well me and my firend came up with 3 pages worht of ideas
You made the point of a career mode where you the player play for schoolboy/club cricket and work your way up to the big time, playing for Australia. First, for a Canadian base product they would not know a lot of the small clubs around Australia, so when you are starting your career mode you create your player using the same technology used in TW 2004, including age, whether your right or left handed, incorporate height and weight from NHL 2003 and chose how fast you are, your reflexes and your agility. Then you could select your gear. So lets say a Gray Nic, size 6, Long Handle bat, Puma Pads, Puma Gloves, Adidas Wrist band, Gray Nic helmet and Puma Shoes. You would do this with a budget of lets say 1,000 dollars. Next you wouldn’t select a club, but make a club name and create all of the players in your team. You should be able to randomize names, looks, equipment for the players. Also selecting a helmet colour for your team and I say only a helmet because I don’t think you have seen any schoolboy cricket players in a One Day uniform. The colour you choose for your club will be the same colour for the caps in your team. Also don’t forget a logo. Next you would create a league. Say 8 teams, you would only select helmet colour, name, logo and skill level. The computer would randomly select a list of names already selected based on the skill level you have chosen. Speaking of skill level, in playing Cricket 2004, we could easily see that you could create a super player with 100% stats, but the people at EA should incorporated that. In the Create Players page you, like in 2004, would be able to select whether you’re a batter, bowler, keeper or an all-rounder. As a bowler you can customize your bowling style. You can select a top speed for you as a bowler. Now this may seem stupid, but if you were in U14 and you wanted your top speed to be 120km an hour your accuracy and various other elements will go down. So you may slow it down to around 100km an hour to get maximum pace without throwing away too much accuracy, like Brett Lee used to bowl. You can also select if you are a swing bowler. (Normal or reverse) Swing will also come into affect with accuracy and without practice you will never make it the big league.
Earlier in this post you did mention practicing and balancing it with womanizing and studying. Well instead of attending practice, and if any of you have played LMA Manager 2004 this will seem familiar, you will select how much time you spend on different aspect (nets, bowling, fielding, catching, fitness, keeping, etc) You can go into the nets yourself like in 2004 to prepare yourself for games. Practicing allows the player to become better, so as a bowler your pace vs accuracy chart will become a lot better and allowing you to bowl faster and as a batter your confidence metre will be easier to fill and a harder to lose. Before I go any further, you may be wondering about your skill level as a batter. When selecting yourself as a batter you can choose your preferred position in the order, (opening, upper middle order, lower middle order, tail end) but this won’t always where you bat, your coach or captain, depending on which age group your in, will select you batting position as on your form vs total skill. You can select your favourite shot and whether you are a passive or aggressive batter. As a passive batter you will try and push for singles and smack sixes and fours only when the bowling is loose. When a player controlled passive batter is at the crease his specialities will be finding the gaps and your shots will be less likely to be in the air. As an aggressive batter you will either be an opener or tail ender, depending on your skill to connect bat and ball. As an aggressive batter your power to try and hit the ball will increase. A graph will allow you to select this, but as a younger batter the power vs connecting bat and ball ability will be lower than if you have been playing for a while. The higher the power the more likely you will either totally miss the ball or edge it to the keeper or slips. Practice and age will allow you to improve on this.
You can also select to be a leg spin, off spin, left arm orthodox etc. Similar to pace bowling you can select how much pace to put on the ball, the younger, the slower the pace will need to get maximum turn. But too slow the batsmen will cart you all over the ground.
As a keeper you will also have to buy keeping pads and gloves.
As you get older selectors for representative cricket will appear at your matches. Once you have made it into these teams you can apply for sponsorship to Puma or Gray Nic and if you get accepted then you may get free gear for 2 seasons as an example.
You should be able to select your preferred fielding position (slips, boundary runner etc.) This is where your height, weight, speed, agility and reflexes. If you are a little chubby your top speed and fastest reflexes won’t be as good as an average height and average weight person. If you are tall your ability to play the hook shot are increased but your ability to be able to get down low to take a catch is decreased. If you are short you will be more able to take off the mark fast (agility) but your ability to jump up high for a catch is decreased. If you are chubby your agility, speed and ability to get down or up to catch a ball are decreased. If you have good reflexes then the coach will put you in the slips or as an infielder. If you have speed you are more likely to be a boundary runner signing autographs for the fans. Also your reflexes will also improve batting. If you have a lot of agility and speed you will more likely to be placed just inside the first circle. If you are fast and running for a ball to your right and it is a pick up and throw, than your speed may affect your accuracy on the throw unless your reflexes are good. If it is a direct hit situation then your ability to perform under pressure affects your throwing, this is where a confidence and form can appear absent if the player has been lazy in parctice. Once again, you said before you wanted a confidence metre for your bowlers, I also think that you need a sort of fitness bar. So if you’re like Shoaib Baktar, that is you have a long run up, you become tired easily on a hot day unless your oobber-doobber fit.
That’s right like you said before you should be allowed to customize your bowling, like length of run up, also your bowling action. This would allow for endless possibilities. Also you should be allowed to customize your batting stance. You would have your character standing in the nets your all the gear on. You would be allowed to move him left and right to protect or show the stumps, move him forward and back and select his posture. This would then become the default settings for your batsmen as he awaits the ball. From then you can adjust him to the pitch of the ball.
Also in career mode instead of selecting the WACA or the GABBA you would select the quality of your home pitch. You should be allowed to select the type of pitch. (concert, turf, etc.) Just say the quality of the pitch was “predigest” and you were on a turf pitch, in U17 then your ground would be like a professional job, maybe a stand with change rooms and the boundary is painted on with a white picket fence around it. But this would differ from when you were younger and when you get older. As you said before you should progress through concert, synthetic pitches and then finally turf. Well as a younger player you should be allowed to progress through the pitches but the ground quality won’t be allowed to go above “good”. You would see maybe uneven grass lengths, grass overgrowing the pitch and a cone boundary line. As you play you should be allowed to select whether you play as the whole team or just yourself. This may seem odd, but if you start in U7, you would have to play each match (you should be allowed to automatically resolve) in each season until you retire at the age of 30 for example. Each season will increase you age and difficulty. If you have 8 teams in your season and you play them twice each then that is 16 games until the age of representative cricket when you start playing tests and one day matches and when you start playing a lot more matches. Selecting whether you bat, bowl and/or field (if you select manual fielding) as yourself will just quicken up the pace of matches. Speaking of manual fielding, I just had an idea that when you aren’t bowling you fielding as yourself in first person. This would add to the difficulty of the game as you would have to press “spacebar” to pick up the ball and even for that matter catch the ball. Or you can skip the matches until winning is important. All these ideas should at least be considered by EA if they are really reading our posts
But like 2004 you should be able to do all the same things. Playing an English tour as Australia for example. Some aspect should stay the same such as creating players. Also another idea for outside of the career mode is being able to create teams from scratch, using the ideas from the top of this post. Also you should be allowed to create a fantasy team and take them on a short career. Say taking on the world with the 11 of your favourite players.