to half-reflect double points month to see if that would help offset the difference in points: by doubling the number of points they get from placing in shows (I left entrance points the same).Β 


At this point, the closest comparison of my own existing animals I can find to see if it's working are these two stores, both trained with enter-all (although no guarantee they got 20 shows on the same day of the week), both having the same amount of time in training, and both have been trained for the week all on Sundays:


Beck the Fjord - 285,870 points at age 5


♦ the Flat-Coated Retriever - 384,880 at age 4


Also knowing that in the past two weeks that these were both in training the horse show cron has failed twice (both Sundays), I think it's evened things out to a degree?


To confirm this, what I'm going to do is, starting as of this post, I will test this out over the next few weeks with two different store pairs (one horse, one dog) on two accounts so that they can benefit from enter-all. I will make sure their 20-show days are the same days of the week, and we (myself and whoever wants watch their progress) can monitor to confirm it's leveled the playing field until the horse show cron is confirmed fixed. I've also outlined the parameters both pairs will be following on each respective page.


Horse test pair


Dog test pair


tl;dr: Horse show crons needing to run twice due to them often failing (especially during DPM) has caused horse points to be higher than dog. I have tried to offset that with half-DPM adjustments until the horse show cron is fixed. Seems to somewhat be working, follow along with the two test pairs to see for sure.


----------------


I'm hoping that addresses what you're saying, Whim?


Also, I second what Insom said above wrt ages of dogs vs. horses on the game in general.


Β 




Z8S4JKE.gifFWuyLok.gif

 

Player Avatar
Content Moderator ΙΉ o Κ‡ ǝ l l ǝ ʞ s
July 7th, 2025 7:34:39pm
4,822 Posts

I always kinda saw it as Insom mentioned, dogs just don't have the longevity that horses do. So it kinda makes sense to me that they have a lesser period of trainability.
My dogs always seem to do better than or just as well as my zombies, all of which are entered in random publics (the exception being my main lineages). Maybe I'm just lucky, but they always hit over 2mill easily with minimal effort, my zombies are lucky to hit that.




jjrZPQp.gif ApFSLNf.gif gisaYrC.gif

 

Player Avatar
Naima {Ω†ΨΉΩŠΩ…Ψ©} ✝️🎨 Phenomenal Paints
July 7th, 2025 7:47:03pm
2,629 Posts

My dogs usually get to about 2mil too, Skell (assuming I have them on an account with enter all - the ones that I might have on an account with a different breed as the breed specialty dont necessarily get 2mil, but I am one that typically does more with the horses)




bdpl7pW.png

 

Player Avatar
Farewell's Paints πŸ”Έyou go glen coco πŸ”Έ
July 7th, 2025 10:38:22pm
1,095 Posts

Β 


To kind of help blitz show her point, here are the results of my recent experiment. This started around early april and ran through early june before I ended it early due to my health stuff. This shows dogs and horses, all stores bought the same day, and trained in either enter all or all auto shows, on their own accounts or on a shared account going back and forth with the breed specialty. The first two pairs are on their own upgrades and the second set on a shared. Pairs 1 and 3 in the chart got enter all training and pairs 2 and 4 got hand picked auto shows. You can really see how the horses start to run away with points. I hope this is helpful.


Β 


HORSES: https://i.imgur.com/GUxOhdm.jpeg


Β 


Β 


DOGS:Β https://i.imgur.com/j4zr1Wl.jpeg





0apjY30.png

 

Player Avatar
π“Œπ’½π’Ύπ“‚π“‡β„΄π“ˆβ„―β‚ŠΛšΰ·† burn me down, 'til theres nothing left
July 8th, 2025 4:43:55am
393 Posts

Thank you Blitz! I was unsure wether it was my bad luck somehow with my dogs being so far behind from my horses, but I'll keep an eye on the test pairs too! :D




morvsig.png

 

Player Avatar
Administrator blitz πŸͺ¦ when you wanna be somebody else, change your mind
August 3rd, 2025 4:08:42pm
6,742 Posts

Update:Β 


Horse show cron hasn't been failing nearly as much since this experiment started. (-frantically knocks on wood-). Horse show cron has failed three times since July 7th, while the dog show cron has failed only once in the same time frame.


Horse pair, at age 7 currently, has just under 500k points.
Dog pair, at age 6 currently, has just over 750k points.


(that's after both pairs have been trained for the week just now).


So clearly dogs are now overcompensating lol.


What I'm going to do is put the dog ratio for points back to normal, with the plan that if horse crons start failing all the time again, I'll tweak the dog ratio again.




Z8S4JKE.gifFWuyLok.gif

 

View Comments 1