Introduction
Tonight the new person negotiations update has been released. This update tries to make the person negotiations less of a "first one takes it all" system by re-introducing the deadline date where they take a decision. No longer will top ranked persons sign a contract to the first team that offers them a contract. The higher ranked a person is, the longer he (or she) will take before signing a deal.
Approachable
Because of this, some more changes were implemented. No longer are persons unapproachable. You will always be able to open negotiations (costs administrative points), and be able to offer a contract (also costs administrative points - the more offers the less). You're never guaranteed that the person might accept to start negotiations. Once he does, the deadline date will be set and every team will be able to make an offer to be the best offer. Whether the person is willing to start negotiations depends on several factors such as the length remaining, loyalty, whether they're allowed to leave the team, ...
Of course, this would mean that it would be hard to guess when a person is on the brink of wanting to start negotiations. Because of this there's a new convincible stat that you can see on the job market and person pages. This stat tells you when a person is convincible to start negotiations. The better your scouts professionalism stat (visible now on the Scouting page) is, the better of a guess the scouts will be able to make. If it's a tick (V), then the person is willing to start negotiations (which effectively sets the deadline date). If it's a question mark (?), then the person might be convincible with a very good offer. If it's a cross (X), then the person will not be convincible to start a contract negotiations showdown between the teams.
Negotiations page
The negotiations page has been redesigned to allow this new system to work. The layout should be made a bit more intuitive, and the person now gives specific feedback on the contract offer which tells whether they will consider/accept/reject it. There are three types of persons. Those who don't share any information. They will take the offer and not tell you whether you're considered. Those who share it with you when you're in the top X% of the offers. And those who tell you when you're the best offer. This should make it a bit more interesting to deal with negotiations.
Watertight
Another new feature that has been added is the watertightness of a contract. During negotiations the watertightness of a contract can be defined. By default a contract will be somewhat watertight, but this can always be improved by spending administrative points during the negotiations. Once the contract is signed, this can no longer be improved (just like in real life).
This stat allows people to try to find a loophole (better word/term is always welcome in the comments) in the contract. Once they do (from the persons page), then the person will get the "allowed to leave immediately" clause activated. This doesn't mean that they will leave immediately, but that they can if they sign a contract. However, just like the "allowed to leave" clause worked in the past, it doesn't mean that it's activated that the person is interested in negotiations.
This is something that I've been wanting to integrate for a really long time, since it's very common in F1 as well (plenty of examples, most notably Schumacher - Jordan).
Negotiations overview
To make sure that pages don't get too cluttered, a Negotiations overview (Personnel => Negotiations) page has been made where all the person negotiations are shown. Those by your team, but also those active in the entire Pitwall world.
Bug fixes
There have been other small changes and many bug fixes in the system. Most notably the requirements that a person sets are now fixed for 1 season. If nobody is negotiating, then they are also refreshed. But they should no longer refresh all the time. Another change is that every person who is interested or negotiating will get a message if the person changes his or her demands. A new feature is that the person will also send out a message 24 hours before making a decision. This should be a handy reminder for everyone who is negotiating with this person.
Running negotiations
Because these are fundamental changes to the negotiations I've had to cancel all running negotiations, and had to regenerate all requirements from the persons.
Coming up...
Next up is a small little project that I've been wanting to do for a really long time: Politics. This will allow team managers to vote on rule changes. These should then be adopted by the PGB (or PIA?). This should become visible on the beta soon.
After that, we'll be getting a development/racescript change with the introduction of cooling in development, and some interesting development changes.
