Time

ITA Racing will be a mostly real-time game. Here's how it will work:

Every real-time day will equal 2 game weeks. At the end of each day, the game clock will start over and advance two weeks, and the horses will age, stats will change and events will take place based on the players' actions for the previous two weeks (the previous real-life day). Then the next set of actions will be available for the players.

This allows us to do several cool things. It allows us to have seasonal events. Since everyone's game is moving at the same speed, we can have events in which everyone can participate at the same time, such as special races, auctions (more on this later), breeding seasons.

This also means that everyone's horses are aging at the same rate. This means that there will be "crops" of horses, just like in real life. The same horses will be competing against one another throughout their careers (until of course they get old enough to enter non-age-restricted races). For example, in real life the Triple Crown races are for 3-year-olds only. You follow the same group of horses as they compete with each other for the right to enter the Kentucky Derby. Our game would have the same style of competition.

The auction system can also be real-time based this way. I don't mean like ebay, where you race against other bidders to get the highest bid in just before the timer runs out. That's not how horse auctions really work, and that's not how you figure out what the horse is really worth. In real life, you keep bidding until the price is such that no one wants to bid anymore. This is how our game will work. The bidding starts on a certain scheduled auction day (say the first two weeks of January in game time) and continues until no one bids on the horse for, say, 12 real life hours. The bidding could theoretically go on forever, but eventually the price will get high enough so that no one wants to bid anymore, just like in real life. You get what your horse is really worth.

What do you think about these features?