I'm just curious as to what the rates are for earning this?

I'm at that point again where I have spent close to $1000 on this game in past few months and gotten an animal up to 6mill points, and it's feeling like I'm pumping money into the game just to see a number change. Like I understand that's largely the point of HP, but... it sure would be nice to have more of a reward system?

Bump bump. It's tied to achievements, yes? Just not sure what the rate is. Agreed, at times it does feel like a "pay to play" game. 

It is tied to the achievements. I do have HPP, but I only just have enough to do something like a 2 week age back after training up a 7mill, 6mill, 4mill, 3mill, 2mill dog(s), countless upgrades, 100mill player points, etc, etc. For the amount of work and money to achieve that list, it's not much and it does make the game feel like pay for play.

HPP is earned by referrals and by player achievements! You get 1 HPP per player achievement you earn, and 1 HPP for each referral point you get.

The items in the cash shop are meant to be an occasional purchase, rather than an always available type of thing. If everyone could buy deages and retirement breedings and resurrection passes for every animal it would take a lot of the challenge away from the game. USD/Horse Bucks is the "cheapest" option, but since not everyone can pay real money for the items, there are also options for spending HPD and HPP.

If you have more achievements than HPP, and you haven't spent any, you may have been affected when we were having achievement and HPP bugs. So let me know if that is the case and I will fix it for you :).

Animal awards don't give you HPP when you earn them, but instead they give the animals themselves points when they are earned. I still need to post a list of how many points each award is worth, but I haven't had a chance yet. The higher the award, the more points you get. As an example the 500k points award gives 1000 points, the 1 mill points award gives 2000 points and so on. All awards earn animal points except for the Gen 1 award, I believe.

The animal awards system is meant to be more rewarding than the player achievement system. The player achievements are only earned once and there are only so many of them that can be earned. Whereas with animal awards, you can get rewarded for every animal that reaches it's goals, and the more the animal achieves, the more the system rewards you.

If you have any ideas about things you would like to see to make the game more challenging or more rewarding, I would always love to hear them!

Re the Animal Generations awards...Gen 1 gives you nothing, Gen 2 gives you 2500, Gen 3 gives you 5000, Gen 4 gives you 7500, etc. 

I thought the same thing Ultramarine as i use to be one of HPs main money giver via upgrading(ive literally spent thousands and thousands here)...

and there werent really any benefits to having a high pointed animal which is partly the reason why the animal achievement thing was added...

but i have since slowed my upgrading down since id rather spend it on the real beasts in the backyard! lol

but i do enjoy HP just because of you guys(the players) and thats why i stay...

yes the hp community is awesome!

I wrote a long post for this thread aaaand... HP logged me out when I posted. That was amazing.

@Sam, thanks for the information =). IMO that rate is too low. Especially if the achievements you can earn HPP with are finite, and considering the difficulty in earning them. Personally I am where I am because I have spent a bomb on HP. The average player is likely going to take longer to earn particular achievements, and I'm not sure why it's a concern to give players a little extra reward for putting the effort in to get somewhere on HP. If they can purchase the odd cash shop item / 1 month upgrade on the house every once in a while, I think it would be earned.

HP is expensive. Maybe it's not expensive if you buy one upgrade every few months, but to get somewhere on the game people have to have bulk upgrades and that's just the nature of it. If I was being smart I would stop upgrading for cash, upgrade my own accounts and use them to self-fund future upgrades instead of doing it for others. But if I did that, I'd be taking an active upgrader off the market. If more people did it, the upgrade prices would go up (in RL and in HPD) and there'd be less upgrades.

Now I'm not fussed to be paying for things on HP. If I was, I wouldn't be here. But the fact is, for the amount of upgrades I have done (over 100), I literally could not afford to buy even one 6. mo. in HPP. And if I did convert my HPP to HPD, it would give me 11mill. Which isn't much in the current economy at all. That is a little disheartening. It's like I have to do and pay the exact same to get to the same point, regardless of how many times I have done it before. It doesn't seem like there's the chance to move up even a little without paying more.

