Pitwall news

As season 2 is nearing its grand finale next week, I wanted to let you know in advance about some of the changes that are coming up in season 3.

Persons
Following the changes of last week with the person negotiations, the minimum number of races is used for the persons. If persons are not getting enough races as agreed in their contract, they will be approachable to everyone and able to join another team at any point of their remaining contract.

Team
The staff levels are removed and replaced by short term focus. The percentages and being able to set a specific percentage per level is gone. Now you can only choose 1 level and the teams' focus will be on that one. Please note that this change is already live to allow people to change their main focus already. The main focus for teams has been set to their highest percentage that was set in the old system.

Development
Several changs coming up in this department. First of all, upgrading a chassis will be slightly faster compared to how it is right now. Secondly it will cost more money to upgrade parts. The more you upgrade a part, the slightly higher the costs will be.
Finally the biggest change will be a new statistic that will be added called "expertise" that will be added to each part. This statistic shows how much knowledge the design team have over each part. This statistic will be the one determining how good a part will be, and thus the part creation algorithm will be changed so that it looks at the expertise. This will make making parts more realistic and less random. The chances of having a crappy or amazing part will be slightly reduced as well, as the potential/rating of a part now has a level that it can rely on.
In the future designers will have a few parts that they're specialised in, but that won't be included yet in this system (one step at a time - but I thought I'd let you know already).
This also means that hiring a new designer who is amazing and making him responsible for the chassis on day 1 of his new job won't result in an instant improved chassis. It will take some time for your team to build up the expertise that the designer brings to the team for the various parts.
Please note that this functionality is still under development, and it might not make it on day 1 of season 3 but surely it will be released not much later.

Sponsors
I have disabled the posibility to add sponsors to the game recently and there's a reason for that. The functionality for sponsors to have multiple teams will be enabled as it was already implemented, but never tested. Because of this, I will give everyone the option to cancel their future sponsor deals for a limited time, in case they want to give it a go with another sponsor that might be better than any other that was available when they started negotiations with their current sponsors. Note that not all sponsors will allow multiple teams.

Session
Doing test laps will cost money again just like in the previous version of Pitwall. The price per lap is set at 3 000,- and is the same for every division.

Staff
The cost of firing personnel will be raised to 20 000,- per personnel that is fired. The reasoning behind this is to prevent teams with big cash to constantly hire and fire if they need a few more here or there.

Persons have always been very lenient in Pitwall during contract negotiations. During the negotiations they were very hard on their demands, but when the time to take a decision was there they would basically accept even extremely low offers.
This lead to some teams being able to sign people up for a very low salary (a salary of a whopping 1,- per week for example), which in result has lead to these teams to be able to receive extra money on the money that they didn't have had to spend on person contracts. With an update that I've just released that contains a lot of changes and tweaks to the person negotiation process this problem is something of the past. On the pages not a lot changed, but I've spend a lot of time tweaking and making improvements to the code that judges the offer. There have been many changes, and I really recommend to look at the changelog (from the Game info > Status page).

This update also incorporates the roles that were introduced very recently. For those who missed it: the roles allow the team to set up a staff structure where there are heads and juniors. Based on your facilities you can add more roles to this structure allowing to get more work done and test out new, promising staff members. These changes are now also included in the contract negotiations as you can now offer head and junior roles to staff members.
Because we already had contracts signed I've updated all the signed contracts to set head roles to those who are assigned in a head position, and junior to all other staff.

Also, because these are major back end changes I've had to cancel all current negotiations. Apologies about that, but there was no other way unfortunately.

To sum up, these are the most major changes:
- Roles are included in the negotiations.
- Persons are now approachable at any time during their contract. There's no more hardcoded block.
- Persons are much tougher when deciding which offer to choose. If they don't like any offer, they will reject. Making it possible to approach them earlier doesn't mean that they will sign a contract the moment they're approachable.
- Whether a person is approachable depends on whether you're approaching as their current manager, or as a manager from another team.
- Re-worked feedback system gives much clearer feedback.
- Money offers (wage, bonuses) now don't necessarily are blocked if they're below the minimum. It's possible to give much more in another money offer to make up for the lack in the other offer (with limits).
- There's a minimum number of races now included in contract negotiations. If this number is not achieved through enough races competed (for drivers) or not being set in a role (for staff) then the driver is approachable and can leave straight away. This was also introduced to make all the staff available who are stuck in abandoned teams. The minimum races has remained at 0 for current contracts.
- Persons in the top 100 will have some public skills (on top of the scout and coach reports), with the higher they are the more public.
- Persons now also check up on their contract from time to time. If they feel they're underpaid they will let you know, and this causes a negative feeling impacting their morale/motivation.

