Pets & Horses My many new™ problems with Mounts

So, after Fruma's release I made a post that pretty highly praised the new mount system, while listing only a single big problem that I had with it. I only had one criticism because I already had access to a pre-Fruma white horse with nearly max stats and thus didn't have the perspective that a new player would have.
Now however, in preparation for a friend joining Wynncraft I began my construction of a perfect black horse, and properly experienced the pure unadulterated psychological torture that ensued.
Particularly with the feeding system. Don't worry, we'll get to that. Oh boy, we will get to that.

With my newfound perspective I set out to make a new post detailing all my grievances with buying, riding, training, breeding, and of course feeding mounts as well as my solutions to fixing those problems.
Note that this post is almost exclusively based on my experience with horses, not with wyverns or adasaurs since I have not started breeding those yet. Regardless, many of my points are universal to the mount system as a whole.

I'd like to reiterate that I do genuinely love the new mount system in terms of how training works, how the animations look, how turbo-charged your mounts can be, and the fact that there's more variation than ever before. But it needs a ton of ironing out, and the feeding timer is a crime against humanity.
Also, I won't be repeating anything I said in this previous original post, particularly because most of the things I said there were based on a misunderstanding of how power-ups work. Now I'm a big boy and I know better the innerworkings of how mount training works.

So, without further ado, I'll start with some of the more minor problems; things that are more inconveniences than massive problems and then go into bigger problems.

• Colors in the Trade Market: In the Trade Market, saddles (or reins, etc.) will not actually show the colors of the mount when hovering over it. It'll show every stat just fine, and if you click on it and then hover over it in the buy menu, it'll actually show the colors properly. But this is inconvenient, having to manually click every mount, go into the buy menu, and hover over it to see its colors if you're looking for a specific color or combo, not to mention memorizing what mount in which row and column you just looked at.

- My solution: simply make colors visible when hovering over a mount in the trade market.
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• Momentum Bugs: Sometimes when riding a mount, your momentum will completely vanish out of nowhere. I noticed this happening when you climb blocks at an imperfect angle or when you run down blocks or slabs.

- I don't know enough about what causes this to offer a solution or any more substantial input than just "please fix it".
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• Speed Boosts: Speed Boost powerups despite their energy cost are almost completely useless. The speed boost they give only seems to last for a few seconds and means little if you're not at your full speed when you get them.

- My solution: I don't mind the boost lasting only a few seconds, but make it so that it instantly boosts your momentum upon pickup by an amount relating to your Boost stat, and disables involuntary momentum loss during its duration, so it basically acts like a mushroom from Mario Kart.
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• Breeding Colors: The lack of control you have of your mount's breeding color result can be annoying, considering how rare some colors already are. After all, the whole point of the rework is to remove unreasonable RNG from the breeding process, and there's more than enough RNG already due to stat mechanics.

- My solution: when breeding, make the first mount's first color always be inherited, while the second mount's second color is also always inherited. This makes the color result completely controlled.
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• Feeding Time: This is the big one. So, the feeding time for horses is unacceptable. It takes a system that requires an otherwise completely reasonable amount of time to train and makes it absolutely insufferable for literally no reason.

There is already a requirement to be able to train your horse. It's called manual labor. You need profession materials to feed your horse in the first place and they don't just come out of nowhere. You either have to gather them yourself (and professions get more and more irritating as your level gets higher), buy them from other players with your own hard-earned cash, or get them from Raids (which are endgame activities that already have their own cost to attempt). So why does there need to be a further limit on players?

Even worse though is the excuse given for it, "to avoid making the best strategy one that requires the players to constantly tend to their mounts."
I'm sorry, but I'm immediately calling cap on that. Having a 6 hour wait time makes you more pressured to constantly tend your mount, not less, due to the anxiety that comes from a constant 6 hour timer hanging over your head for an important gameplay feature. This would be like if Runescape made it so you could only level up 1 time in any skill every few hours "to keep continuous playtime from being the best strategy to level up".
Why are we, the players of a video game, being punished... for playing the video game?
Regardless...

