Pitwall news

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.

Today the updated development system that was mentioned before has been released on the main game. This update allows everyone to finally start their season 9 development projects. As of course there is no time anymore to complete them all now, everyone receives an instant project per part for development. And also instant parts for production.
This system has been tested quite a bit on the alpha website. The alpha testers will notice that there are quite a few other changes (GUI and bug fixing related mainly). These changes were never pushed to the alpha website, so it's not the case that the alpha site has just been ported over. The main issues that were reported have been fixed.

What has changed in this development update? Quite a lot, here's all of it taken from the original specification document:
Split research
The pages need to become less crowded on Pitwall in general, and the research should therefore be split off the development page. With the changes that are coming for the research, it would be better any way.

Research to per season
Because research right now is focused too much on the current season we don't really simulate the trend in Formula 1 that sometimes the rules get thrown overboard and we get a new set of rules. This is not necessarily for the entire car, but it is regularly for one or more parts on the car.
As research will be split off from the development page, we can also allow a tab on the page to switch between the different seasons.

Rules maximum
The rules will now simply show the maximum value that a part can reach. Right now it says something vague like "very restricted". But from this change on the rules will simply show the maximum value that the part can reach.

Removal of rules limits
At this moment the development is limited by the rules, and also the value that a part has is relative to this limit. Parts won't be created relative to their limit anymore, and will have the real value. This also allows the teams to go over the limit with the parts, effectively running an illegal car.

Rules research
A new type of research that allows you to have your designers look into the rules and look for loopholes. Each rule set will have a real value, a potential value, and a multiplier which specifies how likely it is to find out the loophole. Not every rule will have a loophole each season (actually, only a few or no rules will have a loophole), which makes it exciting not knowing which loopholes have been found yet.

Development phases
Development will be split into several phases like we have now, but they will actually do something. The player will be able to cancel out certain phases or decide to make them shorter or longer.
1. Research
This phase starts the researching phase just like it can be done as a standalone. You will be able to state how high the research phase should go, but this won't be higher than the maximum research level.
2. Development
The actual development where the part is improved. It should be made clear to the player how long this phase should be as otherwise the player is in the unknown.
3. Test bed
This phase allows you to assess the performance of the part. This value can be different than the on track value.
4. QA testing
This phase is probably only useful for the gearbox as it allows you to see how long the part will last generally.

Part ratings
At this moment the part ratings are hidden until a number of kilometers is done. Since the test bed phase in the development is introduced, people will be able to know the rating of the part before it hits the track (unless they skip the phase). Instead of not knowing your own part rating, the system will be changed to trying to find out the other teams' ratings. Which makes sense, because you can always know everything from your own team, but need to look out where the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents are. Therefore over time the more kilometers your opponents do with their parts, you will get a better view of where they are with their parts. For now this will be kept the same for everyone (as in, there's no way to increase the rate of finding out how good another team is) as otherwise it will get too complex.

Better overview
Parts will be shown in such a way that it is clear which part evolved from which part. A hierarchical structure in which the first part is shown first and the other parts are followed by it.

Weight tweaking
Weight is still too much of a random factor. It can't be that a part all of a sudden is XX kg lighter. Especially for the heavier parts such as the chassis this is still a problem.

Project mechanics
The number of mechanics was set to a really low number, making it usually no different to have 2 or 5 mechanics assigned. This has been updated.

The careful reader will notice that the last two items (designer instructions & testing programs) did not make the cut. But these will be implemented later.

As I've noticed that there have been quite a few complaints about the morale/motivation, I've decided to reset that for all persons for now.

Next up I'll look into all the annoying bugs and/or features that are not working as correctly.

If irregularities occur, let me know and I will look into them as soon as possible. Have fun everyone!

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.