Cricket Academy: Normalising Skills and Attributes of created players

[arjwiz]

Since Cricket Academy doesn't normalise skills by different creators, isn't CA unreliable?

I've been trying to figure this out for a long time, and I think this is one of the biggest flaws in an otherwise terrific portion of the game. I've seen this spoken about, but there hasn't been any answer yet as far as I'm aware.

Make no mistake about it, Cricket Academy is a fantastic piece of work. However, the core concept relies on individuals creators to not just create physical likelihoods, but also to fill out skills and attributes of the players. Now, unless such important details are filled by a single team of creators who follow the same base standards, there are bound to be terrible anomalies in the ratings given to players by different creators. This is not anyone's fault, it is just a natural occurrence - some would say a score (or rating) of 14/20 is good, some would say 18/20 is good.

Case in point - I just loaded up a match. WI All Time vs Pakistan All Time. I noticed that the Pakistan All Time team's batting is rated 2.5 stars out of 5. So, I looked at the batting lineup. All 11 players were marked as All Rounders. That didn't seem right. So I entered CA and went through the player skills.

The results were shocking.

Every player has logically incorrect skills.

Take Saeed Anwar for instance.

Apparently one of the world's greatest ever on-side players has a skill rating of 3/20 for "On Side". However, he has a skill rating of 19/20 for off-break and 20/20 for drift, which would make him one of the best ever off-spin bowlers.

Granted, "Get Best" doesn't necessarily select the best players and teams. And as far as I know, there is no way of seeing which creator's Saeed Anwar "Get Best" has selected.

But even if we manually downloaded teams from blockerdave's thread, which we should all do any way, there are bound to be visible differences in the way different creators fill out player skills.

To me, player skills are the most important part of CA - significantly more important than what the player looks like. If a lower-end County batsman has better batting skills than a Saeed Anwar, then there is a problem.

What I'm looking for is if this has been discussed elsewhere and a solution found to this, or if there is something I have overlooked that shows that isn't a problem after all. If not, what is the best way to solve this?

 

[Snowy]

The solution is you can edit the skills yourself, or use the default on-disc skills.

 

[yellowlink]

Well What I am doing is I go there and fix the skills by myself. It doesn't take that long actually. I already have Pak and Aus ATB done.

Just go by one by one individually and change their stats, the get best feature is only based on the team selection. Their stats are all messed up, Some of them are even Leg spinners when they are supposed to be Off Spinners, and Vice Versa. Take Bill O'Reiley for example he is Leg spin but in the game someone made him off spin.

I know its time consuming, but it's going to be well worth the time. If people really want I can try to upload my changes to their stats that I have done, so you guys can download them.

Also, All of their Attributes are Kind of glitched as well, Someone who made the teams never edited their stats, or their skill sets, but it shouldn't be a problem.

 

[arjwiz]

Well What I am doing is I go there and fix the skills by myself.

Yes, that's a workaround, although online would continue to have this problem. Most of my games will be online.

But I suppose there isn't much that can be done unless someone like you uploads the correctly skilled players and DBC offers those as Get Best.

 

[Rowdoss]

The solution is you can edit the skills yourself, or use the default on-disc skills.

Yep i agree. I got stuck into editing the all time best teams the other day. Gave players more realistic ratings, changed a lot of players body shapes. and tinkered with the retro uniforms. Gave all the players appropriate hats/helmets/pads etc.. as to the era they played in
Im quite proud of them actually Doesnt take as long as you might think either!

 

[blockerdave]

Yes, that's a workaround, although online would continue to have this problem. Most of my games will be online.

But I suppose there isn't much that can be done unless someone like you uploads the correctly skilled players and DBC offers those as Get Best.

as i have been saying throughout, the only solution is for people to make tweaks themselves. i'll be honest, all the work i did wasn't "for the community" as much as it was for myself, because i wanted my game to be the best for me. i shared the work and made this thread to encourage others as well because the more people involved the better (except for Chunnster).

this is crowd-sourcing, pure and simple, if you see issues, tweak, share and let people know and we will get it better.

 

[arjwiz]

If anyone's really interested, I spent a few days and have re-skilled most of the players, including all international, IPL and ATB players.

I'm wondering if @BigAntStudios can provide the option, in future versions of the Academy, to download the entire database of players along with their skills as a CSV, which can then be edited on a computer and uploaded again (or at least the download part of it). This would make it much easier to compare players' skills and edit.

 

[barmyarmy]

I expressed surprise when Big Ant announced this system at how they were going to get consistency between different creators.
Having worked on the AC13 roster (with far fewer players and only 5 or 6 of us doing player skills) it was a big job to achieve consistency there so I didn't see how DB14 could get it right.
That said I honestly can't say it's affected my game play experience at all at this point and if I found something jarring I've got the option to fix it myself.

 

[Frostyvegi]

I'll be running some tests tonight and probably over the long weekend and playing with the skills alot and seeing what constitutes a 'realistic' skill set, mainly for fielding (and seeing what effect it has on the Superman Syndrome). I'll report back here with my results.

 

[arjwiz]

Great. For now I'm working only on batting and bowling skills myself, leaving fielding attributes completely as they are. I will try and run some simulated matches over the weekend to see how it performs. For example, over the course of a twenty test series between Ind and SL ATB, I would like to see Jayawardene and Dravid in the top 3 run scorer spots.

