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Finals Fail again.
9th.
I think I'm going to not bother with the B class. Still too many good horses there, and too little money. Even if I won the finals, I would've gotten about the same $200 overall that Ptarmigan won by winning the semis/quarters in the A class yesterday.
I might take an A-or-bust approach going forward.
Oh well.. at least I got $29 in free money.
Had 3 horses make the tournmament today.
Catfish made the A class for sprinters. Lost. Catfish is 0-for-3 in getting out of the quarters.
Lowballin KYH Princess made the A class for mid-distance. Her first qualification. She finished 4th, just missing the money.
Flying made the B class for long distance. Won it, got $45 moved on. Drew the crusher LBJ Goat (10.2 ETH lifetime profit) in the semis. LBJ won it, but Flying managed to get 3rd, so he moved on to the Finals.... and of course has LBJ Goat again. Ugh. Another $19 for the 3rd place though.
No flame in the finals (Flying got a flame in the quarters and semis), so not that optimistic: https://3d-racing.zed.run/live/DGtxIrD1 ... runs at 5:30pm PST.
Sucks to one of the best horses in the game when you're in the B class semis, but that's what happened.
In bigger news, tomorrow is the class realignment into the Elo-like system. I predict it will be a fail.
So was the Elo-like system a fail?
The short answer:
:yes2
Same exact problems as the previous system. It's necessary to tank in order to keep yourself at a class where you're competitive. In fact, it's even worse, because you ascend faster than you descend. So now you have a few days qualifying (or coming close to qualifying) for the tournaments, and you have to take a few days off tanking back down.
Imagine a game where you're running more races attempting to lose than ones attempting to win, and you're imagining ZED Run. What a fail. You also massively fuck yourself if you don't purposely tank your horse's first 10 "Discovery" races, as those play a major role in initially ranking you. I knew they were going to fuck this up.
On the bright side, it's literally a freeroll now. Paid racing is mostly dead, and the new way to generate $ there (albeit not big $) is to run the daily tournaments, which you qualify for via free racing. So there's no way you can lose, except for your time (and I guess also classing your horses up, thus declining their value a bit).
I finally had my first Finals cash today.
Sundea Suprema -- a Z8 Szabo Exclusive horse I bought unraced at just 0.04 ETH (bargain), definitely has lots of ability, but always fell short of making money. In fact, coming into today, Sundea had generated ZERO POINT ZERO dollars for me, despite nearly 200 races run. Again, all but 4 were free races, but still. It was so frustrating watching this horse just miss qualifying over and over, or barely qualifying and then losing the first round.
Well, today he squeaked into the B class of sprinters, at 340th place (384 make it). He then made 2nd place in the quarters, and moved on. He then barely finished 3rd in the semis, and moved on to the finals.
Up until now, I was like 0-for-6 in the Finals. Sundea did not flame (and in fact didn't flame in the semis), but he managed to finish an easy 2nd -- well behind first, well ahead of 3rd.
That's my first Finals cash. It was at the B class, but still feels nice.
Finally Sundea is on the board.
6am PDT on Thurs, 3/17 is the big breeding reset.
At that time:
1) All breeding counts reset, so you can breed all horses again, regardless of how recently they had foals
2) The entire breeding algorithm will change
The changes are described here: https://community.zed.run/2022/02/03...uct-roundup-2/
Basically, the main two takeaways are that breeding will become more predictable (fewer donks from good genes, fewer great horses springing from mediocre genes), and all non-genesis horses will see "decay" to where they slowly start to lose the ability to breed good foals.
Anyway, if you have available breedings (covers) right now, I would use them before 6am PT on Thursday. I'm going to create 4 new horses tonight, 3 of whom will be kids of Flying Stupidity.
Well, never mind.
Polygon is taking a complete shit, and ZED is in chaos.
I tried to transfer Flying Stupidity and Metallic Kat to my other stable for breeding, and they got stuck in a weird no-man's land. They're listed in my main stable, but I can't use them at all, and the error messages claim I don't own them.
Also, Flying & Catfish both cashed in the tournament today (Catfish just made the finals, in fact), and I got paid for none of it. We're talking over $200 due to me, and I got zero point zero. So apparently that problem is occurring, as well.
Oh, and any bought horses in the past 24 hours or so haven't transferred, either.
ZED, in their usual communication style, has posted nothing about this, instead only announcing the issues on Discord. Dreadful.
Anyway, I hope this shit gets resolved. If I either lose Flying (my best horse) because of this mess, or if they end up jacking $200+ from me, I'm going to be furious. I'm guessing the horse transfer will resolve, but the money... who knows.
Also, this killed my attempt to breed at the last minute before the reset. Now that's out the window, which is also annoying.
:fail2
First time ever that two of my horses ended up in the same playoff race.
Kind of a bad beat here, because that guarantees only one will move on, and if one cashes, that will only leave 2/11 spots open for the other to cash.
Sundea is the better of the two horses, as you can see by the flame. I just recently took Ice Cold AC out of mothballs and started racing him in tourneys.
