Pitwall news

As season 2 is nearing its grand finale next week, I wanted to let you know in advance about some of the changes that are coming up in season 3.

Persons
Following the changes of last week with the person negotiations, the minimum number of races is used for the persons. If persons are not getting enough races as agreed in their contract, they will be approachable to everyone and able to join another team at any point of their remaining contract.

Team
The staff levels are removed and replaced by short term focus. The percentages and being able to set a specific percentage per level is gone. Now you can only choose 1 level and the teams' focus will be on that one. Please note that this change is already live to allow people to change their main focus already. The main focus for teams has been set to their highest percentage that was set in the old system.

Development
Several changs coming up in this department. First of all, upgrading a chassis will be slightly faster compared to how it is right now. Secondly it will cost more money to upgrade parts. The more you upgrade a part, the slightly higher the costs will be.
Finally the biggest change will be a new statistic that will be added called "expertise" that will be added to each part. This statistic shows how much knowledge the design team have over each part. This statistic will be the one determining how good a part will be, and thus the part creation algorithm will be changed so that it looks at the expertise. This will make making parts more realistic and less random. The chances of having a crappy or amazing part will be slightly reduced as well, as the potential/rating of a part now has a level that it can rely on.
In the future designers will have a few parts that they're specialised in, but that won't be included yet in this system (one step at a time - but I thought I'd let you know already).
This also means that hiring a new designer who is amazing and making him responsible for the chassis on day 1 of his new job won't result in an instant improved chassis. It will take some time for your team to build up the expertise that the designer brings to the team for the various parts.
Please note that this functionality is still under development, and it might not make it on day 1 of season 3 but surely it will be released not much later.

Sponsors
I have disabled the posibility to add sponsors to the game recently and there's a reason for that. The functionality for sponsors to have multiple teams will be enabled as it was already implemented, but never tested. Because of this, I will give everyone the option to cancel their future sponsor deals for a limited time, in case they want to give it a go with another sponsor that might be better than any other that was available when they started negotiations with their current sponsors. Note that not all sponsors will allow multiple teams.

Session
Doing test laps will cost money again just like in the previous version of Pitwall. The price per lap is set at 3 000,- and is the same for every division.

Staff
The cost of firing personnel will be raised to 20 000,- per personnel that is fired. The reasoning behind this is to prevent teams with big cash to constantly hire and fire if they need a few more here or there.