HGG Community Forums

I know when I use the search I have a hard time figuring out where things go. If I do a search with specifics I always end up not getting a single horse so I get frustrated with it. So I will admit I don't use the search horses except to look at my horses mostly.

Search is King :)

and as Confluence points out , if you like a horse , message and ask. There are multiple reasons that a horse is not on the open market, but may still be for sale or for breeding.

The only time i do a ISO is if there were no horses for sale that meet what I'm looking for. There are so many nice horses that i might be interested in that it is easier just to say ISO rather than trying to send several messages when using my phone it is hard to navigate. I use the search most of the time though, figured it out pretty quickly actually so i use it all the time.

ISO ads don't bother me a bit. Maybe it's the tone of the 'show me what you've got' posts that bugs me?

Wildland, I message people all the time asking about horses I like. You're right, I get a lot of no's (at least they are NICE no's!), but I frequently get a yes. It's worked well for me over the years.

ETA: Windspun- YES! It drives me nuts when people do that. OK, if it's a 50k horse and you are just testing the waters, ask, but don't give me time to think about it! Put a price on that Beastie and I might just snap it up on impulse! If I end up not liking the horse after all, then it's my problem, and you still have your money and stall space!

I also don't mind when new(er) players ask that you 'make an offer', pricing horses to sell is tough! But at some point you should start being able to determine what the horse is worth and start putting them up for those potential impulse buys!

I don't mind the request/ISO ads, as they add activity to the forums, and are easy enough to skip over if I'm not interested in reading them. (I will also admit I am nowhere near the point where other players are actively seeking out my lines.)

I only have about a 50% response rate to my private message inquiries about horses for stud or sale, even when they have an ad running. If you don't want to sell to me, I will not take offense, but a simple "I am not interested" reply is much more polite than ignoring a message. I do agree that if your (non-restricted genes) horse is advertised for sale, it should actually be listed for sale. I understand why people get disheartened about just searching and requesting via PM.

Then again, I often seek genetic expressions that haven't been isolated on the game/search yet (PATN1, and I don't think PATN2 is even on the game yet, so my desired "snowcaps" are actually fewspots). In these cases the search engine isn't always useful to me.

However, I do strongly support exploring and understanding the search engine, because it is a very useful tool. Ads should supplement searching when possible, not just take the place of it.

When I started playing, I practiced searching with louder, more complex horses I own/like: can I narrow down search results enough to find them in a small result pool? If I can, I have developed a pretty good understanding of how to find horses with those particular physical traits I seek. If I can't, then I need to tinker further with the search engine parameters!

P.S. If anyone DOES know how to find PATN+ or 1 via search, please educate me! From what I can gather by reading old forum posts, it has not yet been coded into the search engine.

On the topic of the search... is there a way to search for generations.... like all g3 mares?

There are a couple of ways to try to search for a particular generation. One of the best I found was to search for a particular number or Roman numeral in the name search and also sort by paper level. I know what Paper level I expect for a generation, so I would scroll to that paper and then look from there. Also remember to check Lined and uncheck Foundation. Obviously that only works for horses that are papered though...which eliminates anything not owned or bred by Premium members...

I remember people asking Ammit about making Breeders Clubs for more than foundation and 2nd gen horses instead of lumping all the others under the single term "lined". Her response was that it wasn't possible to program a search to identify generations beyond 2nd gen, because of the complexity it would require, or something to that effect. This was several years ago, when the Breeders Clubs were first introduced, and my memory may be a bit off on the details, but I definitely remember her saying that it wasn't feasible to try programming a search for anything beyond 2nd gen.

I think the search is pretty easy to use. And I use it all the time. I definitely agree that a lot of people dont use it and I dont understand why! Its such a useful tool.

You can kind of search for generation. A ton of us use numbers to mark our generations. So.. put the number youre looking for in the name box and voila some horses. Now of course you will get horses that arent of that generation or horses who just have their IDs as their names and you also wont see ALL the horses of that generation for sale since a lot of people dont put generation numbers in their horses names but Ive found loads of horses doing it that way.