Those who follow the chat will notice that I've recently been able to pick up the development pace a bit for Pitwall. The game hasn't had a lot of development recently due to other projects, but planning has never stopped and soon I'll announce a host of features which will take Pitwall to a next phase.
Person negotiations & fixes
Before I started this new phase, which you may call Pitwall 3.0, I wanted to clean up some bugs and correct some imbalances. The person negotiations bug should be fixed now, and persons will be less likely to change their demands all the time now.
The most recent change is that the person market page is now split off from the person page. This should make the page cleaner, and it should provide more info to the user. It's not completely done yet, but we're nearly there. You're also able to check the entire ranking now due to pagination. The search panel is integrated into this page now as well, and the "No teams" filter has been fixed so that people who used to have a contract are now also shown.
Skill visibility
Next I made some changes to the skills for persons. The visibility of a skill starts with no knowledge, to x/3 and goes up to x/20, giving you a better idea of how good someone is in that skill. This is influenced by how known a person is. The more "progress" you have on the person, the more skills you can see. Progress towards the full skill is achieved by being assigned to a race position, ranking, coach knowledge and scout reports. As an external team there isn't much you can do to quickly increase that value other than scouting, so that you get to know the talent and the full skill set of a person. Yesterday some changes were pushed through in this system. Before the "assigned to races" would be a public stat. This has now been split off into a private and public part. The public part is the same as before, but it allows to go higher now up to 60%. This means that if a driver races, then by just racing the driver can unlock 60% of his skills to be seen for others. The rest needs to be compensated by scouting, reputation and coaches. The new part is that the private section is reserved for teams who the person raced for. This new part allows for 40% of the skill set to be unlocked, on top of the public part. This means that a driver his skill set can be unlocked for 100% by just racing. It will require 30 races to completely unlock this skill set.
Another change in this system is that before scout reports would only count for the current season, and those for last season for 50%. All other scout reports would not contribute toward progress to see the full skill set. This has now been removed and every scout report will always count. There is no longer a limit where a report won't count any longer. After 5 seasons there is no longer a drop, and a report will still count for 25%.
Pitwall 3.0
It has been briefly talked about before, but I've planned to make some drastic changes to the game in certain sections where the game is really lacking a fun factor or where it's just too complex. The main focus of this update is to make the game more playable, easier to get into, and to introduce the new race script.
The idea was to develop all the changes on the beta server, and once it would be done to import them into the main game all at once. I've already tweaked this slightly, as some of the PW3 changes have already been integrated. Such changes are the performance improvements (which caused some issues a couple of weeks ago), the skill system mentioned above, negotiations which automatically renew, and some other smaller changes.
The biggest change will be the race script. The current one is in need of an upgrade, and I decide to start again from scratch as the way it will work will be completely different. I won't go too technical, but the script will be constantly running which will make some tasks easier and which will give admins more power to easily restart the script in case of difficulties. Apart from tweaks and bug fixes there will be a new highlights system which should immerse you more into the race. Also introduced will be cooling which will require a bit more choices which need to be made which can hamper performance, and new parts which will be introduced.
Other changes for this version will include changes to the youth tiers. These will be reduced in size to 4 tiers, but more drivers will be assignable in the bottom tiers. And it will be possible to set strategies for these races. Development and production will get an update as well, but I won't reveal too much on that yet.
The sponsors system will get a complete overhaul. The sponsor relations system will be removed since it's very hard to maintain and it will be replaced by a couple of sponsor stats which will influence how sponsors see you. The goal of the PW3 update is to make it much clearer which stats make a difference, and these changes are part of that.
Finally, the personal section will be completely reset. There are a couple of managers who are billionaire due to the imbalanced shares system we had in the beginning. This creates a major imbalance and I decided that we will just reset that section. The public teams will remain public, but all shares will be available on the market again. The number of shares that are created when a team goes public will be reduced to 20 however.
Automatic qualifying and strategy
Another change which was planned for PW3 was automatic qualifying and strategy. I decided to already push this forward to this version so that we can get more racing on track. I will try to get this system ready before the start of week 3. The idea is to get more cars on track during the season, even for teams which are inactive. By default every team will opt in to automatic qualifying, which used to be a paid feature on PW1. This means that teams who have not qualified 10 minutes before the end of the session will automatically go out and do a lap. This will qualify them for the race, and an automatic strategy will set the drivers up for the race. It will be possible to also set a strategy calculated for the managers who have qualified, or you can still set one yourself.
All of these changes for PW3 may be pushed forward if it makes sense. I will try to keep you guys updated on the progress, but don't expect all the changes above to be ready in the current season.
Good luck in season 21 to everyone!
