Pitwall news

Last Sunday there was a server issue which caused the races not to finish or to start properly. As I was on a family visit in London, I wasn't aware of this situation quick enough to fix the issue.
This has meant that there was the option to leave the situation as it was (with half races), or to correct the situation by going back to a backup from Sunday morning before the problem arose.

The database has been restored now to this version (with all messages restored to todays' version). This means that everyone can test more and tweak their strategy. People who haven't qualified can also qualify.
This also means that people who have created an account Sunday, Monday or until now (Tuesday) will need to re-create an account. The same applies for all changes that have been made since Sunday morning.

Apologies for the issues. Somehow these always happen when I'm abroad.

There have been quite a few changes in the career department today, most notably in the shares and in the applying for a new team sections. I can recommend everyone to take a look in the changelog.

Shares
Starting with the shares a big change was pushed through in order to make the game more fun and less frustrating after having been fired suddenly. Many people didn't know that when they went public they had a chance to be fired by either the board of directors or the shareholders. The board of directors would fire you if your results weren't good enough, and this would happen during the season update.
This has now been removed so that people who went public (ie. sold shares) can only be fired by a majority of shareholders.
Also, a logical change in this section is that it's now only possible to either go completely public (100 shares), or not at all (0 shares). Because of this, teams who hadn't gone completely public have now, and those who went public but only had shares on the market without an owner have gone private again (with an auto payment of the share price).

As I was working on the shares section, I pushed through a long overdue update as well which is a much clearer shares page. Each team is now listed individually instead of per share per team which gives a better overview of the public teams. The active teams are shown first as well which was a much requested feature.
The rest of the page gives much more information as to which extra options are available to the shareholders.

Shareholders now also have more access to information. They can see the financial status of the team on top of all the other default information. Also, the shareholders will be able to talk to eachother in the Board meetings chat. A notification will be sent out to all the shareholders and the team manager when a message is posted. This is introduced ahead of future features such as offering a manager a contract as a shareholder, and voting on things for the team (such as contract length).

Shares are now priced differently as well. The shares now follow the demand and supply mechanism more and will be priced differently when less shares are available, or more bids on shares are done. For this reason I've had to remove all the current bids on the shares (be happy, everyone would've paid too much).
And to make the process go faster, the bidding deadline has been reduced from 7 to 3 days.

Apply for job
This process has also been slightly altered. No longer will new managers be able to take over a top team, as that bug has been fixed.
I've also removed the limit for division 3, which means that division 3 teams will be accessible to everyone at any time without a need of a minimum reputation ranking.
That same ranking has been lowered for the first and second division as well, on top of another change: the longer a team is without a manager, the more it will relax its rules and allow more managers to apply. The minimum reputation ranking will drop each day which everyone will be able to see in the new column.

The past weeks I've been working intensely on an updated development script. This script changes the development side of the game quite heavily with a few new strategic changes. The full changes will be posted once the update is live, but if you're interested in what these changes are then head over to the forum topic (link) that was created a while ago.

This update is now almost completely implemented on a test site. This test is now publicly available and everyone can test the changes here.

Please note that this is still under development and that a few things are still not working as can be expected (such as certain elements or buttons that don't do anything yet). Also, the following functions as were described in the original specifications announcement have not been implemented yet:
* Project developers
* Team rebalance
* Auto-create parts
* Designer instructions
* Testing programs

Thanks everyone for participating and providing your feedback (here).

The money that was paid double has been paid back. In your finances screen you will see that you've gotten refunds for all the double paid money from last week on this week. As of course everyone has to be paid, the amounts have been deducted again on this week. That way everyone has paid for wages, suppliers, etc... this week, for last week.

The updates have been enabled again, and everything should be back to normal. To catch up on the missing updates, I've set the hourupdate to also run at minute 30 of each hour for the next 2 days. That way all the lost updates will be caught up. Again apologies for the issues.

Unfortunately there was a server problem from Sunday to Monday which caused the week update to fail. The weekupdate ran twice more, and therefore there will be some manual labor involved to fix the double (triple) updates.

This will be done this evening, and therefore I've had to disable all the updates on the game. My apologies for this, I'll try to make sure the game is up and running as fast as possible.

During the down time, please do take some time to read about the upcoming development changes. A few months ago I wrote that I wanted to make the game more transparent, and more of a game. These changes are a first step towards making Pitwall more of a game.
I've published the specifications in the forum (click here) which I'm basing myself on while developing the development script. These changes do affect everyone and will cause a lot of changes in the development system, so it's best to read them to make sure you're prepared for what's coming.

Again, apologies for the (sort of) down time. I'll post another news update when everything is resolved.