Pitwall news

Ever since the introduction of the market wages there has been no change to the system to let it evolve automatically. Now I've taken the time to analyse the wages (how high they are, etc.) and I've decided to make some changes in this area as there were situations that could completely undermine the system. Sometimes some teams would offer ridiculous amounts, and that completely skewed the expectancy of the person. This has now been changed so that if the market wage is a certain times (not revealing how much, but it's a really low number) higher than what the person is expecting, the market wage will be set to that expected wage multiplied by that same multiplier as before (which I'm not revealing). Long story short: if the market wage is much higher than what the person expects, the market wage will be set at the maximum that the person will expect.
This change has been introduced with immediate effect. Meaning that any new negotiations that are started -with someone who is not negotiating yet and who hasn't been approached recently- are using this new system.
This change will reduce the contract wages by quite a lot, so it might be beneficial to give your personnel new contracts.

I have spoken recently on the forum or the chat that there's going to be an update to the negotiations in Pitwall, but this was not what I was talking about. That is a different update. It will change the way negotiations are done, not the technical side of the negotiations.

Further more there are a couple of other things in the pipeline that are being worked on simultaneously, but it's too early to give details about that. The first thing that will be introduced of that will be the updated development system that will be changed a bit. That will also receive some GUI updates so that there's a better overview for all the parts, and all the running projects.

As I announced earlier I would be making some changes to the game to make it more transparent. One of the things that I had in mind was to display how efficient your designers are (which is excluding the number of assigned designers to a project).
This information is now displayed on the top of the development page.

While implementing these changes, I also made some changes to this formula as it was too similar for most teams (almost nobody was going slower than the optimal rate). I've changed the multipliers of the formula a bit, but also introduced discipline and synergy as variables in the formula. This means that the efficiency will be much harder to keep up.
The formula is also influenced by the short term focus (mostly) and also by the fast designers specialty. If the specialty is not enabled, then it will never be possible to reach the highest level.

These changes will slow down project development a little bit, but that's something that I had planned as well as I felt it was starting to get too much.

Let the battles of the pencils begin! The press release feature that was loved in Pitwall 1 and has been requested a lot to be returned has finally returned to Pitwall.

Pitwall Supporters can now write a press release statement again from the press page. The press statement will be shown in the normal newspaper as well, but only the team and division ranking will be used to calculate how important the item is.

There has been a change compared to how this feature was in PW1, as now there's no more sponsor bonus when releasing a statement. This is purely cosmetic to improve the community feeling and, more importantly, to scare the competition.

For a few seasons the objectives were not working correctly. The objectives were not properly generated for teams that were public the season before, and thus only teams who went public would get objectives in their first season.
Also the clearance of the objectives was not working correctly as the objectives weren't always cleared. The objectives would be cleared during the race, but this logic has now been moved to the week update.

Because of these fixes, I generated the objectives for every team that had to have them from the start. Also they have been updated to clear out those objectives that have been reached already.
Also, as this is now fixed I will not be intervening anymore in the season update. If you are fired because of not reaching your objectives, then I won't undo it anymore.

If someone notices that an objective hasn't been cleared, please let me know in the comments. Also, just to be clear: objectives only apply to the main races, not to youth races.

Great news for the people who prefer to browse the website on the secure (https) connection. The secure certificate has been renewed after it expired.
This also brings back the PayPal payments that was disabled due to the expiration of the certificate.