Interseting stuff and absolutely it's demoralizing. My question is, are there other games have horse training? I ask because maybe there are good horse leveling systems out there where inspiration can be drawn from. I feel like mount training is very rare to see in games. I think in Ultima Online and this really shows my age and pushes my memory but... I think there weren't levels to horses where you could level but instead your horse whispering mastery or whatever it was called determined what you could tame. That feature is kinda neat in its own way because if that were translated to BDO, you could tame higher level horses based on your mastery. That was sorta the case before the recent changes though. But that's the only instance I know where some sort of training level was used for taming mounts in an mmorpg.

This game has a placeholder for a horse training profession, overall. And then, followed up with having very dumb horses.

So, let's break that down a bit:

1. We no longer have our profession affecting the process of taming horses. We no longer have our mastery affect the odds for the new foals - imperials from breeding or dream/mythical from awakening. The whole horse coat system is utterly useless as well. Also, chance for a horse to learn a skill on level up is a bad joke too. At M17, I trained 2 T9s that ended up with ~20 skills, having used ~ 4 tokens for each. They were also potatoes, stats-wise, worse than those of my guildies who are barely pushing Artisan levels.

2. We don't train horses. We get same special rewards if the mount is level 15 or lvl 30. We don't train their skill either, cus there's no xp benefit in that, nor any silver gain.

3. Finally, to the topic at hand, the activity of afk training horses is... dumb. I didn't play the game today. 'Cause event. 'Cause a lousy 4xT6 wagon needs 3 days to get them all to lvl 30 for the highest chance to get an imperial steed. Which steed is still a myth, because my mastery doesn't help. I didn't join boss trains, I didn't grind, I didn't try out the new events. I was afk. Overall, I had a blast in BDO. Most-impr-oved-game. 

Will planting a treadmill in the manor change any of the above? Will it make Horse Training a profession? Give it meaning? Will it make you feel like you're training horses, by safely afking in your manor - still susceptible to desyncs, disconnects, hell! maybe even to horses falling through the floor as they tend to for a good while now?

It's why I'd like for us to think a bit bigger than just "take the problem out of sight". And the bare minimum PA could do is to revise the way we train the damn mutts (as described before). Maybe allow them to use their Fore Chop and Hind Kick skills when attacked by mobs... but now I guess I'm asking too much :)

When you put it that way, horse training does seem rather pointless. But what do other games do for horse training is what I really want to know. I'm not talking about WoW of FF14 because they don't have that feature. I mean single player games or MMOs that do support this. What is there available which could make horse training in BDO an enjoyable and rewarding experience?

I don't know if we would have desync issues with horse treadmills though because it would basically be like a striking dummy. You would be on the side of the treadmill while the horse would be running on the treadmill. Whether the horse falls through the ground or not it wouldn't make a difference because it's not you but a "dummy". Perhaps treadmills isn't the future of horse training but if they don't want to change how we train horses then I think that treadmills remain a fantastic idea. Although I'm rooting for a better horse training system especially now that electricity is more epensive than ever. Who really wants to AFK any game activity? I hear in EU electric bills can easily be over $700 per month in some places!

At the very least XP when not AFKing should be worth its effort in gold. Why is it the same XP when you ride around manually than it is AFK? That's not right. Any effort the player makes be it fishing, horse training, sailing, running around by foot, etc... It should always be rewarded more than AFK and not by a decimal amount, by a significant amount. I think that's part of the core problem here.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has a very simple system.  As you level up, you can level up your riding ability: speeders and other mounts.  The mounts don't really exist on their own, they're just inventory items that look cool when you get on them, and disappear when you dismount.  That's how it was/is in Neverwinter (haven't played it in 6 years, and from what I've heard, it has changed so much that I'm glad I haven't gone back) so it must be a BioWare thing.  Their speed is only affected by the mount level you have.  Super simple.  No AFK riding.  No immersion either.  Right now, BDO exists between pathetic and great in this regard.

..........

In every regard, anymore, I'm forced to admit.......