This morning the website was down due to a network upgrade in the data center. Around 10:30 the problems were solved and the website was available again. The hourupdates need to be caught up, and that what will be done this morning.

A rather significant change is coming to Pitwall this week. The persons contracts negotiations system is something that is quite important to the game, and it's something that I feel is not developed enough yet, mainly due to seeing many teams being able to offer 0,- salaries and fees to drivers. This is something I intend to change, and since it wasn't something that was clearly intended to be like this the change will be immediate.

In the negotiations phase there will be more flexibility whereas the person demands rely more on their power position (similarly as to how the sponsors negotiate). A minimum number of races clause will be added to the negotiations, to prevent persons being stuck in an inactive team. Finally in the negotiations process the feedback will also be changed so that it makes much more sense. This means that there will be less, but more relevant feedback.

Right now we're in a system where the head staff is the leader, and you're able to hire additional persons and employ them. This will change as well by introducing a tier structure that allows the creation of junior positions (for example: 1 head designer, and 2 junior designers). In the facilities page you might have seen "staff space", this is the total number of persons you can assign in a staff position. Every team will have a minimum of 5 staff spaces as that comes with HQ1. Every upgrade to a higher HQ tier gives 2 additional spaces. The staff module also gives an additional 2 staff spaces. Every staff space allows a person to work, and all those persons that can't be assigned to a position will not be able to be employed in any development/production/negotiations. Needless to say, this will have an effect on their morale.

Finally an important change is that in real life it happens very often that prima donna sport stars feel they're underpaid. This will also be introduced in Pitwall. Persons who feel they're underpaid will complain, and the more they feel they're underpaid the unhappier they will be. Persons in your own team will allow negotiations at any time, unless they want to leave the team. So contracts can be improved generally at any time.

These changes are planned to be introduced this week, and it should result in a more structured and more fair contracts system.

In order to lower the learning curve of the game, I've done some research on why and where people get stuck when starting to play the game. I came to the conclusion that the lack of information, and on the other side the information overload on all the screens were the reason that most people stopped playing before properly getting started.

To fix this I've spent quite some time on adding information to the help section. All the pages now contain the most basic information, and they are styled in a wiki kind of way so that the information is easy to spot. More information will be added in the future as the game is being developed.

Another common problem was that people just didn't know where to start. The only real way to fix this was to create a tutorial for the game. New players will now be helped by the tutorial which shows up at the very top of the page. The tutorial is interactive, so it will only advance when the members perform the right actions. Those actions include (but are not limited to): founding their team, entering a competition, signing suppliers, signing staff/drivers, starting negotiations with sponsors, creating/producing parts, etc.
Once the tutorial has been completed the team will have a basic car that can be taken to the track immediately. To accomplish this I've made some changes to the way the new team bonus works. Persons will now join immediately and new teams won't have to wait for the person to choose the team. Suppliers will also sign immediately and there's no need to wait for the next hour update anymore. And finally parts are produced immediately as well, no more waiting for the next hour update either.

All of these actions are done to reduce the number of people who run away screaming from the complexity of the game. Because I couldn't know which members didn't finish their basic setting up of the team, I've enabled the tutorial for everyone. You can always go through it to know what is going on in it, but obviously if you already have a team you won't be able to go through it in the interactive way. You can always end the tutorial by clicking "End tutorial" on the right top corner.

One area that I felt that was quite hard to get an overview of was the scouting area. It was very difficult to get to know which persons were actually worth looking after, and going for. Because of this I've added a very handy panel to the scouting page, called Knowledge.

This panel that allows to filter by job type shows all the information your scout gathered from every person in the game in a nice overview. It lists the contract length of the person, their job type, how good the knowledge of the scout of that person is, how many reports so far, what the average rating is, and all the characteristics of the person (based on their job type). With this panel, it should become much clearer which persons are actually worth going for.
Because this panel almost makes the Scout reports panel obsolete, I've limited the results of this panel to 20 results so that this reports panel is now only showing the most recent reports.

I did a lookup on all the reports that were done, and I noticed that a huge majority of the reports are driver reports. This makes sense with the driver roaming. To improve this I've introduced staff roaming as well. If there are no staff to scout, then a random staff member will be scouted. This staff member needs to be part of a team (so no scouting of free staff), and they also need to be in a role (so head designer, or head commercial for example).
Furthermore I've made some improvements to the mechanism that scouts staff, so that there should be more staff scout reports (non-roamed). Also to improve the actual report on the staff members who are non-roamed (so a requested scout report by the manager), it's now only possible for the scout to file a report on staff who are in an active role at a team.

These changes should make it more easy to get to know which persons you should go for in the game. More cool changes coming up!