Pitwall news

First of all: my apologies that the game has been down yesterday, but unfortunately there were some serious issues with the week update yesterday.

Every Monday at 0:00 a script launches the weekupdate. Before doing so, it takes a back up and sends this to a local back up storage, and two remote servers. This to minimize the chance of losing a backup. Every so many week updates, the older backups are automatically removed.
Yesterday, the launcher script went completely bananas, and launched 60 week updates which took the game all the way to week 69. This lead to crazy finances as every team had to pay debt for 60 times, pay persons for 60 times, etc. However, this also lead to the backups being overwritten by faulty backups leaving me with a backup that wasn’t usable to quickly restore to the point of before the (first) weekupdate and re-launching a week update.

Because of this, I had to do a manual rollback whereas I did the reverse of all the costs that had been made, and all the changes that had been done (youth drivers were suddenly 69 instead of 9 to give one example). This has worked for most of the issues, but I’m not certain yet whether everyone’s finances are 100% correct. Please let me know (in the chat, or by opening a ticket) if you think something is wrong with your team and I will look into it. Worst case scenario I will do a recalculation of everyone’s balance up until last week and then check how much costs/revenue had been made last week.

The cause of the weekupdate spiraling out of control has been found, and this is due to the new e-mailing system that was implemented mid last week. It is also part of a launching script that launches all the updates. This is why the beta database was unaffected as that still uses the old emailer. I have fixed the issue and made changes to the backup system whereas it should always do only 1 backup.

My sincerest apologies for this issue. It’s something I completely hadn’t foreseen to happen, but lessons have been learnt and changes have been applied.
The updates that are behind will be caught up, once we’re sure that most things are okay. Yesterdays youth races won’t be caught up however.

There were some projects that were stuck in development since the transition to the new points system. These have now been cleared, and because of a bug (or more, something that wasn't foreseen) they cost a lot of money (multiple millions). This has been refunded to those teams as those expenses were something in excess of 40 million, which clearly meant that the 5 million compensation of the beginning of the week did not cover.
If you had or have stuck projects or have lost many millions because of this bug, and you did not yet receive a refund, please open a helpdesk ticket.

The server went down last night, like it did some other times this week. I've found the issue now which was related to an old script that was not replaced by the upgrade. It's been fixed now, and we should have no more downtime issues.
To compensate the downtime, the hour update will also run at the 30 minute mark until we've caught up.

Supplier slots
Since the points update it's no longer possible to offer sponsor slots to suppliers. This was removed for multiple reasons. The main reason being that it didn't make that much difference to the negotiations (other factors had way more importance), and the second being that it was an often made mistake by new players to offer many sections to suppliers which meant they were limited in signing up new sponsors.

As it did not make that much of a difference, I also removed the sections from next season (this season they are here to stay) and onwards.

Stuck projects
If you're still having a project that is stuck in development or production (or where-ever), please create a helpdesk ticket and we will take a look at it.

A day has passed since the update, so here's a little status update. Overall it has gone quite well, with a few small issues.

Downtime
Unfortunately I have to start with a downtime announcement. But this was totally my fault. With every upgrade come many backups. Since the database of Pitwall is quite large, it meant that 10 minutes after I went to sleep last night the disk was full and the server went down. This has been fixed since this morning, and it shouldn't happen again. I've set up the hour updates to catch on by scheduling extra hour updates every 30 minutes.

Development
There were a few development issues yesterday due to the transition phase between the old system and the new one. This was unfortunately inevitable. The running projects (from the old system) should all have been finished without costing designer points, but they did always charge the full amount in terms of money. In the old system you would pay per hour update a fraction of the cost, in the new system it's at the end of the development. Hence, some people paid double and some recompensation is required.
Since every project is different, it's impossible to know how much everyone lost exactly so I decided to give all teams 5 million extra as a compensation. This money has been added to every team this morning.

Supplier negotiations
Since the introduction of the points system was combined with some other strategic changes, the number of suppliers has also been reduced. This because as a new feature suppliers will come and go (not so frequent, but it will happen). It's possible that a supplier will pull out (or join) of the sport and this will always be announced a season in advance.
Some people had running negotiations and have been caught out by this. Again, it's very different for everyone so I decided to give everyone 1000 administrative points extra. It's possible that I will do another admin points bonus round (due to how many points are needed for negotiations), but I won't give them all at once not to destabilize the market (since administrative points can also be used for other things). This bonus package is something that is given to every team, and it's up to every team of course what they do with it.

Admin
Finally, since we now have an admin panel I can finally ask for administrators of the game. Everyone who is interested can apply by sending me a message, replying to this news message (with a comment), or by creating a helpdesk ticket.