Pitwall news

As announced earlier, I was going to reset the personal balances and the shares as this system was exploited in the past. Because I wanted to prevent that people would take this information and exploit more things, I've already taken action and reset the shares. The shares have reset to 20 instead of 100 for each team that is in a division, and all other teams have had their shares removed. Also, it's no longer possible to buy shares from teams who are not in a division.
The personal balances (which benefited from the exploits) have also been reset to 20 000 000,- per manager. New managers will now also have 10 000 000 in cash when they start playing.
I know it's not a popular decision, but the personal life section has always been for fun and therefore I decided to take these measures to keep that section fun. I reduced the number of shares from 100 down to 20 to make the shares market less of a micro management thing to do.

Those who follow the chat will notice that I've recently been able to pick up the development pace a bit for Pitwall. The game hasn't had a lot of development recently due to other projects, but planning has never stopped and soon I'll announce a host of features which will take Pitwall to a next phase.

Person negotiations & fixes
Before I started this new phase, which you may call Pitwall 3.0, I wanted to clean up some bugs and correct some imbalances. The person negotiations bug should be fixed now, and persons will be less likely to change their demands all the time now.
The most recent change is that the person market page is now split off from the person page. This should make the page cleaner, and it should provide more info to the user. It's not completely done yet, but we're nearly there. You're also able to check the entire ranking now due to pagination. The search panel is integrated into this page now as well, and the "No teams" filter has been fixed so that people who used to have a contract are now also shown.

Skill visibility
Next I made some changes to the skills for persons. The visibility of a skill starts with no knowledge, to x/3 and goes up to x/20, giving you a better idea of how good someone is in that skill. This is influenced by how known a person is. The more "progress" you have on the person, the more skills you can see. Progress towards the full skill is achieved by being assigned to a race position, ranking, coach knowledge and scout reports. As an external team there isn't much you can do to quickly increase that value other than scouting, so that you get to know the talent and the full skill set of a person. Yesterday some changes were pushed through in this system. Before the "assigned to races" would be a public stat. This has now been split off into a private and public part. The public part is the same as before, but it allows to go higher now up to 60%. This means that if a driver races, then by just racing the driver can unlock 60% of his skills to be seen for others. The rest needs to be compensated by scouting, reputation and coaches. The new part is that the private section is reserved for teams who the person raced for. This new part allows for 40% of the skill set to be unlocked, on top of the public part. This means that a driver his skill set can be unlocked for 100% by just racing. It will require 30 races to completely unlock this skill set.
Another change in this system is that before scout reports would only count for the current season, and those for last season for 50%. All other scout reports would not contribute toward progress to see the full skill set. This has now been removed and every scout report will always count. There is no longer a limit where a report won't count any longer. After 5 seasons there is no longer a drop, and a report will still count for 25%.

Pitwall 3.0
It has been briefly talked about before, but I've planned to make some drastic changes to the game in certain sections where the game is really lacking a fun factor or where it's just too complex. The main focus of this update is to make the game more playable, easier to get into, and to introduce the new race script.
The idea was to develop all the changes on the beta server, and once it would be done to import them into the main game all at once. I've already tweaked this slightly, as some of the PW3 changes have already been integrated. Such changes are the performance improvements (which caused some issues a couple of weeks ago), the skill system mentioned above, negotiations which automatically renew, and some other smaller changes.

The biggest change will be the race script. The current one is in need of an upgrade, and I decide to start again from scratch as the way it will work will be completely different. I won't go too technical, but the script will be constantly running which will make some tasks easier and which will give admins more power to easily restart the script in case of difficulties. Apart from tweaks and bug fixes there will be a new highlights system which should immerse you more into the race. Also introduced will be cooling which will require a bit more choices which need to be made which can hamper performance, and new parts which will be introduced.

Other changes for this version will include changes to the youth tiers. These will be reduced in size to 4 tiers, but more drivers will be assignable in the bottom tiers. And it will be possible to set strategies for these races. Development and production will get an update as well, but I won't reveal too much on that yet.

The sponsors system will get a complete overhaul. The sponsor relations system will be removed since it's very hard to maintain and it will be replaced by a couple of sponsor stats which will influence how sponsors see you. The goal of the PW3 update is to make it much clearer which stats make a difference, and these changes are part of that.

Finally, the personal section will be completely reset. There are a couple of managers who are billionaire due to the imbalanced shares system we had in the beginning. This creates a major imbalance and I decided that we will just reset that section. The public teams will remain public, but all shares will be available on the market again. The number of shares that are created when a team goes public will be reduced to 20 however.

Automatic qualifying and strategy
Another change which was planned for PW3 was automatic qualifying and strategy. I decided to already push this forward to this version so that we can get more racing on track. I will try to get this system ready before the start of week 3. The idea is to get more cars on track during the season, even for teams which are inactive. By default every team will opt in to automatic qualifying, which used to be a paid feature on PW1. This means that teams who have not qualified 10 minutes before the end of the session will automatically go out and do a lap. This will qualify them for the race, and an automatic strategy will set the drivers up for the race. It will be possible to also set a strategy calculated for the managers who have qualified, or you can still set one yourself.

All of these changes for PW3 may be pushed forward if it makes sense. I will try to keep you guys updated on the progress, but don't expect all the changes above to be ready in the current season.

Good luck in season 21 to everyone!

Introduction
Tonight the new person negotiations update has been released. This update tries to make the person negotiations less of a "first one takes it all" system by re-introducing the deadline date where they take a decision. No longer will top ranked persons sign a contract to the first team that offers them a contract. The higher ranked a person is, the longer he (or she) will take before signing a deal.

