Every week, we will be selecting a random pet's blog from the Pet Zone. Only up-to-date blogs will apply for this.

This week, the award goes to Pepper, who is all decked out for the holidays! -- (read the blog to find out more)

For having an up-to-date blog with cute pictures, they have earned their owner poetrist a free account upgrade! Congrats!

Make sure you don't forget to put your real life pet images in the Pet Zoneand ADD/keep UPDATED BLOGS to your pet images, so you have a chance to win!

Who knows, they might win the next weekly Pet Zone contest.

2021

Featured Lythian

This month's Featured Lythian is...

SY971

Holly
Owned by: BattiDanni
Congratulations!

Gifting Gacha Increased Rates

Items with increased rates in this month's Gifting Gacha are:

Cat's Eye Marble

Empty Jar

Harb

Haunted Pumpkin

Wamnut

Gold FAKER

New Monthly Contest

A new monthly contest has begun. You can read more on the Monthly Contest: Written Art page!

Congratulations to the winner of last month's Monthly Contest!

Submission by: hydrabones

Featured Lythian

This month's Featured Lythian is...

SY971

Holly
Owned by: BattiDanni
Congratulations!

Gifting Gacha Increased Rates

Items with increased rates in this month's Gifting Gacha are:

Cat's Eye Marble

Empty Jar

Harb

Haunted Pumpkin

Wamnut

Gold FAKER

New Monthly Contest

A new monthly contest has begun. You can read more on the Monthly Contest: Written Art page!

Congratulations to the winner of last month's Monthly Contest!

Submission by: hydrabones

It's time to head over to Miles Magic Box and see if you can figure out which item is depicted by the artistic rendering. If you do before next week, you'll win a cool prize!

While taking a relaxing sleigh ride through the fresh fallen snow, admiring winters wonderland, we came to a sudden halt!
Our eyes opened wide, dancing in delight, we snuck between trees, to have a closer look.
It was a magical snowscape created by MCR. Making this player todays snowscape winner!

CONGRATS! This player has won a FESTIVE TROPHY for their profile and a FREE ACCOUNT UPGRADE!

Sign up here for your chance to win tomorrow!

The bait has been hooked, fishing line cast and we have caught Arada for this weeks aquarium contest winner! ....Congrats!

¢¢Remember, make sure you feed and care for your fish/tank and collect your nessies bonus daily, if you want a chance to win next week!

What better way to start off the new year than to smash open a Pinata? Starting today, all NPC shops (except for the Snow Jar Igloo and Golden Touch) will be restocking all five of the new 2021 Pinatas until January 22nd, 23:59:59 IcePets time. You can also receive these Pinatas as rewards for quests -- check out your Quest Rewards Books for more information. The year ahead is full of surprises, and you're sure to be pleasantly surprised when you crack open these Pinatas!



Also, some New Years Items from previous years are making their return! Keep an eye out for the Firework Ducky, New Years Hat, New Years Eve Rocket Stamp, Fireworks Earrings, New Years Necklace, and Firework Ice Cube as you browse their respective shops. Like the Pinatas, these will all be restocking until January 22nd, 23:59:59 IcePets time and can also be obtained through quest rewards until then.

What a year 2020 was! As we look towards the future and kickstarting 2021, we wanted to lay out some plans for you so we can all be excited together about what's to come! 

After evaluating Eqcetera¢s status compared to other games, we¢ve decided that it is classified as Early Beta. This means that existing features are still quite volatile in that they could change without notice. Please know that all changes are in line with our vision of the game. We take months to plan a single feature and a great deal of thought goes into every change. While changes may seem disruptive individually, we¢re building towards a greater and more complete experience of gameplay, and we¢ve valued your patience and enthusiasm up to this point. Thank you so much!

Looking into 2021, we see Eqcetera coming out of Beta in August. For context, most games are in Beta for several years with a team as small as ours! This gives us about 8 months to finish up game features, work out all the kinks, and generally deliver a more rounded product for you to play and enjoy. During V2, we made a lot of changes in the heart of the gameplay that expanded what we could plan. The move to V3 has expanded our possibilities even further by providing a stable codebase, more cutting edge technology used in the code, and streamlined code design. These changes mean we can add some really cool new features that would¢ve been impossible on V2¢s codebase ¢ more on these in a sec.