Even so, I'm still rooting for BDO to eventually become the most improved (for real) game of the year!

That's what would make the treadmill a bad idea overall, imo, as it would just reward an underwhelming and unrewarding activity with more dev time and, as such, more cost for PA that could be spent on creating a better system (with a few tweaks here and there)...

.... and because of that too! :)

Why draw inspiration from other games, though? I mean, BDO has almost all it needs for the profession to shine. Mount xp, mount skill xp, skill training mini...*ugh!*... game. All we'd need is a way to move the activity from the realm of "don't bother with the game for 72 hours while training" to a more enjoyable, hands-on approach. 

I'll copy it again here:

1. Gut the amount of both xp needed to level up all the horses and the xp gained from it to ~20% of their current values. This way, you can just get your horse up by training the skills on it or by running around, doing your thing throughout your playtime. Hah! If pushing for Training levels, just running back and forth between pastures and stables will do.

2. Redistribute the remaining 80% of the xp you'd get from leveling the horse to all the skills the horse would need the annoying minigame to learn. Make some of the skills that are now learned at 100% also learnable via minigames - like the leaps. But not evenly. Sprint should get shafted, since you can train your dog to keep 2 buttons pressed.

3. While at it, award more silver on sale for the skills that actually need active training, if they've been maxed. Skills that can be trained but weren't brought to 50% at least shouldn't add to the value of the horse and, between 50% and 99% they'd be valued at 25-50%.

As mentioned in my initial post, I think that it's not a big loss if your mount would only have 10 skills out of 15, for example, when selling it. We might lose a bit on the xp part, but if the training is faster and feels more rewarding, it's already a win, since we can train more in the same time, if we so choose and, if the value of the horse increases with the skills being 100%, that's even better (I'm not in favor of the horse's value to remain the same as it is now and just have it redistributed across learned skills, btw).

All in all, the horses and their trainers will still be around, only not bumping into each other in every safe zone... maybe stumbling over each other while failing the minigame, here and there. With the incentive to train the skill and the decreased time/distance needed to max out a horse, we'll not afk that much. But now that I think about it...

4. If we could give the manor more purpose, we could get a tiny stable object for that place. With a stable keeper. Which would handle the horse that is out, feeding it while inside the manor. The stable would come with a tiny steampunk treadmill, on which you could set your horse to train, for a fee (in silver, for 50% of the skill's value or for 50% of the added value to the horse, dunno). And the horse would run on its own there, while you're inside the manor. I guess it would be too much to ask to also be able to ride it on the treadmill.

We'd have an interaction menu, with the manor's stable keeper, then:
Bring mount out for training - similar to courser training, but with the difference that you'd actually have the mount taken on the treadmill - which will enable the following two option:

* Train mount's level - and from here, the mount will a start trotting animation. 20% of the xp gain compared to normal riding (amount of xp gained calculated with mount speed and time passed). 50% of the silver value for the increase in level(s). If there was no level increase, it'll still be rounded up to 1 level.

* Train mount's skill - 2 times longer than the pearl item skill train token to complete, 50% of the silver value of the learned skill or of a percentange of it, if the skill was not completely learned in the time the mount was training. 

* Third option would be to just mount the mount on the treadmill and just train the beast yourself. Although, with negative the outcome of the minigame, you'd need a few cushions for it. And maybe a bit of banter from the stable keeper, laughing at you each time you fail.

Return mount to the stable - will a) take the mount away from the treadmill and place it in the stable if no training was done by the stable keeper. And b) deduct the appropriate amount of silver from the player and take the mount away from the treadmill, placing it in the stable. If the player has no silver, the stable keeper would issue an alert about he's not working for your gratitude and refuse to release the mount back to the stable.

Something like that, maybe?

I'm happy with the world being "emptier" if it means less idiots running their horses around on tiny paths in towns.  This does not make the game more immersive, it makes it look more ridiculous.

Well, I'm sure the idiots wouldn't run them there if the other idiots wouldn't kill them outside of towns. Or, even better, if training a horse wouldn't mean cicling for 30 hours with literally no input on their part.