- My solution: Completely scrap the "feeding timer". Make feeding something you can do instantaneously. There's already a cost to do so; consumption of profession materials. There's zero reason whatsoever for a limiting timer. As for the feeding menu, you could keep it the same, but allow players to put more than one item into each slot of the feeding "storage", and right-clicking on an item instantly feeds one of that item to the horse it's assigned to. As for breeding, you could make it so that right-clicking on a saddle in the feeding menu starts a breeding process, which to be honest is fine having a wait time. Heck, I don't even mind it having a 6 hour wait time.

Another solution that also preserves the original idea of the feeder is to have the aforementioned solution, but also have a timer that automatically feeds it or breeds it.
(credit to Elytry)

In the event that all of this is too much, given how frustratingly stubborn the Wynncraft team tends to be towards bad systems that exist only to limit player convenience, you could instead at the very least reduce the feeding time by a massive margin. I think it should be like 5, 10, or even 30 minutes, and the absolute most I would accept is 1 hour. But 6 hours is utterly revolting.
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Whew, that was a lot of stuff to talk about. I of course realize how abrasive I've been about the feeding timer but you have to understand, I don't take kindly to disingenuous and, most of all, deceptive excuses for a system that exclusively exists to make the experience worse for players.
Blah blah blah, the Wynncraft team despises player convenience, you know I've said this all before. But as far as I'm concerned, my essay on the feeding timer shows the exact same amount of respect towards the mechanic as that mechanic has shown towards the players. That is to say, almost none.

Anyways, those are my personal gripes with the system
But what do you guys think of the new mount system, and what problems do you think could be fixed?
I might™ add things to the list later if I find more problems, but for now this is all I take issue with.

 

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but in terms of energy replenishment I'd argue the six hour timer (although it should be halved) is the better solution. See, the thing is I don't want to either a. run to whatever enclosure to manually feed the mount or b. have a class permanently garrisoned in that area.

However, if the feeder worked like you said but automatically ticked down regardless of whether or not you manually feed it, then that would be kind of perfect

 

Your idea is actually really good, giving us the best of both worlds. I'll probably update the thread with it (with credit).

 

Honestly, I don'tind the difficulty breeding rare colors. I think that works as a great money sink and gives people with more money than sense something to do. I have no issue with what is effectively a rare cosmetic being hard to obtain for average players, so long as the functionality is fine (which it is; an azure is equivalent to a mystic in terms of usability unless I've been lied to).

The feeding time however feels like a way to make life more difficult for people who aren't paying for Silverbull. I think it was designed to make it take longer to get a good mount; by implementing a 6-hour timer you set a minimum time to maximize the limits and therefore to maximize breeding potential. I don't honestly mind this a ton; I think making high-stat mounts somewhat rare and valuable is fine, and honestly having this as something going on in the background is fine. However, it really does feel like selling those extra slots was a big part of the design; fewer slots means needing to put materials in more often, necessitating logging on more often and having a class either traveling there more often or babysitting it constantly. It's difficult to argue that something is a slow background process when you're having to babysit it constantly, and the number of times you have to travel to the feeder in order to breed a high level mount, especially if you don't have a rank (I feel like this being way more inconvenient for non-ranked/subbed players is a recurring theme here) is honestly pretty aggravating.

Let's say you want to breed a white-horse equivalent wyvern and you only are willing to spend a paltry 60 USD on a rank (the full price of a copy of Baldur's Gate 3); you would need to travel to Bantisu temple, put 3 wyverns into the feeder. Feed them. Either camp there or leave and come back a few hours later. Feed them again. There might be a segment in here where you level them to make this faster, or just to get them high enough to breed. Return to the temple. Put 3 new ones in. Feed them. Leave or camp. Feed again. Level. Third batch goes in (you can also breed one of the first ones now). Feed. Leave or camp. Feed. Breed remaining pairs. Oh wait, no, had to feed the first pair and level them, so do that, then breed the other pairs. Feed and level them. I'm gonna ignore that you're gonna have to feed them multiple times. Then breed these pairs. Then feed and level these ones. Multiple times. Then finally breed your final one and feed it. Anf level it. And feed it some more. Maybe a bit more even. Don't forget to level it.

