Pitwall news

As was discussed in the chat last week, I pushed development for the fans section forward since there were concerns that it was no longer working as intended. I looked into it, but the truth is that before it wasn't working as intended, and people were getting too much money from it. Because of a fix in something slightly related the bug got fixed.
Managers had obviously already gotten used to and planned in the extra surplus in fans income. So it wouldn't have been fair to say that they're out of luck. Because of those reasons, I pushed the changes that were long overdue for the Fans section.

When Pitwall 2 was created, it was originally planned to introduce what was introduced today. But since other stuff had a higher priority, it was pushed back and honestly not looked at again. Everything on the fans page was quite unclear, and it shows the original direction that I had taken with Pitwall 2; everything is hidden, and you'll have to notice the changes - bad game design idea. It has been my intention and I have been making everything much more transparant in Pitwall, and thus this update also reflects that change of direction in the game.

The old fans page allowed the manager to set a price and an image level. The image level is still there, and it now displays the modifiers which it influences. The team discipline has been slightly tweaked. The fans increase has been tweaked quite a lot.
Before fans would join the team based on the results and this parameter. The parameter was much more extreme before since it was the only parameter. How it works now is can be seen from the "Fanbase" section underneath "Fans modifiers". All the parameters are listed there, which start with the base value which is 100%. After the addition or subtraction of the parameters which play an influence we get to the total. This total is applied to the number of fans who want to join based on the results that you scored. So if there are 100 new fans who want to join after a result, and your fans modifier is set to 85% then you will only have 85 fans who join.

Before fans would pay each time they join and that would be it. This has been changed by introducing the merchandise sales. The idea is that your fans will pay for team merchandise on average once every 2 seasons. This depends on two modifiers: supplier and pricing. The supplier can be changed once per season, and plays an influence on the weekly sales and fans increase. The pricing is similar to what we had before, but now the manager can't set his own price any longer. He has to choose ranging from "Very cheap" to "Very expensive", which also play an influence on weekly sales and fans increase, but they also show the average price per product.
As I wrote above, before the fan would pay each time he joined. This has been removed and the fans will pay once every 2 seasons on average. The amount that they pay depends on the "Average product price" for the pricing category that was set, and on the sales modifier. The payout is paid during the weekupdate, and is also shown in the "Merchandise sales" section. A team is allowed to change its pricing for merchandise twice per season. After that they will need to wait until the next season, just like when they hit the limit for suppliers or image level.

Apart from the fans changes, there have been minor layout tweaks such as on buttons, feedback messages, and panels.

The rules for season 24 have just been published. Car wise and racing wise nothing much has been changed. The biggest change is in the prize money. It has been increased quite a lot, but this is coupled with a gameplay change which means that from now on the prize money paid out will vary from division to division. The highest division (1) will get 100% of the stated prize money. Division 2 will get 65%, and division 3 gets 40%. The reason for this change is as it only makes sense since development costs more in the higher division, and we don't want to encourage teams to sandbag in the lower divisions.

Another rule change has been introduced which specifies how many drivers can take part in a session of the same team. Currently this is unlimited which means that a team could run as many different drivers as they want per session by swapping them over all the time in the car. From season 24 this will be limited to 3 drivers in the normal week sessions, and to 2 drivers in the off season testing only weeks. This does not mean that you need to drive with your first and second driver. You can still drive with 2 youth drivers in the testing only weeks. You just need to choose which driver you want to drive with.
From next week on a driver will also be able to participate in just 1 race session per week. This change was necessary to prevent drivers from participating in multiple race sessions per weekend, and potentially gaining much more driver training than was originally planned. This would lead to overpowered youth drivers, which is something that was reduced in recent changes.

The racescript has also had a small tweak, but that change will also be introduced just next week. The pitstop errors were too uncommon and they have been slightly increased. This will make the pit stop practice multiplier more important again.

There have been calls to re-allow refueling, so we will run a politics decision on that this week. It will mean that refueling in the race is allowed again. Since if we push that through I want to keep strategies open, we will not reduce the maximum fuel tank size so that people can still try to finish a race with really short pitstops.

Welcome to season 23 everyone! This season was supposed to be the season of the introduction of Parc fermé, but the majority of managers have decided that this rule change should not be adopted and this was of course respected.

Just like in real world, there's a crisis raging in Pitwall. We've had to adopt our calendar to the situation where we can't travel. Therefore, there will be races this season where we race on a track that we've already raced on. Also, the races are in the European area to reduce the amount of travel. Normally, hopefully, things should be back to normal next season.

Suppliers have also been affected, and we've seen the first big changes in suppliers since the leaving and joining of suppliers was announced. Which supplier leaves and joins is determined and discussed by the admins, with me having the final say. The page on the admin panel where we can make changes to who joins/leaves was updated and improved last season to make sure that no changes can be made to suppliers joining or leaving for the next season and the season after that. This was necessary, since if we would make changes now for suppliers of next season, then there would be no warning message for the managers. This is what happened. Changes were made last season for this season (we obviously hadn't thought about the pull out mechanism), and because of this there was no news center announcement for some of the suppliers that pulled out.
Obviously this was our bad, but we won't be making any other changes (refund of admin points, re-instating suppliers, changing supplier contracts, ...) since the game functionality worked as intended, there was just no announcement. In real life this happens as well (many examples to sum up). I will make some changes to the supplier pages so that it's clear which supplier is pulling back.

Enjoy season 23! The focus is still on the race script, and we should have some more changes and fixes (to youth races) coming up to that soon.

In the past development updates it became clear that there was a big issue with the skills of staff that was not correctly updating. In fact, the skills have remained virtually the same since the start of Pitwall, apart from the persuade skill. This was never intended, and had to be corrected.

I removed the faulty code, and created a new system which is much easier than the overly complex system that was in place. The new system updates the skills of each assigned staff each day. There are several factors which play an influence apart from the maximum skill and talent of a person: age is the biggest factor, but the role of the person (head staff gains optimally compared to junior) and the division the person is working in (not that big of a difference).

To correct the incorrect past 21 seasons, I have run a script which has looked at the age the person would have been at that point, and have done corrections. Because of that a lot of staff have jumped in skills and therefore I also ran an extra reputation ranking and rating calculation script. The skills of staff will now improve like they were supposed to all this time.

Today the world of Pitwall has become a bit more democratic with the introduction of Politics. This module allows managers to vote for rule changes in the published rulebook for the upcoming season.

The governing body can propose one or more rule changes in a proposal. This is then published after which all active managers get a notification in their news center. They can then vote to approve, reject or abstain to vote. Making a vote costs 500 administrative points. Most votes will require 50%, but this number can vary depending on several factors.
If managers vote for, then they agree with all the proposed rule changes, against then they are against obviously, and when they decide to abstain they want to remain neutral but they will keep the vote for a next proposal. Abstaining can be interesting in case you want to save up votes for future proposals where you want to throw more weight into the scale. You can vote with a maximum of 3 votes, and it's not possible to accumulate more than 3 votes.

The first proposal has just been sent out of the door, and it is related to a new rule that was also introduced over the weekend: parc ferme conditions. This rule is currently set not to be enforced next season, but if enough people vote in favor (50%) then it will be adopted into the rule book next season.

In the future it will be possible for managers to create proposals, which will cost a lot of administrative points and have other requirements. But for now we will stick with the governing body making rule change proposals. Of course, the governing body keeps its veto right, but we intend not to use it too much.

Go out and vote! Next up is a new strategy page that is coming soon, and I will try to fix the bugs with the cars not getting of the grid in some races.