I believe this happened because of the idiotic matching algorithm which seems to simply grab horses for the quarterfinals who had the same or similar qualifying points that day. Sundea and Ice Cold both had 0.8 (out of a possible max of 1), so they happened to end up together. This is also why you never want to finish at the very top in the qualifying round.
As mentioned before I've played manager simulation games online for decades. Zedrun just doesn't really scratch my itch as much as I wanted it to and here are some reasons.
1. Pay to play and pay to win combined. Most games that are pay to win are also free to play so at least you have a a low entry. Zedrun doesn't have this at all. You have to pay 100$ to get started and then you get crushed. They really need some sort of free to play model where new players can come in and experience the game without such a huge investment. Maybe a class B type thing with no prizes.
2. No server resets. Early adopters have such a huge advantage it feels like new players can never catch up. If they released new generations that did not have to compete with old ones this would help get around this. I understand with NFTs server wipes are not realistic but unless you introduce some sort of power creep regarding new horses this is a huge problem.
3. Lack of strategy. This is a big one here. You really can't do much at all. There is next to no feedback and it's not even clear how well visual representations mirror what is actually going on at the race levels engine (often visual representations in sim games are not 1-1 and it's better to analyze other stats). It just really feels like you have a good or bad horse and there is nothing you can do about it. This makes a large portion of horses completely useless. There is so much more they could add in terms of hiring jockey's, feedback on races, weather, health, etc etc. It's really just boring here and once again feels like the game is more so a predatory investment scheme. Right now the biggest strategy is figuring out how to sandbag.
What's sad here is that ZED has a lot of potential, a big and well-funded userbase, and still a lot of enthusiasm from players.Quote:
Originally Posted by BetCheckBet
So many people, myself included, really want it to be good and to succeed.
Somehow, despite a ton of new employees, they still make the same mistakes over and over again. This ranges from boneheaded missteps regarding new features (such as the recent breeding algorithm change fiasco, where they accidentally "degraded" new foals, and thus made them all look like donks), to slow/incorrect fixes for existing problems (such as the ongoing class system situation).
They are getting a TON of help and great suggestions from what is a very engaged and intelligent userbase. It's like free consulting work. They ignore most of it, for whatever reason.
Put me in charge of ZED for a month, and I could fix a lot of the issues and make the game a lot more fun. In fact, put Willie in charge, and we'd also see a massive improvement. Or put one of the other experienced ZED players in charge, and again, ZED would be vastly better. I just don't get it. Reminds me a bit of Galfond and his Run It Once poker site. The community wanted badly for him to succeed, gave him loads of free (and good) advice, yet he ignored all of it and the site failed. This is even worse, because Galfond never got significant traffic, whereas ZED already has the hardest part (traffic) solved.
With that said, I still enjoy the game. There's more strategy than you're giving it credit for (figuring out which horses are donks, which are great deals on the marketplace, and which is the best lengths to race/tank horses, for example). However, I will admit there is so much more which could be done, and none of this will really be possible if the primary reason to race is to intentionally lose -- which is the situation right now.
BUMP
Willie has already mostly checked out of the game, and I might be going into sleep mode with it fairly soon -- at least until the ZED Tokens come out.
They've completely fucked up the class system with this idiotic ELO rating system (as predicted), and paid racing is essentially dead.
This analyis shows that there's basically tough competition in all levels of paid racing now:
https://twitter.com/ShadyLaneZedge/s...18875068133376
Furthermore, the tournament situation has become irritating. It takes a ton of intentional losing in order to get your horse down to a class where he can compete well enough to qualify. Once I qualify, I'm losing every time for the past week -- even with my best horses like Flying Stupidity, Catfish, Sundea Suprema, and Projekt SEP.
I'm not giving up permanently because my stable itself does have some possible long term value (and short term -- I could sell at a nice profit now if I wanted to). This is because I have 8 genesis horses, 7 of which are unraced, and 3 of which are Finneys. My Flying Stupidity bred horse is also valuable, at least right now. I will probably get a fair number of ZED Token for all my genesis horses plus my 35-horse stable, most of which has been there for a long time.
Since buying my genesis horses, I have turned a slight profit on all other transactions. My racing profits plus a few horse sales have negated my expenditures in breeding/purchases. Thus, I have 27 additional horses beyond the 8 genesis ones, and gained a small amount of ETH in the process. However, a number of those 27 are donks and aren't worth that much.
I've had fun with the game, and it's been a nice distraction, but it's also been frustrating at times, and I'm sick of racing to lose every day.
It's also worth noting that the game would have been much less fun if I hadn't lucked into breeding Flying Stupidity early on, who then went on to breed Projekt SEP and the once-good (but no longer due to changes) Ptarmigan. So I probably would have ditched out ages ago if I hadn't lucked into that.
A lot of players prefer Pegaxy over Zed Run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogdZ6VhfY-s
nice todge how much ?
Dead wrong and incorrect here XfactorQuote:
Originally Posted by TheXFactor
I myself come from DFS/Poker, I never played that Vidiot box much. Myself. I'm not even at all I retested in video games. And probably won't be but competitive racing with some NFTs and, gambling and thata right in my wheel house I know . So that's why I caught interest in Zed myself, I'd never be interested in them kinda games at all. I never played video games but Madden pretty much either, so you're wrong. Some of us have actually no interest in these kinda games or flipping NFTs, especially a more grown up person now.