 

[blockerdave]

online and career mode both have normalisation, making the original point by @arjwiz a non-issue.

in casual mode, there can't be a normalisation because how do Big Ant know if i'm making Richie Richardson (nearly 6k test runs at over 44) or Percy Fender (380 test runs at 19) - both players I have made and used in my casual mode games. plus subjectivity... you'll never get me to agree that there have ever been better openers for england than Hobbs and Sutcliffe (individually and as a partnership) and that's obviously gonna feed in to my ratings, whereas someone who dreams of sitting in a bath of jam with the cast of TOWIE watching Cook and Gooch open together will likely rate differently. how can any system cater for that?

further, the majority of the players were created, skilled and attributed before we had the game, so we had no idea of how that feeds into gameplay.

the only way for people to do this is take some ownership of their own rosters, check out what's there, and how it seems to be affecting the games and making the tweaks here.

e.g. @arjwiz thinks anwar is rated incorrectly - cool, you sound like you know more about him so tweak the stats, reshare and maybe we could even have a thread for players where skills/attributes have been edited... then someone could say, ok i'll download LlewellynF7 All Time Pakistan but I need to remember to switch in arjwiz's Anwar etc. etc.

the AT Pakistan rating is obviously off, not sure whose creation that is but it doesn't sound like mine because i guarantee the batsmen are not all rounders... especially hanif mohammed as i made that player myself from scratch. but even so, it's nothing that can't be fixed by the person who spotted it editing and resharing and oh, i don't know... maybe seeing if there is a thread for teams he could ask for it to be added to.

 

[arjwiz]

online and career mode both have normalisation, making the original point by @arjwiz a non-issue.

in casual mode, there can't be a normalisation because how do Big Ant know if i'm making Richie Richardson (nearly 6k test runs at over 44) or Percy Fender (380 test runs at 19) - both players I have made and used in my casual mode games. plus subjectivity... you'll never get me to agree that there have ever been better openers for england than Hobbs and Sutcliffe (individually and as a partnership) and that's obviously gonna feed in to my ratings, whereas someone who dreams of sitting in a bath of jam with the cast of TOWIE watching Cook and Gooch open together will likely rate differently. how can any system cater for that?

further, the majority of the players were created, skilled and attributed before we had the game, so we had no idea of how that feeds into gameplay.

the only way for people to do this is take some ownership of their own rosters, check out what's there, and how it seems to be affecting the games and making the tweaks here.

e.g. @arjwiz thinks anwar is rated incorrectly - cool, you sound like you know more about him so tweak the stats, reshare and maybe we could even have a thread for players where skills/attributes have been edited... then someone could say, ok i'll download LlewellynF7 All Time Pakistan but I need to remember to switch in arjwiz's Anwar etc. etc.

the AT Pakistan rating is obviously off, not sure whose creation that is but it doesn't sound like mine because i guarantee the batsmen are not all rounders... especially hanif mohammed as i made that player myself from scratch. but even so, it's nothing that can't be fixed by the person who spotted it editing and resharing and oh, i don't know... maybe seeing if there is a thread for teams he could ask for it to be added to.

Yes but do we know how normalisation works online? I'm sure it doesn't auto-correct a Saeed Anwar into a batsman or a Simon Doull into a bowler. You don't seem to understand that the point is most definitely an issue to people who care about relatively accurate skills. If you're fine with it, then that's good for you.

In single player mode, subjectivity is always a factor, of course. But that subjectivity is reduced if there is one person or one team who has skilled the players. Especially if that person or team has an understanding of how to fill in the skills - as you said, most players were skilled before creators knew what those skills really meant.

The concern is that of the more glaring issues. One of the highest rated Sachin Tendulkar's, of the millions in CA, has zero skills. Empty. If "get best" downloads this Tendulkar, who then bats worse than Agarkar, then there is a problem.

@blockerdave I know you like being sarcastic in your comments in general, as your comment about the mighty thread showed. As I said, I've begun tweaking and redoing stats of every player in the following squads: Current Test Playing Nation, ATB, IPL and 1999 World Cup. I'm then going to run some tests and, if people care, report results, to ensure that players are fairly represented in my opinion. I also said I'd be happy to upload them if people want to download them despite my subjectivity.

I'm also looking forward to hearing what @Frostyvegi has seen in his test.

 

[blockerdave]

it wasn't sarcasm - if people are finding issues with any teams in that thread, please let me and/or the creator know, and if you tweak any of those teams and reshare, pls do the same.

 

[arjwiz]

it wasn't sarcasm - if people are finding issues with any teams in that thread, please let me and/or the creator know, and if you tweak any of those teams and reshare, pls do the same.

Okay, I will try and complete my reskilling by Saturday and test on Sunday. If I am able to do this properly, I will upload my teams next week and let you know.

 

[Snowy]

And then the people who don't agree with how you have skilled your teams can edit it and upload their own versions.

Like blocker has alluded to, and I have in other posts, people aren't locked in to the ratings that are part of Get Best. They can edit everything the original creator has done and make it their own.

It really is a non-issue in my eyes.