Birthday Horse Contest Winners 2019

Finally, it's time to decide the winners of what was probably our last HI2 birthday flute contest. It's rather sad that this might be it, yes, but it's not all that likely we'll be spending much time there now that our sub has expired. The lag, which used to only be an issue for us in forests, has gotten worse and is quite annoying. *Sighs.* There's nothing stopping us from doing a similar contest on HI3 next year, though. Maybe with the first wild horse caught on our birthdays?

Okay, enough of my rambling. Let's get to the winners!

Category 1:
Fluted wild that looks the most like the horse on Mom's calendar

The winner is Julie's Shagya! It's far from a perfect match, but the horses have the same base color, chestnut. That was all it took this year.

My Swedish Warmblood (perlino tobiano) wasn't that terribly far off from my palomino, but the spots vs no spots and different eye colors counted against them. Bethany's Sugarbush Draft (buckskin blanket appaloosa) and pale palomino were pretty dissimilar, as were Lily's Gelderland (dapple gray) and palomino. (Side note: what's with all the palominos on Mom's calendar? They're nice looking horses and all, but isn't variety the spice of life?)


Category 2:
Fluted wild with the prettiest/handsomest profile artwork

All four of our flutes were quite good-looking this year! First place ended up a tie between my Swedish Warmblood and Julie's Shagya Arabian. (The risk you take when there are 4 judges.) Let's just say my flute gets the prettiest profile artwork prize:

and Julie's gets the handsomest profile artwork prize:

Category 3:
Fluted wild with the coolest avatar

We unanimously awarded this one to Bethany's Sugarbush Draft. <3 It doesn't get much cooler than buckskin with a frosty rump.

If my Swedish Warmblood had had a tail that matched her cool orangey-gold mane, it would've been harder to choose between the two!

There were no boring or unattractive avatars in the bunch this year. Third place is a tie again, this time between Julie's Shagya:

and Lily's dapper dappled Gelderland:

Category 4:
Fluted wild with the best personality

Bethany's flute was the clear winner. Interestingly, 3 of the 4 flutes were "Unique" personalities this year. Julie's broke the mold with the "Drill Sergeant" personality label. 

My flute was a not-so-distant second, also with 3 traits on the desired right side of the chart.

Category 5:
Fluted wild with the highest sum of stats for its breed

My flute crushed the competition with an impressive +54 total!

Second went to Bethany's Sugarbush with a +12.

Julie's Shagya squeaked into third with a -12.

Lily's Gelderland came in last with a -13. Sorry, Lily!

The competition was fierce in this category this year. Last year the totals ranged from a mere +5 (Bethany's) to -82 (Julie's.) 

Category 6:
Fluted wild with the highest total sum of stats

My flute wins yet again with a stat total of 2254! 

Julie's Shagya squeaked into second with a 2238 stat total. 

Bethany's Sugarbush is just barely in third with a 2237 stat total.

Lily's Gelderland is fourth again. 

And now for two more random categories we decided to add for fun.

Category 7:
Fluted wild that coordinated best with the dog of the day on Mom's calendar

Bethany's Sugarbush wins!

Yay for spots!

Category 8:
Most Intelligent Fluted Wild

Let's hear it for Lily's Gelderland! We think he ought to win something after how much it cost to flute him. XD

Bethany's and my flutes have tied with 3 wins each, so we are the winners! We're not sure what the prizes are going to be, now that HI2 is so laggy. Maybe we can each choose something to build next on our HI3 ranch? Or we could concentrate on doing something special for Star and Gryff first, like getting them their own tack or stat training them first. Hmm...

Before we get totally sucked back into HI3, though, I have to mention what happened on November 15, during literally the last few minutes of our expensive monthly subscription. Julie had logged on to flute one last wild horse. Roughly 2 minutes remained before the sub expired. Not knowing if the sub expiration would immediately take effect, she and Ravine hurried to a non-Ton island and played that flute (sound on so we could hear the effect one last time.)

It was a pale horse whose avatar reminds us of Zephyr's, one of our first +6/6 wilds.

This horse, however, was not a cremello sabino APH, but a fancy "golden ivory champagne" sabino Mangalarga Marchador! Behold:

Wouldn't you know it, he had great +6/6 stats too: they add up to +85!

