Russia 122 for 2 at Lunch

[Langeveldt]

I keep trying to let this go and play something else but the rest of this game is just too darned good.

So against a swinging ball at Trent Bridge Russia have cruised to 122 for 2. I have tried absolutely everything to get an AI batsman to behave as they would in real life (As in 50 all out I would imagine the Russkis against Johnson and Harris), and yet I see slaps over cover for six, flicks over fine leg for six,as impeccable straight drives splitting mid on and mid off, and the sneaky Russians batting with Greenidge and Haynes like assuredness.

I have tried every pitch combination, every difficulty level, and as a cricket gamer since Brian Lara 95, would hope I know the right end of the cricket bat from the wrong end. So PRO shouldn't be an insurmountable challenge in getting these Russians out.

This game is supposed to be finished now, and I am taken aback by the polished nature of everything else. So why can we not get AI batting right? Must I wait and just hope that it gets fixed in 2016? Or is my bowling really that bad?

(Russia on one bar of skill for everything, minimal anticipation and strength)

 

[grkrama]

What difficulty are you playing ? going with that skilling thread with Pro difficulty gives you better results apart form tail ender thing.

Also this is something that BA im sure will get it right next time around. Also i would recommend Playing against humans is a better reward for bowling.

 

[Langeveldt]

Pro.. I've tried the Skilling thread, and it does give a somewhat more authentic experience, yes, but then I don't get any variation in teams as set rules regarding attributes have to be followed. Surely the gap between Russia and Australia should be noticeable here in 2015 with cricket gaming.

I just hope Big Ant know about it if it's not just me. It completely ruins an otherwise fine game.

 

[whiteninness]

Unfortunately the attributes don't have a huge effect on the game.

Neither does your bowling really. You can bowl tripe and still get plenty of balls lobbed to mid on. You can also bowl lots of corkers and get nothing for it.

I really hate to say that the AI batting innings at times feels....and I REALLY hate saying this.... scripted.

 

[Langeveldt]

Well I am glad there is at least a consensus of some sorts, which may go some way to alerting BA that it is something that needs fixing in the next iteration. I think it is safe to say we have exhausted all avenues of testing and have reached the end of the development on '14 anyway.

It's more important to some people than others. Unfortunately for myself if it's Russia walking to victory in a test match, then it completely ruins the immersion for me. Others enjoy the beautiful graphics and online experience and have never noticed that all the hours spent in the Academy essentially make only cosmetic differences. I see some threads hundreds of pages long where people talk about academy skilling, how it is incorrect for some downloadable teams and think to myself, "Well it makes little difference anyway."

 

[MattW]

Genuine question - why do you want to be able to absolutely and consistently thrash a team? That 50 all out scenario might well be realistic to a real world result - but it's a video game, where would the fun be in having results that are certainties before you even commence the match, why play to just see them crumble with little effort?

While quite clearly, it should be significantly easier to defeat Russia than a test playing nation - I don't see the merit in making it so that it would essentially be impossible for another result to occur. There is no point in my view of making the difference between the best team and the worst team so large that the match is not worth playing - why make a game with an option to play a match that is over before it began?

If your point is simply that skills should be better implemented and more impactful - I don't think the point is best made with extreme cases like Australia v Russia. I would personally suggest that the case I would like to see differences in skills between teams optimised for would be cases like Scotland in the 2015 World Cup - a team that lost all their matches, but were able to really push hard against sides that were close to them in rank, and still give a slight scare to off form sides that should be much better. Sides being weaker than you, but able to put pressure on if you lose focus.

I think there is always a strong case for a bias to be towards making something that results in enjoyable matches - even if that means there's some degree of sacrifice of realism in edge cases.

 

[blockerdave]

Genuine question - why do you want to be able to absolutely and consistently thrash a team? That 50 all out scenario might well be realistic to a real world result - but it's a video game, where would the fun be in having results that are certainties before you even commence the match, why play to just see them crumble with little effort?

While quite clearly, it should be significantly easier to defeat Russia than a test playing nation - I don't see the merit in making it so that it would essentially be impossible for another result to occur. There is no point in my view of making the difference between the best team and the worst team so large that the match is not worth playing - why make a game with an option to play a match that is over before it began?

If your point is simply that skills should be better implemented and more impactful - I don't think the point is best made with extreme cases like Australia v Russia. I would personally suggest that the case I would like to see differences in skills between teams optimised for would be cases like Scotland in the 2015 World Cup - a team that lost all their matches, but were able to really push hard against sides that were close to them in rank, and still give a slight scare to off form sides that should be much better. Sides being weaker than you, but able to put pressure on if you lose focus.

