Pitwall news

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!

This morning the junior team feature has been activated. This feature allows any team manager to create a junior team. This junior team is completely separated from the main team, but is restricted in some ways:

• Division: junior teams cannot promote to higher divisions.
• Facilities: junior teams can only have a 1 starred head quarters.
• Suppliers: junior teams can only sign 'normal' contracts with suppliers.

This feature is available to all members for now, but will be only available to supporters in the future (you only need supporter to activate it).

The reason why this feature has been introduced now is because it should create more competition in the bottom divisions. As a new player it is not fun to compete against nobody else, and since this feature was easily implemented technical wise it was done so now.

If it turns out that there were certain strategic things that were missed in the beta, then there might be drastic measures against junior teams. These junior teams should be considered as fun in the first place. Feedback is of course welcome as always.

With a slight delay, this morning the game has been updated to the latest version. This update was focussed mainly on racescript changes, and other much requested features. The site has been in maintenance today due to slower than anticipated scripts.

Morale changes
First of all the only change that has nothing to do with the racescript: the base morale. Before we had the “team fit” mechanic, which was not the most popular mechanic of the game (to say it with an understatement) since it was completely unclear how it actually worked. The mechanic itself was not properly built either, and therefore the commentary was justified. Because of that I've just completely removed that mechanic, and replaced it with something that is very clear: the base morale. A person will always converge to their base morale, which makes it clear from the very start what kind of morale you can expect for a person. The morale is of course still influenced by other factors such as winning, retiring, etc. Speaking of the morale drop, an important bug has been fixed which caused

Tyre temperature
Before tires had a reliable rating, and depending on certain factors they would degrade. The kilometers that a tire would last were also influenced by this, and this made for a bit of a messy system. A new statistics has been introduced which is the tire temperature. The tire will degrade faster the higher the temperature is. Combined with this new statistic another new stat is introduced for each part called “condition”. This stat determines how good a part is, and it will now fail when it hits 0. No longer will the number of kilometers that it lasts be a determining factor, but it will be indicative. Tires also have a condition, and the tire condition is also influenced by the temperature. Once the tire hits terrible there’s a big chance that it will explode. Once the tire goes over the cliff, lap times will also increase quite a lot, just like driver errors.

Performance calculation
A few changes have been made to how the performance of a car is calculated on each part of the track. A car that has a good acceleration stat will make more difference in tracks with an emphasis on acceleration, and the same goes for all characteristics of a track such as braking and the speed phases of a track section.

New driver skills
Since the performance calculation has been upgraded, I also felt that drivers were pretty much the same at the highest level. They could use more distinctive factors. Because of this several new driver stats have been implemented: low speed corners, medium speed corners, high speed corners which should speak for themselves. The old corners stat has basically been split up in three separate stats. Further more we split up the speed stat in braking and acceleration. All the new stats have been generated based on the existing stats.
Management stats for drivers now define how harsh they are on the car. Drivers with a high car management stat will put a lower wear on the car, while a good fuel management will result in lower fuel usage. The new tyre warming stat will result in tires being warmed up faster, since wear is much higher when the tire has a too high or low temperature.
The technical stat has been split up in two stats: car setup (which is the old stat) and car development, which is a stat that will be used in the future for car development.
The mental stats have been generated already, but have not yet been implemented.

Person ratings
Last season we had an instance where a very experienced player (I won’t name names) was clearly confused by how good his (okay, it’s a ‘he’) designers were. He was overestimating them, and it made it clear to me that the way the stats worked in the past were not clear enough. Because of this I’ve decided that more transparency is needed, and I’ve made the talent, global rating and global talent visible. Talent was already known thanks to scouts, but the global rating and global potential are new. These sort of replace the old reputation system. The global rating states how good a person is compared to all other persons in the staff category. So a 5 star person is one of (or the) best in their category (designer, mechanic, …). The potential makes it clear how much talent the person has compared to the talent of all other persons in their category. Depending on the knowledge of the person, you will see 1, 2, 3 or 5 stars with stars being the highest knowledge.
This is also updated for the skills of a person, whereas the old skill types (terrible, very good, …) have been replaced by numeric values up to 20. Depending on the knowledge a higher maximum number is available.

Car setup split
The car setup statistic has been split into two: performance and tyre management. Performance is the same as the old car setup stat, but tyre management determines how good the car handles the tires. The better they are handled, the lower the wear. For the first time in Pitwall managers can now also change the setup of the car, but only in a limited way. It can be set up towards better on performance, or better on tyre management. This is possible on the same page as where cars are sent out. Do note that it’s never possible to get superb on both stats since it’s always a compensation between the two.
In order to improve either of the stats, a certain testing program can be chosen in the testing session. Either program will also always improve the other program, but only in a limited way.

Tyre handling stat
A new characteristic has been created for cars: tyre management. The suspension and diffuser now have a tyre management characteristic which determines how hard the car is on tires. The better the stat, the lower the wear will be on tires. All old and current parts have been updated so that they have roughly the same rating as the other stats.

Fixes
Several bugs in the race script have been fixed (but not all), such as feelings would only occur in qualification sessions, while it should’ve been in race sessions.
Another big bug that has been fixed is drivers who would DNF in a testing or qualification session would keep “coming back” for the remainder of the stint.

That’s all for now, work continues on the racescript just like on the car development. More fixes will be rolled out soon.