I don't mind this acting as a slow background task. I don't mind it being a bit grindy to level them. I don't even mind the fact that all this time you're having to return and occasionally tinker. But the number of times is unreasonable for a background task, and it feels deliberately engineered to be much slower for anyone without at least Hero+. I'm not even necessarily against Hero+ having a perk there, but good lord it would be agonizing to do this as an unleveled player if you already had a good mount you were using.

 

Honestly, calling it "revolting" is generous.
Day one, I immediately said to anyone who would listen that they could quarter the feed time and it'd STILL be too long. I also got to start with a pretty great preexisting horse, and as someone who always likes breeding/training mechanics in games (Pokemon, Palworld, etc, heck even whatever Umamusume has going on), it's borderline insulting to hand us a very fun system and basically tell us not to use it at risk of it consuming our entire lives.

For simplicity, let's say that each feed from start to end takes 5 hours (obviously it doesnt, but you know, simplicity sake).
You need to start with 2 basic horses. Each basic horse starts with 10/30 (limit/max). To breed correctly, you need to get, ideally, all stats to max, so in this case, 30/30.
For a starting horse, they can only eat T1 food. I really don't feel like sorting out all the numbers (good god why couldn't they have just been divisible by 5 or something), so I'll be generous and say you can max a horse with 10 feedings (assuming 2 of each food, skipping 3 categories. Again, the number isn't accurate and I'm being generous, especially considering the timer STARTS at 6 hours for horses past T1).
That's 50 hours for a pair of T1 horses to get ready to breed, then another 6 hours to breed them together.
Congrats! You now have a T2 horse. It's barely better than your T1s were, and perhaps, if you were unlucky, slightly worse in some stats.
Now, do that whole 50 hours again for that horse... and another 2 T1s, then the second T2 that those breed into. You've now spent 150 hours feeding, and 18 more breeding, to get your T3 horse.

This time cost only continues to double for every single tier up you go.

50 hours is already insane (though honestly, if the parents were kept after breeding, it would be very fair).
To make that time grow exponentially for every time you want a tiny little upgrade on your mount? That's catastrophic.
It'd be months until you got a horse on par with the stuff you could roll the dice a couple times for before Fruma.

But hey, if you pay A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY DOLLARS FOR CHAMPION RANK, you can negligibly offset this time with an extra two horse slots!

(If anyone wants to actually do the real math, I'll update my numbers to be accurate rather than kind)

Also, just here at the end, I want to reiterate that I in general actually very much enjoy the entire breeding and training process that we've gotten. It's literally just the feed times that's turning it from a 4.5/5 to a 0.5/5.

 

What I hate most is that it's not like it'd be too easy to get an amazing horse without the feeding timer, because you still have to partake in hard manual labor to get the materials needed to breed a good horse. And if not hard labor, then you spend absolute shitloads of emeralds. The feeding timer just has absolutely no reason to exist and I cannot fathom why they felt the need to add it to an otherwise amazing, breathtakingly good system.

 

You feed them so little that I'm not sure that it's actually all that accurate to say that buying them would be expensive, nor do I think that it takes a large investment of labor. It takes 10 materials to make the limits for a starting mount, and approximately the same for a t2. I think it takes 14 materials to max one with only level 1 materials, which is a negligible cost or time investment to obtain, even if you aren't doing profs. Assuming ~10 materials to max the limits holds true for higher levels, in order to make a t4 mount, that's roughly 140ish materials (200ish for the level 1s). Even if it takes well over 200, you're talking about something in the realm of the cost of a chestnut horse pre-Fruma if you buy these, or maybe an hour of labor for something that is theoretically comparable to a white horse, and is effectively at the point where you are well into the realm of diminishing returns. If you're a proffer, you're talking about minutes of labor, and while I do think professions deserve to be a bit more fun and rewarding, this equates to them having virtually no cost to level mounts (I'm no proffer but I've leveled them enough that I could churn out enough level 1 materials to level a half-dozen t4 mounts in minutes). Assuming 6 hours to breed them, a t4 mount would represent effectively a 42 hour investment if every breeding was run sequentially. Running 2 simultaneously, that drops to 24 hours, and hero+ and higher players could get one in under a day (assuming they can get on every 6 hours to tend to them, but still). I'm not against changes to the system; I think I've made it pretty clear that I think the time-gating feels like a tacked-on addition, but I think that allowing such quick and easy access to high level mounts (arguably effective-max from what I've heard) completely negates the reason for the system to exist. If you can spend a few le or a few minutes to achieve a "max"-level mount, it feels like pointless busywork to not be able to just buy one from the merchant in the first place. Requiring more food (so as to actually give them that high investment cost you were talking about) or smaller improvements per generation (again requiring a monetary higher investment, especially for rare colors, as well as a higher time investment) would make that more reasonable, but I doubt that anyone likes that.