I never played the Vidiot box much myself but l, idk about you
I was listening to previous radio show in archives and Druff mentioned buying one or 2 horses for 1500 dollars. Haven't heard anything in a long time concerning zed, any update?
BUMP
So is this game dead?
Not completely, but it's on life support.
I really regret not cashing out when my stable was worth like $25k at its peak. Or at least selling some of my unused genesis horses to at least get my $5k investment back. I did sell some horses, and I was a net winner in racing, but that was offset by money I continued to spend. Basically I put about $5k into it initially, and then made money which I reinvested. Of course now the horses are all worth shit.
Most of the original ZED founders have bailed out, and now it's under control of others. The current CEO is named Nir Efrat, an Israeli guy who didn't join the company until November 2023.
Efrat had a Twitter Spaces today where he revealed plans to completely revamp ZED and essentially make much of people's existing time/investments worthless.
https://twitter.com/CMRidinDerby/sta...05187981082814
Quote:
If you missed the @zed_run spaces here is a recap below:
1) All old Zed horses will be replaced with new "Zed X" incentives/rewards
2) The game will be much more accessible than before by allowing people to be involved as spectators (and likely placing bets) on horses without owning a horse. The rewards will trickle back to the owners
3) $ZED will be a key part of the ownership loop
4) UI/UX will be completely revamped and Zed will be available on Mobile devices. Beta testing to start very soon.
5) Automated Racing: Horses will be put into either a racing pool or a breeding pool. If a horse is in the racing pool then you will have races scheduled automatically for you (perhaps breeding fee is the buy-in to the racing pool prizes?).
6) Leaderboards: Races will allow horses to move up and down a leaderboard (which suggests prizes for winning/great breeds)
7) Retirement: You will need to decide when to retire a horse. If it does well in racing, you can retire the horse, take the earnings and breed again. You cannot breed horses in the racing pool.
8) Breeding: Breeding will be a huge part of Zed X. You will need to learn the horses, see how they perform, what they're good at and what they should breed with. There will be auctions to have mares place bids on studs. Once the auction is completed, the newly bred horse will enter the racing pool and the bred horses will be retired.
9) Racing: Nick hinted at "optimizing" horses as they race. As a horse develops, you will be able to make adjustments to help optimize a horse. (this is only in concept but needs to be done later in the design path)
10) Series: Nick alluded to a "series" format similar to Fortnite. Horses will come in and out of the meta to keep the game fresh and changing so we always have new things to look forward to.
11) How do I get an "airdrop" for Zed X? By engaging starting TODAY. This is incorporated into the formula for what we're getting in the new product. It will be a mix of horse type, races entered and breeding fees, along with some kind of formula for length of horse ownership.
12) Wen? It happens "this year".
Basically it's a soft rugging, but we all saw this coming. They realize that they've failed over and over to bring the old crowd back to keep racing, so they're creating something entirely new, and rewarding activity going forward. It's like someone buying a busto online poker site, and requiring you to rake $X in order to cash you your existing funds.
So they're going to kill all the ZED horses, and then reissue new "ZEDx" horses. They're going to issue you those horses not based upon how active you are between now and the relaunch.
Listen to the part at 33:52 of the Spaces. A poor sap who spent $800k (!!) for Z1s is told that he may get almost NOTHING for his investment, but rather your new ZEDx horses and rewards will be airdropped with a "formula" which will at least partially based upon your present activity, and not just what you own. The CEO said there's a "good chance" people with valuable existing horses will get something good, but he refused to promise anything.
:what
Basically it looks like the CEO is paranoid that people will just cash out their new ZEDx horses rather than use them, so he doesn't want to reward those who aren't willing to keep playing. This is almost like a new company telling you that you got rugged by the last company, and you're not going to get much based upon past assets/activity. Ouch.
I do wonder if they will be legally exposed by killing existing assets and not replacing them with equivalent assets in the new game.
Don't want to rant about this too much because I imagine most of you don't care anymore.
But I just thought of something.
They should just decouple ZED from the whole NFT space, and make it a regular online game. In 2021 ZED was cool because it was one of the few NFTs with utility. The horses weren't just a piece of digital art to collect -- they were able to both produce money via racing and produce "offspring", which would in turn also be NFTs.
But there's no reason for it to be NFT-associated anymore because that craze is mostly dead.
So if they really want to kill the old horses and start a new game, all they really have to do is give everyone off-chain horses of similar power to their on-chain horses. Then start having the new races, rake the paid ones, and go from there.
Maybe they'll get lucky and start getting people interested who stayed away before because the crypto element was too tough/confusing.
As it stands, their plan has fail written all over it.
Playing some Zed.Run this morning first time in a long time, hopefully showing some Activity helps in time
I've got 10 horses from Z6 Szabo--> Z13 Legendry's (No Genesis or above Z6s)
Oh well game was fun while it lasted, ill still dibble and dabble its fun to me..
https://zedx.run/
:lol