Approachable
Because of this, some more changes were implemented. No longer are persons unapproachable. You will always be able to open negotiations (costs administrative points), and be able to offer a contract (also costs administrative points - the more offers the less). You're never guaranteed that the person might accept to start negotiations. Once he does, the deadline date will be set and every team will be able to make an offer to be the best offer. Whether the person is willing to start negotiations depends on several factors such as the length remaining, loyalty, whether they're allowed to leave the team, ...
Of course, this would mean that it would be hard to guess when a person is on the brink of wanting to start negotiations. Because of this there's a new convincible stat that you can see on the job market and person pages. This stat tells you when a person is convincible to start negotiations. The better your scouts professionalism stat (visible now on the Scouting page) is, the better of a guess the scouts will be able to make. If it's a tick (V), then the person is willing to start negotiations (which effectively sets the deadline date). If it's a question mark (?), then the person might be convincible with a very good offer. If it's a cross (X), then the person will not be convincible to start a contract negotiations showdown between the teams.

Negotiations page
The negotiations page has been redesigned to allow this new system to work. The layout should be made a bit more intuitive, and the person now gives specific feedback on the contract offer which tells whether they will consider/accept/reject it. There are three types of persons. Those who don't share any information. They will take the offer and not tell you whether you're considered. Those who share it with you when you're in the top X% of the offers. And those who tell you when you're the best offer. This should make it a bit more interesting to deal with negotiations.

Watertight
Another new feature that has been added is the watertightness of a contract. During negotiations the watertightness of a contract can be defined. By default a contract will be somewhat watertight, but this can always be improved by spending administrative points during the negotiations. Once the contract is signed, this can no longer be improved (just like in real life).
This stat allows people to try to find a loophole (better word/term is always welcome in the comments) in the contract. Once they do (from the persons page), then the person will get the "allowed to leave immediately" clause activated. This doesn't mean that they will leave immediately, but that they can if they sign a contract. However, just like the "allowed to leave" clause worked in the past, it doesn't mean that it's activated that the person is interested in negotiations.
This is something that I've been wanting to integrate for a really long time, since it's very common in F1 as well (plenty of examples, most notably Schumacher - Jordan).

Negotiations overview
To make sure that pages don't get too cluttered, a Negotiations overview (Personnel => Negotiations) page has been made where all the person negotiations are shown. Those by your team, but also those active in the entire Pitwall world.

Bug fixes
There have been other small changes and many bug fixes in the system. Most notably the requirements that a person sets are now fixed for 1 season. If nobody is negotiating, then they are also refreshed. But they should no longer refresh all the time. Another change is that every person who is interested or negotiating will get a message if the person changes his or her demands. A new feature is that the person will also send out a message 24 hours before making a decision. This should be a handy reminder for everyone who is negotiating with this person.

Running negotiations
Because these are fundamental changes to the negotiations I've had to cancel all running negotiations, and had to regenerate all requirements from the persons.

Coming up...
Next up is a small little project that I've been wanting to do for a really long time: Politics. This will allow team managers to vote on rule changes. These should then be adopted by the PGB (or PIA?). This should become visible on the beta soon.
After that, we'll be getting a development/racescript change with the introduction of cooling in development, and some interesting development changes.

The person reputation system has been updated last weekend to better reflect the real ranking of persons. The previous system was based mainly on results of the team. But this had the flaw that useless persons would also profit from good results. This lead to these useless persons to be asking a lot of money while they were actually worthless.

Changing this system was necessary as 1) it was quite difficult to find really good staff/drivers for new teams; 2) it could make really good staff/drivers really cheap if you looked for them long enough.
The rating system has been changed recently so that it's much clearer (by using the stars) what the rating is of persons. The new reputation system will use that now as well to rank persons reputation-wise, but will also use a new hidden stat: "known". A person starts unknown and will slowly build up popularity by various factors such as: results (position), series (for drivers), division, ... Once this stat has reached 100% then it will always stay there.
This stat is used in the reputation system in the sense that it's multiplied by the rating. This means that if a young driver is rated 10/20 and he's only known for 50% then his rating will only appear half of his real rating. This is done to prevent that if a new 4 year old driver is generated and he's a 20/20 potential, that he'll be snatched by the first manager who spots him. Only when he starts participating in races will it become clear what a talent he is. The new reputation filter has been live since last weekend, and I invite everyone to take a look at them.

I've also made some changes to the job market filter, whereas some irrelevant sorting filters were removed. I also added sorting by reputation which should make it much easier to spot great driver/staff.

Together with this smaller release I've also fixed a few bugs (see the status page for more information), and fixed a bug in the rating system (which was mentioned before) as retired persons were also still counted. This will have updated the ratings.
A bigger bug was also fixed over the weekend which caused the day update to stall. This in turn lead to many little bugs, such as: skills were not reducing due to age, person rankings were not updating, synergy did not reduce, parts did not reduce, economy stayed the same, pit crew efficiency did not reduce, there was no check and possible correction for double head staff, no administrative clean up (which caused huge log tables and thus a full server disk) and no new portraits for persons. This bug has been fixed and the day updates are now running correctly again.

That's all for now, more updates and fixes will be coming soon as I'll have some spare time again the next couple of weeks.

A fix in the strategy page lead to another bug which resulted in it being impossible to set a pitstop. This bug has now been fixed and everyone should be able to set their pit stops again.
Apologies for the issues!