Would there be any way/any worth in revamping claiming so you could select maybe 1-3 horses to claim? The first horse you put a claim on would be the one the system put you in for, but if the other horses on your list were not claimed by anyone else and you lost the flip for your top horse, the claim would put you in for the other horses. I’m not sure how it would code or if it’s worth the time, but it seems like there are a lot of nice horses at FF going unclaimed because there are other horses drawing all the attention (and since so many horses at FF are inactive because there are just so many, it’s messing with their sire/dam Breed Rankings).
Or would there even be a way of putting a tally box on the horses in claiming races so that stables could decide if it was worth putting in for their favorite or instead should chose to put in for their second favorite because no one else wanted it at that point. IE: There are 10 claims on Super-sparkly Horse X, 2 claims on Semi-sparkly Horse Y, so I would put it in on horse Y instead on horse X because I have better odds walking away with a horse.
Plus the old codes makes me depressed. (Not actually, but I do struggle to remember how it works, given that it was mostly written 15+ years ago.)
Regarding your ideas, I like the idea of submitting ranked claims and having the option to fallback to your 2nd/3rd choices if you don’t get your first choice. Not so crazy about showing that X people have put in claims for horse Y, as part of the point of claiming (when I first wrote it anyway) was that you wouldn’t know which horse you had a good chance of getting. I’m open to being persuaded if people have good arguments for why this might happen though.
I like the idea of being able to make a 2nd and 3rd choice in case your first choice is unsuccessful. I guess one danger to that would be making sure that, if you were successful with one claim, the code would cancel your other claims so that you wouldn’t potentially end up with 3 successful claims. Or do you think you’d allow that?
As for the other idea, if we’re able to make a 2nd or 3rd choice, I don’t think it would be necessary. If there is one horse that many people want to put a claim on, it would probably be because it was heads above all the others so it may not affect our choices.
I really like the idea of being able to put in 1-3 claims. Perhaps restrict it to one claim per race, 3 per race day? I know I’ve definitely run into the problem of seeing several horses I like but having to claim just one, and usually I opt for the 2nd/3rd choice because I know my first choice is probably everyone else’s favorite as well! Moving more horses out of FF is also a nice idea.
Unfortunately I don’t have anything concrete to add to the discussion.
(Not actually, but I do struggle to remember how it works, given that it was mostly written 15+ years ago.)