Unfortunately the three reviews given last were making it appear as if AVH is no fun at all. Although you may have to click on things multipule times, you usually have to do work in all games. Even the old horseland.com made you have to click 100 times just to enter one show. (Of course now they have a little flash game in which makes it a little more bareable).
Basically if you want to get anywhere in this game you have to work for it. It's not at all boring: you can open up chat at the same time and chat to other players while earning money.
You can write blogs: read other players' blogs and comments on them. AVH even allows you to write your own goals and whether or not you want to display them to the public.
Also it's not as if AVH can afford designer graphics - then again it doesn't exactly need them as it is a more textual-based game.
Another note is that the reason why most people are confused about the game as they sign up and just ask questions straight off the bat instead of reading the F.A.Q. There's also a helpline and a lot of nice people on AVH willing to help new people but really read the F.A.Q once and you'll know almost everything about the game.
Even if you don't want to level up and make the best horses, you can go on to make friends.
This game has some aspects which are unique to only AVH. The fact that you can belong to a different guild (out of four: Rider, Manufacturer, Equilibrium and Trainer) lets you pick and choose how you will gain money and what you can offer to others. Then again the option only is gained through leveling up. By the time you reach level 20 all guilds are open for you.
Leveling up is not as hard as some think, a little bit of determination and you'll level up in no time. I've only been playing this game for around four weeks and it is one of the top horse games I've played. (Far outranks Horseland.com seeing as you can choose to do much more than just enter shows and chat). AVH allows you to make tack, train horses, train other people to be better at a particular type of show, which trains from Dressage to Racing.
You can transfer about anything between people whether it be money from the goldsmith (the bank basically), to actual horses.
You can even write polls and take quizzes in this game.
Oh, and about the advertising thing - think about it logically. If you don't have that big of a gaming community do you really want them to looking at other horse sites?
In my opinion, I think the game works best for 13+ seeing as you would need some form of income: meaning that the user would need to be able to manage their money effectively.