As a reminder, while we are in Beta, we will not be accepting any new suggestions or feature requests. This isn¢t actually a change; we¢ve been doing this since we moved to V3! Instead, we will be reviewing suggested tweaks to current features that could help improve gameplay but anything outside of this will be planned for after we move out of Beta. 

What does moving out of Beta mean? It means that we will not make any more drastic changes to existing features, other than QoL updates. We will be opening up player suggestions again and only adding new features. It also means that we¢ll start advertising on social media and other channels to increase our reach and grow our playerbase. 

Want to see how we will progress out of Beta? Check out our 2021 Roadmap to see details for each month! This is definitely worth a look ¢ some of the new features are super-popular requests we¢ve been getting for a long time and are thrilled to be able to implement in the coming year!

[ Link to the Roadmap page ]

For 2021, we will continue our goal of making horses more unique as individuals while also adding features to improve gameplay and help the economy. Since we¢re moving to a once per month dev update schedule (more on that below), we will have a monthly focus. You can view each month¢s focus on the 2021 Roadmap page! We decided to create a separate page so that it can be referenced throughout the year. Note that it¢s difficult to plan a full year ahead and when we dive into 2021, we could see changes to this roadmap. If this happens, we will keep you updated!

Some highlights include:

• Quests

• Exploration

• Player and Horse Careers

• Updates and additions to Associations & Clubs

• Eggs & Straws (woo!)

• A few features that haven¢t been revealed yet!

The roadmap does not include art updates or new breeds ¢ though we have the next year planned for those, too. °

Looking at 2021, most of the changes left to be added to Eqcetera are quite large. This means it will take more development and testing time than our previous schedule accounts for. Thus, we will be moving our development updates to once per month. This does not mean that smaller updates can¢t happen in between such as bug fixes, updates, and smaller tweaks. However, for the large game-changing updates, we need more time.

Development updates will not be scheduled on the calendar since large features require lots of testing, fixes, and code time. However, we do aim to keep on the once a month update schedule. 

At this point in time, we will also be moving our art updates to once per month. This allows us to better budget for art and potentially get a stockpile of art going so if Solo ever needs a break, it will be possible in the future. If revenue for the game picks up this year, we will likely move back to a more frequent art schedule.

As a reminder, to ring in the new year together, we are bringing back a player favorite, BINGO! We will be hosting a few rounds of BINGO on our Discord on January 2nd at 7 pm EST/Gametime. A round of BINGO will also be held in the forum for those without Discord on January 2nd at 5 pm EST/Gametime. Our BINGO theme revolves around everything we completed in 2020. :)

Random Knowledge Post your ID with your entry or it will not count. Reply to this post with a piece of random / useless knowledge you have. It can be about anything, owls, trucks, astronomy, your choice! Keep it pg-13. Ends: 6:50 AM (you get 45 mins) Prize: 10 or more winners will be randomly selected to receive a winter doodlecorn of choice. When times up, I will staff only this so that I can quickly nab winners without needing to sort through valid time entries.

Hello, hello! Sadi here to toss out a quick update on the FoF stuff. I JUST tossed the FoF links to staff to get their votes in for winners. There's 15+ contests to judge, many of which will take time to go through. So, I am giving them two weeks to get their votes in. Please allow for that amount of time to pass before PMing me to get any information regarding winners. I'll be rolling out winners and credits together, so please keep an eye out for that. Thank you everyone who partook! Many of the contests reached the boosted prizes stage, y'all did great. :) Have a fantastic night! Sadi.

Congratulations to the following winners of Luck of the Draw, winning $100,000 PB :
ditzymae
BERKSHIRE
WindHallow
WindHallow
BERKSHIRE

If you want to be a winner next time, check out the Luck of the Draw - Available at the House of Luck in Badgeria!

Today's winning Mega Money Madness number is: 5229
Congratulations to the following player for winning the $279770 PB Jackpot

Buliwyf

If you want to be a winner next time, check out the Mega Money Madness under the GAMES icon.

While taking a relaxing sleigh ride through the fresh fallen snow, admiring winters wonderland, we came to a sudden halt!
Our eyes opened wide, dancing in delight, we snuck between trees, to have a closer look.
It was a magical snowscape created by gavriela. Making this player todays snowscape winner!

CONGRATS! This player has won a FESTIVE TROPHY for their profile and a FREE ACCOUNT UPGRADE!

Sign up here for your chance to win tomorrow!