I do love HP, but yeah...

@Blitz, thanks for the explanation! I didn't realise each generation got a small point bump.

@azalie, I feel you! Though you do have some of the most epic animals on the game =). But I do understand. The RL pon-pon's are always more important. I would drop everything for my lil cavoodle butt.

The people on HP are lovely. It's a great community. I've been on SIM games which are just as fun but so toxic, so it's really awesome to be a part of.

So, the HPP system and the way it actually works is sort of convoluted, which I think is part of the problem.

Like I said above, you get 1 HPP for each player achievement you earn, and 1 HPP for each referral point you earn (you get 1 referral point when someone uses your ID to sign up and start playing, and 1 more referral point if that player upgrades for the first time).

The part where it's a little more complicated (too complicated, in my opinion, but it's kind of just the way it evolved over time) is that you can spend referral points and HPP separately. So, to get the 1 month upgrade, or to trade for HPD, you can ONLY do that with referral points, not with HPP. And you can ONLY use HPP in the cash shop. You can't use points from achievements separately of HPP though.

So, basically, you can refer your way to a free 1 month upgrade, but you can't achieve your way to it.

Personally, I think it would make more sense to get rid of HPP spending directly in the cash shop, and no longer differentiate between referral points and HPP. Instead, I think it would make more sense for both of those points to just BE HPP that you can then trade for HPD, upgrade time, or Horse Bucks, and then spend those things however you wish.

I've brought this up for discussion before, though, and people were hesitant about changing it. Although, I think it would make more sense, and then other things which don't earn you achievements specifically (I don't have an example right now, my brain is tired, haha), could also be worth points. If that makes sense?

There are currently over 100 player achievements able to be earned though, which you can see here: https://horsephenomena.com/other_info.php#achievements

So, in short, I agree that the system needs some work!

Ah, I see. I don't have anyone to refer so I'd never see those points, then.

What I'm getting from this though is that it seems unlikely to change and I'll have to keep paying with no chance of my achievements ever helping me out in the long run. So in the end I'll just be paying to eventually earn a pretty picture on my account that really means nothing?

Sorry to be cynical, ha. I've just been on other SIM games where there's a real drive to obtain achievements, and each achievement paid out in Bank and / or Points that helped you advance your character / account in a way that drove really fun competition between players. From what I can see now, I can't trade my HPP for HPD (as that's a referrel only conversion), I can't use it to upgrade, and I can only use it in the cash shop. And I have to hit increasingly extraodinary milestones to even earn one.

I'm going to need to chew on that for a bit and re-evaluate what I'm doing.

I understand that the cash shop items are expensive so players dont buy all the time...but why cant HPP just be turned into HPD or something that could be traded for hpb or hpd to use throughout the game?

If you can only use them in the cash shop for the expensive stuff thats kind of a loss right off the bat since those prices are super high... its like  "lets work super duper hard to earn an achievement to buy a super duper expensive cash shop item" and even then you need more than 1 achievement...

Or maybe the upgrade achievement could get more points as you reach them then the others... since we are funding your job lol

(Except for ads now)

I realize people will think thats not fair BUT if we dont upgrade them and they cant upgrade themselves then there goes HP(besides ads)

This is just my opinion and may get edited later!

Quoting specific parts below so my post stays kind of organized:

"What I'm getting from this though is that it seems unlikely to change and I'll have to keep paying with no chance of my achievements ever helping me out in the long run."

I didn't say that. I actually pointed out several ways that the current system is flawed and I actually agreed with you that it needs work.

HP is not a heavily ahievements based game, and they were added as a feature later in the game's life. So the system isn't perfect, and there is certainly room for improvement. 

"why cant HPP just be turned into HPD or something that could be traded for hpb or hpd to use throughout the game?"