To be honest, I don't know what is the best option. I don't think they can get rid of the timer without making the entire system feel like a pointless few clicks and some waiting. The timer itself sucks though, so I don't know that leaving it makes the system that much better. Honestly, I think a few major reworks are needed, but I doubt they'll want to do that seeing as they just finishing reworking the system once, and a lot of the friction does occur from things being locked behind ranks or Silverbull, which they probably don't want to change which is fair; they do need to make money somehow, and I'd rather it be more annoying to interface with a largely optional part of the game than for it to actually affect my moment to moment gameplay.

 

I'm talking more about the higher tiers of horses in terms of lots of emeralds or labor

 

Being unable to even scavenge for energy when on minimum - because picking up the energy powerup TAKES energy - is insult to injury. I have MAJOR issues with this feeding timer. It legitimately feels like a mobile game that forces you to wait forever for minimal improvements.

Combined with the system that makes powerups you don't pickup more and more common - leading to only receiving powerups that are useless, as you would obviously avoid the stats you've already maxxed - this is an agonizingly awful system that completely counters all the good parts of the new mount system.

Get rid of the timer entirely, and make it so you cannot find powerups of stats you have maxxed. That fixes 95% of all issues with mounts.

 

The leveling system being designed to not only repeatedly give you upgrades that are actively detrimental to take, but to only offer them if you try to avoid them, was such a bad design choice. I genuinely cannot fathom why this was added, the only explanation that makes sense is to deliberately make it grindier and to force more feedings- to make it take even longer.

I completely get the mobile game feel too. I don't hate the idea of the feeding time, but the way it's implemented specifically feels deliberately antagonistic, as if they were trying to get you to buy something to make it smoo- Silverbull gives 2 extra feeding slots (although mathematically, the utility these add is actually pretty small).

Anyway, my bigger issue is how it feels like a deliberate time-waste added at the end of development to make it take longer, rather than a deliberate choice that was carefully integrated from the start that makes the system more interesting. The way it's integrated with the system is, I think, the actual issue. Right now, the optimal method to breed mounts is to buy a mount, level it, feed it, level it, feed it, breed it, repeat with another mount, then breed them. Then you feed that mount, level it, feed it, and then repeat leveling and breeding until you reach your desired potential. You can't just add food, you need to take active grind steps between the passive grind steps, and with a degree of timing (which can be annoying if you have a life outside of Wynncraft), or it will take many, many more feedings. A friend wrote a quick program to optimize feeding them, and we found that the difference between level 1 and level 40 materials for a second-gen mount is around 4-5 feedings or 24-30 hours, which, going to a level 4 mount, represents an additional 48 hours on the low end just for macing the limits on the second generation, assuming you have a rank lower than hero+ (huh). This either represents taking much longer, or being on more often and actively grinding to level the mounts (one mount isn't too bad, but the 15 mounts you have to level to make a gen-4 is a bit much). I'm not against more active players being rewarded, but the actual differences can be pretty extreme. I assume third-gen mounts will be similar, so that's another 24+ hours. You'll also need to feed the fourth gen, so 24+ there as well. On the low end, that's adding somewhere in the neighborhood of 96 hours (a week is more realistic) unless you can get on and level your mounts, and do so during the window where they're being fed (so they don't run out of energy and take an extra 6 hours to get it back) but have already been fed enough to level up enough to use higher tier materials.

So unless you log on repeatedly over the course of leveling your mount, following timing constraints that are rather difficult to meet if you happen to have a job, or school, or any other commitments or responsibilities in your life (like sleep), this adds a fair bit of time to breeding a high-potential mount.