Turns out the sub expiration did not immediately go into effect - it doesn't do so until you log out and log back in. This means we had some time to ride around the very handsome Manga and dig up some pirate treasures on Narrowed Isle. 

I don't know if HI2 was thanking us for the 6+ years we faithfully played or was trying to get us to re-subscribe, but at any rate it certainly got our attention. XD Maybe it will motivate us to resubscribe for a while once the novelty of HI3 has worn off a bit. We'll see...

Apollo and a New Buddy

We completed Apollo's quest at long last!

It wasn't near as difficult as we'd feared, thank goodness. We thought Apollo might play a short clip from somewhere near the middle or end of a piece, but he seemed to stick to the beginning. We still had to consult our chart a few times to identify some of the less familiar pieces, where we had described each in words. (For example, our note for Dvorak's Symphony 9 - 4th Part was "starts like Jaws/epic Western.")

One piece he asked us to identify several times, including for the last question, was Moonlight Sonata. It's one of my favorites. =)

That leaves us with only two more Esroh quests to complete, but it's looking less and less likely that we'll ever complete them. For Ares's quest, we still have to get those pesky remaining 20 or whatever competition wins. HI2 is a ghost town, and we're guessing anybody who would agree to compete with us would compete our socks off. Without completing Ares's quest, we can't meet Zeus. :^( Oh well, the world will go on.

I'm much happier to report our latest HI3 news!

There is now a usable "rotate" option for existing ranch buildings. We were able to rotate our first barn without having to tear it down and rebuild! Since we'd already gathered enough wood and stone to rebuild by the time we realized this, we were able to build a second barn! Pepsi was somehow standing on it as it was going up, hence she ended up like this. =)

On November 1, we happened to lasso this mare out in the savanna near Agartha Village:

Okay, so she's not going to win any conformation contests. (And if you think she looks a bit awkward here, you should see her grazing...) Nevertheless, she is quite special. Her genetic stat total is even higher than Cloud's, and despite those forelegs, she's faster and stronger than our other horses. Her dapples, random eel stripe, orange mane, huge star, and 3 white feet dress up her basic chestnut coat quite nicely. 

Out of curiosity, we had her breed determined. The result: Grade European Hotblood. From what I've read online, people don't seem to be in total agreement on which breeds count as "hotbloods," but the Thoroughbred is definitely an European breed in that category. We think our mare looks fairly Thoroughbred-like with those long legs.

We weren't sure about her at first, but she's been growing on us. Her two personality traits that are quite extreme, skittishness and antisocialness, have not had much of an impact when we ride her. (We don't care much for dark forests or crowds anyway.) So, we made it semi-official and gave her an infinitum amulet, which froze her in time at the same age as Starfleet, 5.7 years.

4 horses means my sisters and I can each have one of our own now: no more sharing. =^) Bethany picked out Starfleet's name, and both have luxurious dark manes, so they seem meant for each other. Felicity claimed Gryffindor because he's brave and has so much chrome. Lily chose Cloudburst, obviously, because we caught him on her birthday. That left "Pansy" for me. (I plan to rename her, thanks to the unsavory Pansy Parkinson character in the Harry Potter series, but I haven't decided on a new name yet.) Don't worry, I'm quite happy with this turn of events: I get a speedy horse with a personality I can relate to pretty well.

Our focus the last two weekends was determining our horses' favorite treats. And yes, it really did take us several hours. Horse treats on HI3 combine 3-5 different ingredients of 11 different flavor types. Each horse has 4 favorites and a couple of flavors they don't like. We systematically combined flavors until we discovered each horse's favorites. 

Here's Gryff's treat chart. ;^) Turns out his favorite treat combines sweet, savory, starchy, and fibrous.

I'm sure there's a more efficient method, but we got there in the end for all 4. The hardest part was learning which ingredients were which flavors and then tracking down the different ingredients. We tried to harvest them all in the wild to save money, but we ended up buying a few of the trickiest ones to find. Discovering each horse's favorite treat made PepsiSummer his/her favorite human permanently and gave them a serious bond boost. I guess the way to a HI3 horse's heart is through its stomach! =^P