I think that's how it should be! Instead of earning HPP which you can only spend in the cash shop, and referral points which you can also spend in the cash shop but also other places, I think those points should all go into one pool, and you should just be able to trade those points for HPD/HPB/upgrade time directly. I feel like it would make more sense. Then you can turn around and spend that in the cash shop if you want to, or not. And in that case we could also have other things tie into the HPP system. I did bring this up in a forum post before, though, and a lot of players didn't seem to like the idea of changing the system. So I think it would need to be discussed again.

"Or maybe the upgrade achievement could get more points as you reach them then the others"

With the current system's programming, we can't change what specific achievements award, but it's a possibility if we re-vamp it to change what certain achievements are worth. It's also possible to add more upgrading achievements for selling upgrades, since I think right now it stops at 10? I could probably add those in pretty easily!

Sorry if I came across as harsh. I just wasn't necessarily seeing a solution in the responses or I suppose an acknowledgement of where I was coming from as a regular upgrader, etc, etc.

I think HP will benefit from any improvements in that regard. But I think over the course of this post I've become a little disillusioned.

Late...forgot to check back last night!

You are welcome to suggest other player achievements you'd like to see! As well, every time we do some sort of chat party or big event, participating also usually gives you an achievement (and a HPP). So chat parties, the 24 days of Christmas, my epic Christmas word search, my puzzle a day thing I did before that will happen again soon, the Easter Egg hunts, the Pumpkin hunts...etc etc.

I thought more about this...

I play 2 other horse sims, Equination and Howrse.

On howrse, you can play the game without spending any RL money, but if you want to have any hope of being successful, or actually "winning" their monthly contests, you have to pay for credits, usually a lot of them if you want to do well. They have an achievement system with badges, but all you get from it is the self-satisfaction and a badge on your page. It doesn't give you credits, or money, or points or anything. 

On Equination (which is a rather realistic TB racing game for those of you who've never heard of it), you can play as a basic stable, but it severely limits what you can do on the game (eg: you can only have a max of 25 horses in your main barn who are able to race, compared to the 2 premium levels you can make your stable, which allow you to have up to 115 without buying extra stalls on top of what the upgrade gives you). They don't have an achievement system other than the possibility of you or your horse getting Stable/Horse of the Year distinction, which only gives you a little icon on your page and nothing more. There's game money and there's credits (which are bought with RLD). 5 credits is $5 USD. In order to upgrade to the best of the two premium options, it's 80 credits for a year (so $80 USD). And even if you are a second tier premi (the top level), you can still continue to have crappy racehorses and suck royally and never get anywhere in the game. They also don't have any sort of upgrade auction system, so short of selling your horses for credits and hoping someone buys them, there is no way as a basic to upgrade to better yourself on the game unless you fork out the RLD.

Honestly, comparing the 3 games I play, I'd say HP has the best options available, even if we do need to think about revamping them.

Im all for changing the hpp into something that works for the whole game!

Even if it dont change ill probably still keep on keepin on!

Cuz i love you guys! :D

I second what Blitz says. I have been on numerous other SIM games since 2001 - this is the only one that has kept me around and will keep me around. I even came back for two weeks, dropped $45 into three upgrades and disappeared again due to a high stress first trimester and I cut back on everything including FB time. I came back as soon as I got the 'everything looks okay for now'. The first one I joined was Horseland back in 2001 and I stuck around until 2008/2009 shortly after the changes happened and I found HP and I have been here since 2009. It's the only one I have found that you don't really have to dump money into. You have optional, awesome perks, that cost a good bit but are worth it to me personally.

I do wish there was a way to earn it based on the player points, however, I do understand that would take a lot of time, a lot of money (for the site), and probably be something that was very glitchy in the beginning due to programming taking time and lots of money.

While I agree the HPP could be converted - it hasn't been around long. It's something I'd like to watch to see what happens. It'd be nice if it was transferrable from one account to another (so long as they were owned by the same player).