This is actually easily fixable. Basing your feeding level on the limits, rather than the level, and/or giving more food slots (either allowing for higher level feeding without repeated leveling grinds or allowing long, slow grinds without needing to refill the food respectively) would make this less painful. I think that removing the timer entirely just gives a massive advantage to hero+ players (having to log on 3 times over the course of 12 hours to get a chestnut horse just seems overpowered), and that there are better ways to improve it.

 

For me, the timer is awful because it's something you can't really control. I would actually be perfectly fine with mounts taking just as long to level up, but the timer is passive, and you're forced to wait on it and play around it with next to zero interactivity. Furthermore, it hard limits how much time I can actually invest in mounts, which is a very strange thing for Wynncraft that has no such hard limit on any other system in the game. If I really really wanted to, I could grind raids nonstop for 12 hours a day. There doesn't come a point where I simply have to wait a few hours before my next "raid token" becomes available.

And with the previous mount system, you could theoretically grind nonstop to get a perfect horse - optimizing emeralds per hour to buy seven quintillion horses & breed until you get a white, and then train it up to max. Not that I'm saying this is a very healthy way to play, but the fact is, there was a large spread between minimal investment and maximum investment. With this new system, the difference between minimal & maximal investment isn't really any in-game mechanic. It's just setting a bunch of timers on your phone to log on and click two buttons. And the only real difference is minimizing the time between the timers, instead of the time overall.

Maybe I'm yapping too much now though lol. I really do like the mounts as a whole but something has to change with the feeding & breeding timers.

 

Also, something I should say. I've been defending the waiting system here, and while I think it is a good idea (poorly implemented, but a good idea), I should point out that it does take about 9 to 10 feedings for the second generation mounts, which does amount to 54-60 hours each. I've not found any that took fewer than 9, so I'm going to assume that if there are any, they are at least fairly uncommon. If you don't have hero+ (I notice that keep saying this, don't I), you have to do that at least twice, for a total of 104 to 120 hours. You also have to do this once for the generation 3 and for generation 4 mounts. So, a minimum of 208 hours, plus the time spent feeding the first generation mounts. (I'll low-ball and say around 30 hours, x2 if hero+, x3 if vip+, x4 if unranked). So, to be clear, in the neighborhood of 330 hours of waiting, on the low end (160ish if hero+). Again, this is probably a fair bit lower than the average. If you don't find the optimal feeding options for your mount, and make the mistake of feeding them suboptimally, you might add on an extra 6-12 hours per mount. Same if you get one with a really bad spread. I didn't get any that needed 11, but it seems entirely possible. While I don't hate the idea of having a waiting mechanic, and I actually think that having a time gating mechanic for feeding to prevent instantly churning out maxed out mounts is a good thing, this is a wee bit ridiculous, no? Given leveling the mount, any downtime because of a life outside of Wynncraft, bad stat spreads, suboptimal feeding, etc. I could very easily see getting a generation 4 mount taking four or even five hundred hours.

 

I think the big issue is that all that math implies you're caring for your mount at exactly the time the timer is up, perfectly. And that's the thing; the whole point of the timer (at least, according to them) was to keep specifically that from happening; ceaseless unending maintenance. And as shown, it does exactly the opposite.

But another thing is, this is mounts we're talking about here. Mounts in an MMO game should not have this many caveats to just simply making them feel good to use. Feeling good to use is the whole point of mounts, arguably just as important as their role as transportation. Whether it's from their innate faster speed, flying, novelty, or other things, mounts systems should strive to scratch that itch.

Wynncraft's mounts check every single one of those boxes to give you that feeling, but the commitment to get to that feeling is torturous, to the point that it feels like you'd be better off not engaging with them at all. And that's a terrible shame because if the feeding time didn't exist, I literally would not be able to think of any other game with a better mount system than Wynncraft.

In FFXIV your mounts are equal parts speed boosts and bragging rights, and then later you unlock flying. In Warframe you play as a crack-addict super ninja to the point that mounts' speed is redundant so they are really just novelties, but damn does each one feel really good to use regardless. Destiny mounts are also really fun to use and always have been (a notably rare W for Destiny, I know). None of these games force you to grind super long to get that just overall good feeling of mounts.