Forum topic: Development concepts

As some of you may know, an update of the current development system is being developed (drum roll) on the beta right now. This topic can be used to raise issues or ask questions.

This is the changelog as of 13/07/2021:
* General, NEW: New layout
* General, FIXED: Members without a team can now visit normal pages, but no longer team pages.
* General, FIXED: Much more pages are correctly handled by the no team checker.
* Index, NEW: Changed design.
* Career, NEW: Changed design to tabbed layout.
* General, FIXED: Several items which shouldn't be shown to managers who have no team, are no longer shown.
* Team, NEW: When starting a team, members now have the option to automatically set up the team.
* Team, NEW: When starting a team, members now have the option to automatically choose a division.
* Development, NEW: When the first chassis of the season is finished and no cars have been created, the system will automatically create 2 cars.
* Team, FIXED: Team founded message was no longer shown.
* Chat, CHANGED: Performance optimization which should case the page to load faster.
* Racescript, CHANGED: An extra check is performed after qualifying to make sure that the drivers who qualified still belong to their team.
* Press, CHANGED: Message is now also required.
* Suppliers, CHANGED: All logos have the same size now.
* Sponsors, CHANGED: All logos have the same size now.
* Team, CHANGED: Team worth is now also shown for private teams.
* Team, CHANGED: Team worth is rounded.
* Racescript, CHANGED: Tyre wear values tweaked
* Parts, CHANGED: Grip values for hard and medium tyres are now a percentage of under 100%, instead of above as before. Therefore the grip value of the soft tyre will always be the highest.
* Racescript, FIXED: Tyres stay in their temperature and stress levels even after returning to the pits.
* Racescript, CHANGED: Tyre wear is now influenced differently for wear and stress than before when it was the same.
* Drivers: CHANGED: Feedback message is now showing when trying to change coach on Monday and Tuesday.
* Development, FIXED: Staff rating was incorrectly calculated as originally intended.
* Production, FIXED: Staff rating was incorrectly calculated as originally intended.
* Staff, FIXED: Staff rating was incorrectly calculated as originally intended.
* Politics, CHANGED: Junior teams can't vote any longer in politics.
* Development, CHANGED: Junior teams can not research concepts.
* Help, NEW: Help system moved to wiki.
* Finances, NEW: Cash cost.
* Finances, NEW: Income tax.
* Development, NEW: New development upgrade system.
* Session, NEW: Program: Car development testing: improves the unlock of progress of development
* Team, NEW: Teams can now declare bankruptcy.
* Session, NEW: Top 3 and random 3 finishers have 6 random parts checked for legality.
* Session, NEW: Race overview page.
* Session, NEW: Race insights.
* Development, NEW: Overview page
* Racescript, FIXED: Stoppage of script due to deploying of safety car.
* Development, CHANGED: Tweaked points required to develop parts.
* Car, CHANGED: Tweaked values of handling/speed/cornering.

Added 13/08/2021
* Cars, NEW: New layout.
* Development, CHANGED: Modifiers only change over time.
* Racescript, CHANGED: New calculation method.
* Desk, NEW: Feedback that the member is not in a division.
* Session, NEW: Feedback that the member is not in a division.
* Development, CHANGED: Finetune was not correctly calculated, and has now more weight to the rating of a part.
* Person contract, CHANGED: Expiration length now has a maximum of 7 days. Which means that every 7 days a new requirement calculation is done.
* Person contract, NEW: Whether a person is interested in negotiations is now set once and not recalculated all the time. This is split between the current team and the non-current team.
* Person, CHANGED: Power position formula re-created from scratch.
* Person, NEW: Power position is now influenced by the current team. Teams in higher divisions will get a lower power position compared to lower division teams.
* Person, FIXED: Negotiations with a person who was not yet negotiating would always fail.
* Person, FIXED: Power position was not always correctly calculated (in case the person was not part of your team).
* Person, CHANGED: Cap on difference between expected wage and market wage used to be 5, this is now 3.
* Person, CHANGED: Maximum contract length is now 3 seasons + 2 options.