HP is the only SIM game I have played in the last two years, after my previous chosen SIM game no longer became an option.

My previous SIM game did a lot of things that I liked, but unfortunately bred a toxic community. Among the things I did like, though, were that it constantly gave out achievements for meeting milestones. For instance, it was a Mafia SIM and you could jailbreak players. Achievements were given out at x500, x1500, x2500, x5000, x10000, x15000, x25000, x50000 jailbreaks. By the time you got into the tens of thousands, payouts were reaching 500MILL and 2500 points, etc. They were very good about rewarding your hard work and effort, which I appreciated a lot.

It also allowed you to earn interest on your deposited bank, which I think is far superior to the tiny 400k HP pays out per week to players. At least at the scale I play HP, that's peanuts to me. In fact I don't even bother picking it up. Perhaps it will add up to something for players who play religiously for months / years, or have a whole lot of accounts, but I don't bother myself with it. I much prefer the idea of being able to earn interest on the money I have accumulated (i.e, a % of what you have is paid each week).

So off the batt, that's two things I'd like to see improved, but... I'm not going to wait for it to happen, unfortunately.

I did a lot of thinking about HP yesterday. I appreciate that we've at least resolved to think about achievements, but there is still no acknowledgement that as a frequently paying customer that's disgruntled with the fact that there's kind of, I don't know? No loyalty? No recognition? Over the fact that I have spent so much on HP and there isn't even an achievement, or occassional 'you know what, you've done 20 upgrades, have 25% of your next one' or something like that, to honor my contributions. Like sure... I get a nicely pointed animal for my trouble, but the fact is, if I want another one, I'll be paying the exact same amount, if a little less, to reach the same goal. It hardly lessens the work or the cost for me the next time around, so 'why' should I do it again? Well, the reason I have done that in the past was because I like having high-pointed animals. I really do. But the more I think about it, the more I see it's kind of a never-ending cycle. HP is a long-term financial committment, or a long term time committment. And it doesn't want to reward you all that well for doing either, because it wants you to pay money. For upgrades, for cash shop items, for quick HPD. And I think there's a bit of fear around the idea that giving any more is going to affect those sales? That's how I see it.

That, though, kind of doesn't work for me. Personally, I am very liberal with my money. I am in a position where I currently don't have as many of the normal adult costs as I am still living at home and don't drive. I pay rent, I pay for health insurance,  I pay for my medical expenses, and I pay for my dog. I have money to spend, and I spend it on the things I like. Games, art, software, food, etc. I recently hosted an event on tumblr where I paid over 700$ to artists, so they could showcase their skills and make some money. I consistently support several artists. In fact I support them so much that they've started trying to offer me discounts, which I refuse because I know they need the money. That is kind of amazing customer service IMO, and so sweet of them to offer because they'd actually be better off not offering it. But they care about me and are grateful for me coming back, and they want to do something for me, you know? I've even bailed a few of these people out of bad financial situations without expecting anything in return. I'm a giving person. I am a patient person. If you treat me well I treat you well. Simple.

The last time I raised a concern of mine on HP, I was told to get back in my box. My issues with private shows, which were brought about because of timezones and late acceptance. At the time, that was causing me to have to online at work to try and enter my animals, and also causing me to miss shows. When I said 'hey, it would be nice if on acceptance there could be an auto-enter because of x reasons', people were very much 'eh, i've had to do that and i managed it, so no, that's a bad idea' and 'if you're having an issue just PAY someone else to do it for you'. Nevermind that I'm a 9-5 office worker in Australia, with long commutes. Nevermind that my stress, from a stressful job in which I am almost ALWAYS overcapcity working, was being added to because I was literally unable to complete private shows and as a result was losing money (RL, because that's how I fund myself). The answer was to in the end just PAY MORE and BE QUIET.

