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CRICKET STATS
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CRICKET STATS
THE RETURN OF A FAVOURITE |
INTRODUCTIONCricket Stats is actually one of our oldest games. Gameplan was the first, and Soccer Stats was the second, but Cricket Stats arrived very soon afterwards (but see "Dates & Times" below). THE LOSS OF A FAVOURITECricket Stats had actually done ten seasons (with nine leagues) before being the first of our games to become too difficult and uneconomic to run. It was actually losing money, and it was getting more and more difficult to obtain reliable stats. And more and more difficult to free up the time needed, especially during the move to Yeovil. This time we'll be doing our own stats keeping, which will be even more time consuming but does mean we don't have the extra cost of paying for a stats keeper. And the stats should be more reliable. Other changes that have helped make the game look viable again are the introduction of play-by-email, which we hope most players will be using. Turns delivered in minutes intead of days. Lost turns replaced instantly, instead of days more. For the domestic game, one-week deadlines should not be a problem for anyone, where before they were often a struggle. OLD COACHES NEVER DIEOf the players who were active when the game closed down, in the intervening seasons only two have collected their leftover turn credits or moved them to other games. The rest of the players still have their credits on account, waiting for the game to return. Every season I get dozen emails from people wanting to know whether it will be back this year - this year, it is. WHAT NEXTThe first decision to make is whether you want to restart the leagues that were in play before or press ahead and start again from scratch. I favour going for the restart. We've missed several seasons and squads are going to be very out of date. You'd probably need several weeks of bids to get a viable team together anyway. I think it will be easier for me to start the game over with a completely new player list and with new teams forming new leagues. If you were in the game before, then let me know which you prefer, and whether it's a strong preference. You may notice I haven't yet offered an updated rulebook, and that's because I'm still working on changes to both the rules and the software. There is plenty of time for them to be ready before the start of play. There will be an outline of the rules available very shortly - enough to get new players through the startup process and remind old players what they were doing before. We hope to have an online turnsheet available for the bidding rounds available by the end of the week. That means if you decide to go ahead by starting over in a new league, then we can get started right away. And you can be getting your team signed up while I'm putting the finishing touches to the new software. If you want to be included in a new league starting, then let me know right away. The waiting lists are open. Decide on a team name and think about who you're going to be bidding for. LIMITED OVERS CRICKETDeleting the one-day variant should help to simplify the rules and reduce the costs some more, but if this version of the game goes well we will consider running a one-day version as a separate game. But it's always been the first class version that has caught the imagination of the players. TEST MATCH VERSIONThe expansion of Test cricket with a more regular schedule of games should make the test match version a practical proposition (although we'll get the domestic game running smoothly before we launch it) and that means we can run the game worldwide. The credit card facility means people can pay wherever they are and whatever currency they use, with a minimum of fuss. Email means overseas players get their turns just as quickly as local ones - so cricket fans ANYWHERE will have a game that includes their own local favourites, and that encourages them to follow the fortunes of players from distant lands as well. FREEMAILERSAlso being included in the new version is the Freemailer option. This is a game where this may really work for us. It'll be limited to standby places, taking over the duff teams at the bottom of each league. We're going to need the players to work at recruiting more players, but when you can tell people they can start for free and it only costs money if they get into it, then that's not going to be too difficult. And cricket fans can talk to each other, and MOST cricket fans are ready for a game like this one. The current plan is to introduce a membership option that will follow on from the freemailer scheme, so that when someone who is playing online is thinking about upgrading they can think about paying a fixed annual memebership instead of turnfees. We don't really need turnfees for customers who play entirely online since most of the costs are overheads, poviding the facility and setting up, not costs that mount up turn by turn. DATES & TIMESCricket Stats is our third-oldest game, assuming you don't count prototypes or any of the manually-adjudicated games games I ran before we started introducing computers to the process. The prototype of Run Chase was already running in the early 80s: when Ian Botham did his thing at Headingley in '81 we were already getting similar results from our trial games. I remember the top-rated player as far as the game was concerned was Imran Khan, but the most effective was Sarfraz Nawaz (probably because he was usually bowling at the other end to Imran, and batsmen would be very cautious when facing Imran, and then get careless when it was "only" Sarfraz that was bowling). If you count the prototypes then Run Chase is actually older than Gameplan. If you were to count games that aren't currently running, then there are three more computer-run games of the same vintage that never made it past the prototype stage but could still turn up again (those are Bugwith, Ironroads and War at Sea) and several from the boardgame and cardgame era that we might see in new forms (Pirates, The Thin Red Line and Warship).
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