Added 20/09/2021
* Person, CHANGED: Reduced the effect of motivation on a skill rating.
* Person, CHANGED: Reduced the effect of synergy and discipline on skills by 1/3rd.
* Person, NEW: Concept insights skill for designers.
* Person, NEW: Maximum car setup skill for mechanics.
* Session, NEW: The car setup is now a maximum of either the chassis maximum car setup (calculated by number of km's completed) & maximum mechanic setup rating.
* Cars, NEW: Mounting parts costs mechanic points. These can go negative. The cost depends on the part type, the mechanic mount efficiency stat, and how many times a part has been mounted already.

Added 28/09/2021
* Scouting, NEW: Scouting reports are now instant and are no longer done over time. Generating a scout report costs points which is based on the job type of the person, their age, and their ranking. Points are generated each hour and are based on the professionalism stat of the scout team.
* Scouting, CHANGED: Updated design of the page.
* Finances, CHANGED: Debt interest percentage reduced from 6% to 4%.
* Team, NEW: Tax optimization specialization: reduces each tax tier rate by 15%.
* Session, CHANGED: Youth cars and parts are now deleted after each race.
* Race, FIXED: Several car mounting issues for youth and guest races.

Added 23/11/2021
* Scouting, NEW: 3 random persons are put forward to the manager.
* Strategy, NEW: New strategy page.
* Person, FIXED: Try to break contract box did not appear.
* Coach, FIXED: Assigning a coach could throw an error.
* Coach, FIXED: Mondays and Tuesdays would never allow unassign coach, even in non-race weeks.
* General, NEW: Google Analytics events.
* Team, CHANGED: Worth calculation formula. Balance, loans and investments are now also included. Division modifier reduced.
* Team, CHANGED: Financial information is now available for everyone to see, even for those who have not yet invested in a team.
* Team, CHANGED: The variance of the share price (when many shares are available) has been drastically lowered. From 75% to 25% of the share price when all shares are available. The maximum (when 0 shares are available) is still 150% of the share price.

Jean Spiteri had the following questions:

In the Detailed timings is it possible that when timings of a driver are open they can get closed by reclicking the driver?

Is that expected to happen though?

In the Research page > Concept information, what does exactly the Remaining concepts number show?

How many undiscovered concepts there still are according to the head designer.

Trying to develop a fuel tank using V5 fuel tank S27 concept - the tank size field has the following error beside it "Warning: A non-numeric value encountered

I'll check it out.

While developing a part, when a stat reaches the Potential maximum, the Improved rating becomes 0%. Is that correct or should the rating remain at the maximum? The same happens with weight - it becomes 0 kg. Not sure if the 0 is actually reachable.

The rating should obviously stay at its maximum. With which part did you have this?

Trying to cancel a queued development gives a blank php_my_development page and the project remains in the queue.

I'll check it out.

Will new produced parts show their ratings in the Cars page after production or will they still need to run a number of laps before the ratings are revealed?

The ratings of the parts are known, so it would be silly to hide those. But the characteristics of the car may still be hidden. Up for decision still though.

The Detailed timings are showing lap times before they are completed.

Thanks, I'll definitely check that out.

In the Updates page, the Session and Team panes scroll together. Is that correct?

No, I don't have this behaviour.

* Finances: Cash cost.

What's a cash cost?

* Finances: Income tax.

Is this a way to make teams earn less money? Because sponsors aren't working as intended.... This week I've made 1M less than what I've got in my sponsors...

* Session: Top 3 and random 3 finishers have 6 random parts checked for legality.

How do we know if a part is illegal? Or rather, what makes it illegal?

* Development: New development upgrade system.

What will change? Do we need to play in the beta to know these changes?

* Development: Tweaked points required to develop parts.

