The Big Lottery has ended

Today, 1st April 2011, the Big Lottery has finally ended and in typical Howrse fashion, it finished at a different time than they had advertised. Ah well, never mind. The lottery has been hugely successful and popular with thousands of players entering each of the 8 daily draws. In fact it was so popular in the first few days that Howrse had to change the rules to stop massive amounts of prizes being handed out as well as to prevent cheating.

Originally you could exchange tickets with a friend 3 times during the lifetime of the lottery, but this meant enormous amounts of prizes were appearing in people's inventorys, which would have possibly undermined the game. For example on one draw, I won 840 apples! So Howrse changed the rules so that you could only exchange tickets with a friend once. A number of players had cheated by setting up multi-accounts and this was another reason for the rule change. Howrse also changed a rule which meant you could not take part in the lottery if your account was registered after the start of the competition. Smart move, we thought.

So players (including myself and LucyLou) were frantically sending and receiving friend requests in order to swap tickets. This became very confusing and it was hard to keep track of who had sent tickets and who hadn't. Howrse even set up a friend-making forum to make it easier for players to get large numbers of friends. Players soon realised that by deleting friends as soon as a ticket exchange had been completed meant you could get round the '10 friend requests per day' rule. A bit naughty but very useful.

So thousand of entrants for each draw and thousands of prizes awarded. Howrse added Nyx and Posiedon's packs to the items you could win, after the rule change. So players were also winning apples, Laurels, Eolus' Winds, Seahorses, Made to Measure Saddles, HoP's and of course bigger prizes such as Ploutos' Parchaments, Hermes' Winged Staffs and of course, Balios' - the new Divine horse.

I was very lucky. No I didn't win a Balios but I did win 7 Parchments and a Hermes' Winged Staff. Now LucyLou and I checked a large number of Balios winners and found that most of them had been registered on the game less than 300 days. So it appears that Howrse were possibly trying to prove that newer players have an equal chance of owning a Divine, by allowing more, less established players to win this fabulous new horse. Just our opinion of course.

And after several days of the Big Lottery, something totally unsurprising happened. Howrse started offering Balios' in HoP's. Well who'd have thought? We had to laugh when we saw this as the day the lottery started it was 100% certain that the new Divine would soon be available in Horns of Plenty - which you need to buy with passes of course. Oh well, that's how Owlient make their money as a business, so fair play to them. It was just so predictable it made us smile. We wouldn't be surprised to see that you can get one if you buy 30 passes. We shall see.

So, the Big Lottery was a success and an enormous amount of players took part. We'd love to know what you thought and if you'd like to see another one in the future. And if you were lucky enough to win a Balios - then share your good news with us.

Now, time to start saving for those passes....!

Patsy