Pitwall news

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.

After almost a year of development the points update has been finished. First of all: a big thanks to everyone who has been testing the update on the beta site. It wouldn't have been possible to create this update without their help.

So what has changed? The initial plan was to just test a points update in the game, and then see how it impacted the game. Gradually as the new update was being worked on other features have been added, all with the aim of improving the playability of the game, decreasing the learning curve and to improve support offered to members. I believe that with this update the game offers players an easier to understand game which will allow them to get started quicker on. There has been a lot that has been changed, and it wouldn't be a good idea to go over it in one news update. So for now I will highlight the changes and come back on individual features later on. On top of all the changes listed below, many bugs have been fixed as well. Most notably the race script will now auto-restart after it has frozen.

Points
First the obvious: there are now 4 points categories: administrative, designer, mechanic and commercial points. Depending on many factors, you get a certain amount of points per hour update. These allow you to take actions on all of those 4 aspects in the game. This also means that there was no more a use for personnel (who you had to assign to deals etc.) in the game, so they have been removed. This should remove a big part of the micro-management in the game, which is something that has come up as annoying in the past.

Development
Before you had to start a project and wait for your personnel to finish the project. Each project now costs designer points. Once you have enough points, the project will be finished. You can still create projects when you don't have enough points, and once you have reached the number of designer points required the project will be finished. The ratings have also been made more transparent, and you can now see exactly how much percent your part is.
As a welcome improvement: you can now also produce parts at the same time as starting a new project.
Producing parts uses mechanic points and work in a similar way as the development projects. Once you have enough points they will be instantly finished and you can go test them on the track right away.

Suppliers
Supplier negotiations have been changed so that they can work with the points system as well. The previous system required you to choose a contract type before negotiations. This could lead to your team being without a contract when a rival team signed the supplier up before you could. This has been changed and you can now progress the negotiations by investing administrative points. You can sign a normal contract at 30%, a partner deal at 70% and a works deal at 100%.

Persons
Negotiating with persons is now based on administrative points. Once negotiations start with a person there's a chance to sign them instantly, but it won't always work. Big tier persons will require so many points that it will take some time before a team can sign them.

Sponsors
Sponsor negotiations work similarly to the person negotiations. The initial points that are required are very high and cool down to a more normal points requirement. There are also more sponsors available now, so there shouldn't be a sponsor shortage any more.

GUI update
During the update I had to change many things in the layout of the game, so I decided that it would be a good time to change the look of the game as well and to make it a more mobile friendly website. This has been accomplished with the new layout I believe. Virtually every page has been re-created, so a lot of effort has gone into this area. This change should make the game much more accessible to people playing from tablets and phones.
If the website looks strange, you should clear your cache and refresh the page.

Admin panel
Last but not least, there has been a lot of development in the admin panel. There was virtually no admin panel in the old game which required me to do every thing myself. Since I'm not a student at school any more with a lot of free time, it got impossible for me to handle everything. I will add admins soon to the game which should mean that the game will get much more organized again. The admin panel allows admins to handle a lot of tasks, and the panel will only improve a lot over the coming weeks as more requirements are added.

That's all for now. I will come back on more individual features later on. The upgraded was tested yesterday, and apart from a few small problems there were no major issues. I will try to fix any problems that there are as soon as possible.

To me this feels like a brand new Pitwall, and I really hope that all of you enjoy this new version!

Because of the issues with qualifying, the qualification session has been extended to 16h (4pm) Pitwall time. See the right top of the page to see the Pitwall time zone.
Apologies for these issues, I've been investigating a lot this morning, and found some of the (well hidden) reasons why we had some (week/race/...) update stalls lately.

I haven't been very active which is because all my time and effort go to the beta right now. The good news is that things have advanced quite a lot, and many bugs have already been fixed. Also good to know is that there is an admin panel that admins will be able to use. It will allow me to give admin powers to people again, and the admin panel is more advanced than ever (and will continue to be developed).

As some have noticed, I have started fixing the minimum races clause in the person contracts recently. To start of: this is not an implementation, more of a fix of something that was implemented but never worked as it should have and was promptly disabled in the background. But I will do a public test (probably tonight) before implementing this, as it heavily affect teams that's for certain. And it's also possible that I will postpone this to next season, but that depends on testing etc.

This clause (minimum races) in the person contract is used in two ways for persons: "unassigned races" and "races competed" (note competed does not mean completed even though there is a typo on the person page - competed means qualified). This clause also takes into account whether the person has been with the team for the entire season. If the person joined in the current season then the formula goes something like this: floor( ((13-week_joined)/13)*minimum_races ). So if a person joins in week 13 and requires 10 races, then the number of races will be 0 (as he could join after the week 13 race). If he joins in week 6 with 10 races required then he will require 5 races from the team.

The first way the clause is used for persons ("Unassigned races") is to prevent (rich) teams from hoarding staff from the market and keeping them unassigned. The races assigned parameter is raised by one every Sunday at 0:00 for each person that is assigned to a role. If a person is unassigned, then this parameter will not be raised for that week, no matter if he was assigned during the week (only Sunday 0:00 counts).
This parameter was not kept before (checking whether a person was assigned in a role) and has already been calculated for all previous and the current season based on the races stat in the history (so it has been more generous). From this Sunday on the system will do the checks already and they will be correct.
If the potential number of races (assigned races + races remaining in the season) is lower than this minimum races clause, then the person is set to "allowed to leave immediately" due to a breach of contract (this does not mean that the person will leave, but he can).

The second one ("Races competed") is to prevent inactive teams from having amazing persons and "locking" them away for a long time as the team is inactive and they're tied to their contracts. This parameter looks at the number of races that the team has competed.
If the potential number of races (races competed + races remaining in the season) is lower than this minimum races clause, then the person is set to "allowed to leave immediately" due to a breach of contract (this does not mean that the person will leave, but he can).

Once this is completed (and the long term join person bug fixed) I will do something similar for sponsors (but this info is already available so that shouldn't take long to implement).

If you have created a part but it didn't get finished instantenously, please let me know in the following topic: click here.
I will look at it and manually update the parts.

Please note that the instant part for development only works for the actual development part of the system. Both the research and the test bed phases do not work instantly.