Maybe instead of the research level increasing slowly overtime and having no other way of increasing maybe we could also spend design points to raise the research lvl cap as well

What's a cash cost?

It costs companies money to keep cash in hand. Therefore there's a cash cost that you need to pay (percentage) of the remaining cash in balance at the end of the week. This is introduced to prevent teams from hoarding money (we are talking billions here in Pitwall).

Is this a way to make teams earn less money? Because sponsors aren't working as intended.... This week I've made 1M less than what I've got in my sponsors...

Not necessarily. Also done for reasons as mentioned above. The sponsors thing is unrelated. I have more things coming up for the beta (such as participation fees) to make everyone slightly less dependant on sponsors.

How do we know if a part is illegal? Or rather, what makes it illegal?

It is clearly indicated next to the concept (parts are created from concepts) if it's illegal. Each concept has a certain chance for it to be deemed illegal. Teams can make a vote in the politics section for the governing body to take a stance on whether the concept is illegal or not. This is completely automatic, so no human interaction on admin side. If a concept is deemed illegal, then it's banned for use in the race.

What will change? Do we need to play in the beta to know these changes?

There's still a lot for me to type it on, and I don't have time for it right now. But yes, I would recommend to play the beta to be up to date. In general: concepts are introduced and you need to spend developer points to research and discover concepts. Each concept has a certain maximum, which increases until it plateaus at a certain season. Concepts are valid for a certain amount of seasons, after which new ones are introduced. Basically I wanted people to make a design choice, rather than just full out pumping the same thing all the time.
The beta is down at the moment, but hopefully it should be back sometime tomorrow.

Maybe instead of the research level increasing slowly overtime and having no other way of increasing maybe we could also spend design points to raise the research lvl cap as well

There's a lot of changes coming, but increasing maximum level modifiers is not something that is going to happen. That would change the game into requiring people to be online as much as possible not to reach their dev cap.

Inflation on wages. Some staff demands are now asking ranges up to 10m+

The game doesn't allow more than 7 digits in the box so it will at some point become impossible not just financially but to physically sign certain high end staff or drivers.

Dan, that is something still on my todo list for the beta. Change are coming so that demands are specific to a team which will allow me to play with the demands much more. Persons would then ask much bigger demands to a division 3 team (or refuse for a while) for example.
Also, I will change the way they want to negotiate. They will clearly announce when they’re ready to negotiate, and that won’t change for the rest of the contract term.

It costs companies money to keep cash in hand. Therefore there's a cash cost that you need to pay (percentage) of the remaining cash in balance at the end of the week. This is introduced to prevent teams from hoarding money (we are talking billions here in Pitwall).

It will also affect teams trying to save for instance to a HQ5 using "Plan A" instead of "Plan B" or similar, unless there is a limit on when this cost would kick in (eg when bank balance reaches 50 million). If cash cost kicks in directly, it will essentially add an interest rate for Plan A.

Some teams may save a buffer (bankruptcy should be avoided, but big buffers also unrealistic...) or plan for a major push in three seasons when HQ5 has finished building...

@ Tommy: good point. IMO it would be a good idea to make the cash cost progressive - not flat. So e.g. 0% up to 20m, then 3% up to 50m etc.
So it is possible to have a buffer for free, but hoarding 500m will be very expensive.

@ Feedback/BETA: is it possible to change the "find exploit" on a concept to the same way that "find concept" is handled - enter amount of points, you find it or not. Also a counter that tracks the points you wasted already. Clicking the find exploit button for 5 times in a row very tedious (especially because the page reloads and you have to scroll down again).

Is the order you discover concepts fixed? Or is that random, so you might find the best concept right away? If it's fixed, I'd suggest making it random so managers don't know if it's worth continuing spending points.

My design team, despite all designers being assigned, has 0-10% rating in every category (design team rating, concept insights, research rating, development rating). Is this not implemented yet?