With less than a week to go for this patch 2 to release, maybe this is too late to note for this patch, but it's never too late for patch 3.
1) The more I am playing online the more bugs related to wide deliveries I observe. Most of the times a wide is given even when the batsman touched the ball. Has this been fixed in the upcoming patch?
2) Another bug is the momentary screen-black-out as soon as I hit a shot in online matches. I guess it's related to delays. Has this been fixed in the upcoming patch?
3) Also, most users are not being fair and not allowing the batsman even a couple of seconds to view the field before facing the next ball. A field indicator is increasingly becoming necessary. If rear-view cameras are used, the batsman's location on the on-screen field indicator should be shown to the south of bowler's end. And for broadcast cameras, the batsman's position should be shown north of the bowler's end. Anyway, suggestions aside, is the upcoming patch addressing the basic issue?
4) The challenge-the-decision system seems to be broken for both online and offline modes. Using the following decision tree, this may be handled more gracefully -
a) Firstly tweak the umpire AI to ensure that not all decisions given by the umpire can be correct. But while doing this, it is important to not break the umpiring system as only one decision review is possible in most cases. I don't know how this can be implemented but in simple terms, the wrong decisions should exceed no more than 5% of total out decisions, or in other words, the probability that the umpire's decision is wrong should not exceed 0.05. The first wave of decisions include leg-before-wicket, caught behind the wicket/slips, and run-outs; by the way, run-outs sometimes show the wicket keeper's glove not reaching the stumps but yet bails fly off, but I digress.
Next in line are the clean-bowled and caught in the field decisions by the umpire, when the bowler may have bowled a no-ball. Today, the umpires seem to be 100% correct in calling out a no-ball. We can either leave this as is, meaning the challenge-the-decision system is not needed for clean-bowled and caught in the field decisions, or tweak this, too.
b) Once umpire decisions are tweaked to be incorrect on random occasions, the internal review / replay engine that already "knows" the correct decision will come into play, of course after the player challenges the umpire's decision. A slight issue here is that sometimes the system can't correctly guess between leg-before-wicket challenge or caught behind wicket/slips challenge. I think the easiest way to solve this is check for both. If bat shows a nick in the review even though the original appeal was for leg-before-wicket, it's still out! If the original appeal was for leg-before-wicket but the review showed that the ball hit the bat first, it's a not-out (unless of course it was still caught by someone, but it is unlikely).
c) Run-outs situation is easier and should be handled the same way.
d) The system today is actually doing most of what I described above. But most importantly, if the decision after the replay/review is not what was originally given by the umpire, then umpire should change his decision after the big screen shows the reviewed decision.
5) Another observation is about the medium pacers. I find it extremely difficult to face their borderline dead balls or balls floating in air like a feather. I understand medium pacers ball slower than fast or fast-medium, but should they really ball like that and that slow? Is the upcoming patch addressing anything in this case?
6) Finally, I know the ground-ball-caught-out bug is fixed and that is going to be a life (match) saver. It's happening at least twice in a match these days.
Many thanks to BigAnt Studios and Ross for this otherwise great game that is on its way to becoming even better!.