Season 30 is just around the corner, and it was time to release some of the updates that have been worked on recently. But before I get to that, I would like to inform everyone that it is my plan to get divisions as active as possible. Teams that have been inactive for a season will be demoted to division 3, without exception. So even those who have been inactive in division 1 will be relegated to the bottom. Active divisions is part of the fun, and being in an empty division is simply not providing the experience that was intended. All divisions in division 1 and 2 will also be filled up until there are 12 teams in each.
About a season after the introduction of the new development system, it was a good time to make some tweaks to this new system. Overall, the implementation of this system is considered to be a success but of course improvements are always possible. These changes have already been implemented on the brink of the new season.
Upgrade unlock
Before a part can be upgraded, the upgrade unlock progress bar needs to reach 100%. This depends on the number of kilometres. The number of kilometres that are required has been slightly reduced for the chassis, gearbox, and floor.
Also, from now on the more iterations are done, the faster a part will reach 100%.
Research progress
When a concept is discovered the team needs to reach 100% by researching the newly found concept. This is done by increasing progress. The progress would used to increase on a random number between 15% and 20%. This has now been fixed to 20% as the random could have been quite annoying.
Competition concept
Since the introduction of concepts, teams their concepts are shown on the development > competition page. It was felt that these concepts were visible way too early, actually even before the own team could upgrade the concept. So the number of kilometres required for the concept to appear on this page has been doubled.
Mounting parts
When mounting a part, the system looks at how many times the part has been mounted to the car already. Based on that and other factors the mechanic points cost is calculated. Before it used to be that when you develop a new iteration of a part, you would be back at 0 mountings. From now on, all mountings from previous iterations count for 50% which means that the cost for later iterations won't be back at 0 mountings, but 50% of all earlier iteration mountings. Due to this, the cost will increase after an iteration, but not by as much as before. Also, the more iterations are done, the less the costs will rise.
Others
Apart from changes to the development system, the person negotiations bug which pushed back the decision date all the time should also be fixed. The page no more loading issue should have been resolved as well. Notify me in the chat if you see it re-occurring again.
Coming up
Next up, and more accurately: soon, the scouting system and person rating system is going to be slightly changed. The scouting system currently is simply not that great to play with, and I feel that the 1, 3, 5 star system is just too complicated and simply not fun. Therefore I'll make some changes to the way ratings are shown, and will get rid of the 1, 3, 5 star system. The system will just always show either a question mark, or 5 stars. When the stars are in blue then the rating is not final, when the stars are in gold then the rating is final. How that rating is calculated will also be changed, but more on that later.
Also coming in an update soon is that parts are still as brand new if they've been in a crash or collision. This should hopefully be fixed before the first race of the next season.
