Pitwall news

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).

As announced earlier, and introduced a little later than originally intended, I've made some changes to the development system.

The research level was introduced to make the development less of a gamble, but it required a transition season to avoid too much of a sudden change.
I've applied the following changes with immediate effect.

Maximum research level shown
The maximum research level is the maximum level that the research level can reach. Once this level is reached, it's pointless to do further researching as the maximum has been reached.
This maximum is a calculation of the quality of your design team.

Team research level calculation
In the transition season the research level was only the skill set of the designer, now it's the entire team. In other words: the maximum level of the research level was the skill level of the designer, now it's of all designers in the design team (which can be assigned from the Personnel > Staff page).
This is very important, so please do read this before you post on the forum that there's a bug: This means that up until yesterday your research level was probably (unless you already have an amazing design team with multiple junior designers) higher than what is shown now. This is because the head designer is no longer responsible for the full 100% of the research level rating, but only for xx% (how much I keep a secret, but it's less than 75%). So we are in a similar situation as we were when the system was introduced, but now teams can do something about it: hire junior designers, add them to the design team and the maximum research level will increase. Any changes that are done in the design team will be reflected straight away in the maximum research level (so changes like who is the head designer, or adding/removing a junior designer are shown right away in the maximum research level).

Research level reduction
The research level reduces when a chassis or part is designed, but it was also applying this for upgrading a chassis or a part. I decided that this is a bit too much as the research level already took a hit originally and the potential was already calculated (reminder: the potential level of a part is based mainly on the research level, not the current level), and I've remove this. From now on the research level will no longer reduce when you upgrade a part or chassis.

For now the maximum research level is the same for each part, but as I mentioned in the introduction of the system, but in the future this will be changed by having designers who are more specialized in certain areas (such as gearboxes) than others.

There was a bit of confusion about the system since its introduction, and I think a large part was played by the fact that everyone was a bit over-inflated on their research level numbers.
As a general rule: it's pointless to do research if your current research level is higher than your maximum research level.

These changes are the first of a set of changes that I want to introduce to the game to make the game more transparent and fun to play.

Because of a mistake on my side when drawing up the calendar, the first two weeks of season 4 weren't marked as test weeks.
This meant that by the time that I noticed this error (this morning) it was already too late to undo what had gone wrong. Because of this I've restored the back up from last night before the season update, and manually launched all the updates, and fixed some season update bugs.
Right now the server is catching up on all the missed hour updates. Once this is completed, the weather will be generated and season 4 will be able to start.

This season will mark no big updates as I've been very busy with another project that is due to launch very soon.
Once this project is live, I will be introducing an update for the development section. The maximum value of the research will no longer be just based on the head designer, but will be calculated based on the total designer staff. This was announced when the research feature was introduced so that managers had time to adapt to this.
I will also make it more transparent so that you can see immediately how high this value will be. That way there's no guessing, and you'll know when you can stop your research project.
In the future I intend to make the game a bit more transparent (or just more "a game") in certain sections that are now too much hidden.