This time I have raised a concern, at least there's the offer to think about it but I, however cynical, don't see it driving any of the change I'd want to see. Maybe HP will eventually will move to paying out HPD for achievements, but then what will the HPD reward be? 500k? 1MILL? Will it actually be worth anything in the economy that works in millions, if not billions? Will it make any kind of difference at all, or will it essentially be another participation certificate?

I could stay and help drive that conversation, but my day job is actually getting paid to try and design software for businesses. I don't go home to work some more.

HP for me is only fun in seeing the pay-off of my work. I don't enjoy clicking endless buttons. I have no reason to really socialise on the game, as I'm not a forum person and the chat is rather clunky. I literally only turn up to see my points go up. And right now, I think I can live without that. I have alternatives like Overwatch and Siege, which are a one off cost and will allow me to play for years into the future. There's better value for money elsewhere.

I'll be offlining on HP tomorrow. I still wish everyone the best.

I'm sorry that you feel like all your concerns and suggestions have not been addressed, but I assure you they did not fall on deaf ears.  Sam and the staff like to hear everyone's opinions and input on game features to see what we can do to make it a game that you continually enjoy to play as a player.  A lot of our improvements to the game have come from strong player input as well as our own ideas.

From reading your post I find that it seems like you play much larger games with much deeper pockets.  I'm guessing you are talking about Mafia Wars that started on Facebook?  If my assumption is right thousands of players played that game and there were plenty of micro transactions in the game to help fund the advancement of the game.  You also mentioned Overwatch, but we don't even need to get into how large Blizzard's player base is.  Essentially it's like you are trying to compare HP (ie a mom and pop shop) to huge SIM & Video Game companies (ie Walmart, Costco, etc), and we just can't compete.

HP is a one woman show with the help of volunteers.  However small we are, Sam still provides discounts throughout the year (Cyber Monday, Random coupons on our social media websites, chat party discounts/prizes, etc).  We would love to be as large as those other companies to offer more perks, but we just aren't at that point.  We offer incentives when we can as well as offering HPD through the weekly banking system.  We can only offer so much HPD before it gets the economy all out of wack which in turn makes it even harder for new players to get into the game as well as older players sustaining what they have.

I personally have my 40 accounts and am pretty self sustainable aside from buying an upgrade here or there through out the year.  I obviously sell a lot more upgrades if I am doing a project or what not, but aside of that I hardly have to pay anything out of pocket.  I can get all my upgrades through upgrade auctions with HPD.

I think idealy it comes down to the fact that maybe HP is too small of a game to cater to your big game experiences?  We are very much a click based, time consuming, social based community.  It might not be for everyone but those that are here, and stick around, enjoy it.  It's not necessarily a bad thing that we don't click exactly to what you have been used to, but HP has been keeping on keeping on the same way for years with a player base to follow.  We will miss you if you go, but know that we hear you and understand your concerns even if we can't implement right at this moment.

"I personally have my 40 accounts and am pretty self sustainable aside from buying an upgrade here or there through out the year.  I obviously sell a lot more upgrades if I am doing a project or what not, but aside of that I hardly have to pay anything out of pocket.  I can get all my upgrades through upgrade auctions with HPD"

i think ultra is talking about no real perks for those who spend the money to upgrade people...

You say you can get all your uppies via auctions...what happens when all the players that provide that service(like me) quit offering it?!

Then everyone would have to buy their own(which obviously alot of players cant since they buy from sellers).

Granted id like to see more perks added for the ones who do spend the rld, but im not gonna quit over it.

With selling upgrades as my main source of income, i sorta feel like im cheating in a way..since im basically buying 200million for $15 rld. Which i believe is 13mill per $1?!

I understand where you are coming from, ultra, really I do. You have put a lot of your hard-earned RLD into the game both of the times you've played in order to have the best of the best of your breeds from the get-go, and feel like you're not reaping any benefits from it. I understand how frustrating that must seem to you, especially from the sounds of the games you've come here from.

