Pitwall news

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.

Some more overdue changes have been released today with immediate effect.

Scouting
Several small improvements have been made to the scouting page, such as an indicator that shows whether the scouted report was a roamed report or not.
There were a few reports from people who kept getting roamed reports even though roaming was turned off. This was looked into, and it was possible to receive roamed reports under certain circumstances. This bug has now been fixed, and if someone else has this problem again: please do let me know. Another scouting bug that was fixed was that it was impossible to scout junior staff.

R&D
There were concerns from several people that it was too easy to stay ahead of the rest in the development race once you reached a high level in one of your plans. These concerns were correct, and this has now been tweaked by applying a constant reduction to development plans and produced parts. This drop is quite low (maximum 2 ratings for a highly rated part), but high enough to keep on developing once you've reached a high stat. The drop is only for parts of the current season, so next season parts and plans are not affected until we move on to the next season. The drop rate is the same for both plans as parts.

Person negotiations
The contract wages has always been a hot topic. In order to make it more realistic I've made a few changes that should make the wage expectations more realistic.
First of all the staff that are expecting a junior role will now expect a lower wage than before. Secondly, staff in general will now also expect a slightly lower wage to compensate for the increase in staff that is now possible.
Finally, the biggest change: the wage expectation for drivers and staff is now split up in two parts.
One part is the normal wage expectation by persons like we used to have it before for 100%. This part is now set to 50% of its old value (it used to be 100%).
The second part that also accounts for 50% is the market wage for similarly rated persons (based on their ranking).
For example: the driver expects a minimum wage of 75 000. If the average of drivers in the ranking is 50 000, then the driver will expect 50 000 on top of his minimum expected salary, making his expected wage 125 000 (75 000+50 000).

This will increase the realism value quite a lot, as when teams are generally poorer the expectations will drop, and the other way around.
This change only starts counting for negotiations with persons that haven't started yet (nobody negotiating yet).