I think there is always a strong case for a bias to be towards making something that results in enjoyable matches - even if that means there's some degree of sacrifice of realism in edge cases.

Genuine question - what's the point of Russia being in the game at all if you can't thrash them?

The whole point of there being teams with different stars ranging from <1 up to 5 is surely to allow a range of challenges and playing Russia should feel differently to playing even a Scotland/Ireland and much different to playing South Africa.

Similarly, if he wants to play AS Russia vs Australia that should be much different as a challenge than playing as South Africa vs Australia.

This lack of a faithful representation of a team's (or individual's) merit in terms of star/skill per the academy in favour of gaming a result considered fun/competitive/"fair" is one of the game's biggest flaws and the suggestion that it stems from design rather than implementation is staggering.

It's surely only right that the game returns a faithful representation of the team's abilities modified by the player's ability and inputs and the match/pitch conditions. It's then down to the player to find his/her fun through changing the difficulty, adjusting who they play with/against and adjusting individual skills/attributes in the tool Big Ant gave us supposedly for that.

You're basically saying it's no fun to get blind drunk and so every drink will be 3%ABV even if it's wine saying 14% on the bottle.

 

[T.J.Hooker]

I don't see the merit in making it so that it would essentially be impossible for another result to occur.

Well, surely you want a somewhat realistic range of difficulty in the game. Shouldn't half volleys and long hops should be nicely thrashable for a skilled batsman? Shouldn't a really awful batsmen struggle to survive against a highly skilled bowler?

If you have the potential for highly skilled players to dominate then obviously you have the potential to line up teams with very uneven abilities. I'm not sure I see a problem with this.

 

[MattW]

Very uneven matchups make sense, teams should be uneven. But my question is essentially, how bad does 0 skill need to be?

An example I've used in the past to complain about bowling controls like the old EA ones where the way that they made bowling hard was to just have the pitch marker being practically uncontrollable. The goal there was difficulty, but it meant losing the link with how good the bowler was.

The question out of that would be, do you make a game where you accept a baseline of skill - that to a reasonable extent, what your inputs are can be carried out by the player you are controlling.

If you had no player input, then it would be fairly straightforward, but once you add the user in, should they have enough control over a bad player that by playing perfectly they could do well, or if playing as the better team, if a high difficulty setting is chosen, should an AI team that would have no chance normally still try and make the game challenging for you?

 

[cricket_online]

Very uneven matchups make sense, teams should be uneven. But my question is essentially, how bad does 0 skill need to be?

An example I've used in the past to complain about bowling controls like the old EA ones where the way that they made bowling hard was to just have the pitch marker being practically uncontrollable. The goal there was difficulty, but it meant losing the link with how good the bowler was.

The question out of that would be, do you make a game where you accept a baseline of skill - that to a reasonable extent, what your inputs are can be carried out by the player you are controlling.

If you had no player input, then it would be fairly straightforward, but once you add the user in, should they have enough control over a bad player that by playing perfectly they could do well, or if playing as the better team, if a high difficulty setting is chosen, should an AI team that would have no chance normally still try and make the game challenging for you?

Matt, I can't speak for others but my expectation of skill level is follows :-

Minimum (0 bars) - The batsman should bat like Chris "Phantom" Martin, i.e. no clue which end of the bat he's holding and averages between 0 to 5
Maximum (Full bar) - The batsman is a reincarnation of Don Bradman and would be literally impossible to get out cheaply unless he gets a corker and averages in 80s or 90s
Bar half full (50% skill level) - The batsman averages around 30
Bar 75% full - The batsman averages in high 40s
Bar 80% full - Batsman averages close to 60
Bar 90% full - Batsman averages in 70s


Similarly for bowling my scale would be as follows...

Minimum (0 bars) - Bowler who doesn't bowl and would average in excess of 100
Maximum (Full bar) - Bowler who averages in teens a la Sydney Barnes
Bar 50% full - Bowler who averages in high 40s
Bar 75% full - Bowler who averages in early 30s
Bar 80% full - Bowler who averages in late 20s
Bar 90% full - Bowler who averages in early 20s

Again Big Ant's or other people's scale may vary but it should allow for every kind of batsman or bowler to be represented in the game. Currently there's no scale to get you batsmen who consistently average below 15, forget replicating Chris Martin or Danny "The Duck" Morrison. This is what people want to see, i.e. the skill levels and attributes should mean something. We have such a great player editor (DBC Academy) but it looks like it doesn't matter how you skill players, especially batsmen, as even a 0 skilled batsman is capable of flaying McGrath on a green pitch in the game.

