Played 70 hours Career mode, using custom sliders. A little annoyed by lack of fielding competence or control over fielding. The AI dive-and-miss looks quite unrealistic (or maybe it's just me being annoyed at them for missing). The fact the bowler is frozen immediately after delivery drives me up the wall. Ball keeps getting popped up near bowler's head and no option to catch it. Also very unclear how to consistently aim for stumps or encourage fielders to aim for stumps for run-out chances. Fielders often have moment of staring at the ball before they start running. This is on semi-assisted.
Do you all use fully-assisted or manual?
Do the wicket-keepers ever go for stumping?
Also, I seem to rack up Fielding AP no matter what training or gameplay I do. I understand that currently there is no way to 'train' fielding, not that I would if I could, but my fielding being far higher than my batting or bowling purely due to free AP handed out for every action.
Granted I am finding bowling compelling, using 30/30/80/80 settings. Except in T20s where AI constantly moves across a 7th stump full delivery into a golf slog over deep square leg. (Run rate 50 seems to turn AI into godlike batsman to off-stump bowling... I think it interacts also with the match type and remaining overs.) Test match (run rate 20) / ODI (40) is a much better contest between batter and bowler.
In batting, I am slowly improving timing. (Biggest change was setting Pace/Spin Visual Speed to 70-80 for more realistic ball speed -- 0.5 seconds between release and crease -- no more waiting for some computerized timing window, just see ball hit ball.) Playing a lot of straight drives, the occasional lofted shot over extra cover, leaving balls well outside off. Average is slowly coming up. Next planning on learning how to hit Aggressive Grounded shots. (L2+R2?)
Commentary is mostly irrelevant or actively incorrect so I've turned it off, besides which I'm not playing matches which would have English commentary anyway. (Indian club level / domestic) One example is that often when the keeper has collected a wild delivery, they will incorrectly state it has gone to the boundary. Or saying "a tidy over" when I have allowed 20+ runs from it, because the last delivery was a dot ball.
It's clearly a good game as otherwise I would not be this invested in it fixing what doesn't work. Just feels like it needs that extra bit of polish to really shine.
As far as I can tell, 'Match Difficulty' option in the sliders only sets the sliders to emulate that particular difficulty. If you set the sliders yourself I don't think it should matter what the difficulty is set to. Can anyone confirm?
Interested in learning more about these sliders in general.
