Pitwall news

As you may have noticed, the server started going slow about 24 hours ago. The cause of this I'm not 100% sure about, but I have my presumption. The problem has been fixed now, and because of the lost day of testing I have extended the testing session with 1 day. Therefore it's still possible to test today, and because of this qualifying has been reduced to 1 day only (tomorrow, Saturday).

The job market page has been updated today. The page now also has an option to select persons based on the fact whether they're allowed to leave the team immediately. This can be done so by selecting "Allowed to leave". This is an option that the manager of the person has to release the person from the team without firing them. If the person is willing to negotiate with other teams, and he/she accepts a new contract the person will transfer to the new team immediately.

This option is also shown on the person page, but there was a bug that caused that this option was only shown for persons who were allowed to leave in the current season of their contract. In other words, if in season 2 of the contract the person was allowed to leave the person the person wouldn't be shown as allowed to leave in season 3 of the contract, while he/she was actually able to immediately transfer to a new team once an agreement was reached. This bug has been fixed, and the person page now also sets the tick in the "Allowed to leave immediately" contract option, even if this option was not agreed in the initial contract (how it was showing before).
Because of this, everyone is advised to check their contracts to make sure that nobody forgot that they allowed their person to leave the team a few seasons ago.

Another change is the job market list now only shows drivers and staff who haven't retired yet. And the division of the team is showing next to the team name.

Ever since the introduction of the market wages there has been no change to the system to let it evolve automatically. Now I've taken the time to analyse the wages (how high they are, etc.) and I've decided to make some changes in this area as there were situations that could completely undermine the system. Sometimes some teams would offer ridiculous amounts, and that completely skewed the expectancy of the person. This has now been changed so that if the market wage is a certain times (not revealing how much, but it's a really low number) higher than what the person is expecting, the market wage will be set to that expected wage multiplied by that same multiplier as before (which I'm not revealing). Long story short: if the market wage is much higher than what the person expects, the market wage will be set at the maximum that the person will expect.
This change has been introduced with immediate effect. Meaning that any new negotiations that are started -with someone who is not negotiating yet and who hasn't been approached recently- are using this new system.
This change will reduce the contract wages by quite a lot, so it might be beneficial to give your personnel new contracts.

I have spoken recently on the forum or the chat that there's going to be an update to the negotiations in Pitwall, but this was not what I was talking about. That is a different update. It will change the way negotiations are done, not the technical side of the negotiations.

Further more there are a couple of other things in the pipeline that are being worked on simultaneously, but it's too early to give details about that. The first thing that will be introduced of that will be the updated development system that will be changed a bit. That will also receive some GUI updates so that there's a better overview for all the parts, and all the running projects.

As I announced earlier I would be making some changes to the game to make it more transparent. One of the things that I had in mind was to display how efficient your designers are (which is excluding the number of assigned designers to a project).
This information is now displayed on the top of the development page.

While implementing these changes, I also made some changes to this formula as it was too similar for most teams (almost nobody was going slower than the optimal rate). I've changed the multipliers of the formula a bit, but also introduced discipline and synergy as variables in the formula. This means that the efficiency will be much harder to keep up.
The formula is also influenced by the short term focus (mostly) and also by the fast designers specialty. If the specialty is not enabled, then it will never be possible to reach the highest level.

These changes will slow down project development a little bit, but that's something that I had planned as well as I felt it was starting to get too much.

Let the battles of the pencils begin! The press release feature that was loved in Pitwall 1 and has been requested a lot to be returned has finally returned to Pitwall.

Pitwall Supporters can now write a press release statement again from the press page. The press statement will be shown in the normal newspaper as well, but only the team and division ranking will be used to calculate how important the item is.

There has been a change compared to how this feature was in PW1, as now there's no more sponsor bonus when releasing a statement. This is purely cosmetic to improve the community feeling and, more importantly, to scare the competition.