Like tron said above, however, we are very much a mom-and-pop store of a game, not a Walmart. I'm not sure if you played HL back in the day before the cartoon, but it started out in the very beginning as a mom-and-pop game run by a teenage girl. The game got bigger as more and more people played and it evolved into the popular game where a lot of HP people played, then it evolved again when it went more "Walmart" with the launch of the cartoon and the relaunch of the website. Which as we all know was the beginning of the end of the site. I read an article once about the girl who created HL with her dad...I just went looking for it again and couldn't find it, although if you look up Horseland on wikipedia there's a paragraph about the origins of the game. Like tron said, we are not at the point where we can become a Walmart type of game, and honestly? I hope we never are, based on how HL went down that road.

Picture it...Ottawa, 2012.

A hardworking young girl is slaving away for minimum wage at a local grocery store, which is under renovation. A customer storms up, asks why there are tarps up outside of the department they are standing in. The girl explains that the store is slowly being renovated and improved. A little here, a little there. The customer doesn't like it. "I want to speak to the manager!" The girl calls the manager over, where the customer states, "I see you're renovation...making improvements. That's good, but I don't like it. It should be like this instead." The manager listens to the customer's feedback, thanks them for it and that says that the store is always open to suggestions, but that said suggestions aren't possible at the moment. The customer gets upset, and states "but I put hundreds and hundreds of dollars in groceries into this store weekly! You must do what I say! I want it to change to this way, so you must do it because I give you my money!"

Sorry, couldn't resist....it called for some Sophia....I can't tell it quite like her, but then who can? :P

Sam is the creator and owner of the game. She paid for it to be programmed in the beginning out of pocket, and the only way HP has been able to improve and become the successful game it is today is through us all buying upgrades. A game like this is not cheap to run. Those of us who have played since the beginning remember how bare bones it was in its genesis. The improvements may not be perfect, and not everyone may like them, but they have made the game better, and like it's been said several times, we are open to suggestions, but just because they are made doesn't mean we will implement them. At the end of the day, Sam will add/change what will both benefit the game the most, and what the majority of game players want, because if 1 or 2 people want something drastically changed, but the other 90% of the game players disagree, Sam can't afford to run a game that only has 1 or 2 players because all the others hated the change and quit.

I know you are a "go big or go home" type of player. You want the best of the best or not bother, and you want it now. Part of the game play of HP, though, is the climb. In the real world, you can't just snap your fingers and buy a house, you have to work hard to earn it. I have done two super-successful top-25 of all time dogs on HP. With both of them, I spent A LOT of time saving my money, before doing the big project. Then saved my money for a long time, then did another. All without buying other people upgrades in auctions in order to fund it. Getting the best is not supposed to be easy. And honestly? It makes me that much more proud of my accomplishments with those two dogs and the fact that they were both in memory of my old RL goldens, because of the blood sweat and tears I put into the process before they were even born.

I really hope I'm making sense...I worked 7 hours in my day job today then 4 hours tonight at my part time job, so my brain is SUPER sleepy right now, but I didn't want to forget what I had to say before tomorrow...

If you (anyone reading this thread, not just those who have replied), have an idea for the achievements system, or anything game-related...that's why we have a suggestions area on the forum! Plus any of us staff are always available should you want to bounce an idea off of us! But disclaimer...like the customer in the grocery store, just because you suggest it doesn't mean you snap your fingers and it happens. Everything has different factors to consider before we go forward with it...will it improve the game? will it cost a lot to get the programmer to implement? is it even possible with the way the entire game is programmed? (because telling you right now, Sam would have to win the lottery to consider a complete reprogram of the entire game LOL), etc.

Also side note...the $400k does add up weekly with multiple accounts, and does accumulate over time! And if we upped that amount then we'd just add to the inflation we're already trying to reduce to bring all of the game $ prices down...

In short, that's what I have to say. Ultra, if you ultimately decide you are done no matter what, I will miss you, but that's your decision to make. If you are a more "big box store game" type player, I wish you luck wherever you land next! :]