 

[MattW]

Genuine question - what's the point of Russia being in the game at all if you can't thrash them?

Well, because they asked to be...

Australia vs Russia is an unrealistic thing by itself, they would never play cricket against each other, there would be no point.

When Russia do play cricket it would be against fairly similar sides, ICC affiliates that they would have a slight chance of winning against. The matches might not be as skilled, but that would be on both sides.

 

[cricket_online]

Well, because they asked to be...

Australia vs Russia is an unrealistic thing by itself, they would never play cricket against each other, there would be no point.

When Russia do play cricket it would be against fairly similar sides, ICC affiliates that they would have a slight chance of winning against. The matches might not be as skilled, but that would be on both sides.

You are missing the point. This is a video game and anything's possible. Russia may or may not face Australia in real life but in case they do, Russia will more likely be routed. A 0 rated team should be flogged by a decent side. If a low rated team or player doesn't play like a village cricket team, my question would be why bother having ratings and skill/attribute bars?

 

[MattW]

You are missing the point. This is a video game and anything's possible. Russia may or may not face Australia in real life but in case they do, Russia will more likely be routed. A 0 rated team should be flogged by a decent side. If a low rated team or player doesn't play like a village cricket team, my question would be why bother having ratings and skill/attribute bars?

That's the thing though, no cricket game has tried to simulate village cricket, it's international cricket, and the domestic cricket of the top cricket nations.

There's an issue of scope here, how much variance in skill is it reasonable to expect between top and bottom?

There's a reason that in most sports games I'm aware of, when players are rated out of 100, the worst will be 50, or close to it, not 0.

 

[T.J.Hooker]

Very uneven matchups make sense, teams should be uneven. But my question is essentially, how bad does 0 skill need to be?

The lowest likely ability level for the lowest level of cricket in the game. You don't need to be able to simulate the skill level of some random septuagenarian pulled off the street and sent in to bat against professional bowling, but I guess you do need to be able to simulate the skill level of Phil Tufnell, which isn't a great deal higher.

The question out of that would be, do you make a game where you accept a baseline of skill - that to a reasonable extent, what your inputs are can be carried out by the player you are controlling.

If you had no player input, then it would be fairly straightforward, but once you add the user in, should they have enough control over a bad player that by playing perfectly they could do well, or if playing as the better team, if a high difficulty setting is chosen, should an AI team that would have no chance normally still try and make the game challenging for you?

Well I think player stats have to set the limits of both good and bad performance. Perfect user input corresponds with the best that player might reasonably perform, terrible player input corresponds with the lower limit, with the more extreme batting errors reserved for genuine tailenders or incredibly bad input. You have to be responsive to deliberately bad input, I suppose, or you infringe on user freedom a little bit.

Anyway consider this scenario : hanging on desperately for a draw with a genuine tailender, having to concentrate to safely defend in the same way you have to concentrate to score runs with a recognised batsman. Potentially that sounds to me like something that might be challenging and fun, in the right match context.

It seems absolutely straightforward to me that if I'm playing as Alastair Cook, I should have a good chance of biffing the quicks with pull shots if they drop short, but should find beating the field with drives challenging. If I'm batting as Monty Panesar, then maybe I'd like boundaries to be possible if I get a rank bad ball and respond with good input, but otherwise I think I'm ok with finding it difficult to get the ball off the square.

The user input, I suppose, must always have the capacity to make the difference between a very bad performance and a very good one, but the practical limits of performance must necessarily be quite different for Monty than for Cook.

 

[cricket_online]

That's the thing though, no cricket game has tried to simulate village cricket, it's international cricket, and the domestic cricket of the top cricket nations.

There's an issue of scope here, how much variance in skill is it reasonable to expect between top and bottom?

There's a reason that in most sports games I'm aware of, when players are rated out of 100, the worst will be 50, or close to it, not 0.

So what you are saying is that we will never be able to have a true tailender in DBC. Other sports games do represent players as novices for certain aspects of gameplay. As an example I play Madden and if I use a non-QB as my team's QB the drop in skill level is easily apparent. JJ Watt may be the greatest defender in American football but if you put him as a QB he absolutely sucks and struggles to complete simple passes.

I would expect the same in DBC as I wouldn't expect all the cricketers to be all-rounders. A good bowler may suck at batting and vice-versa for a top order batsman. If 0 rating means competent skill level you'll represent the game of cricket inaccurately as by default every player in the game is an all-rounder which is not true at all. Even earlier cricket games were able to depict this aspect of gameplay accurately as in BLIC 2005 or EA Cricket 2007 you could easily see and tell the difference between a top order batsman and a tailender.