Idea for Career Concept - Long Post

[Puckett guy]

This is an idea I have come up with to give the feel for some type of a career progression from year to year. I have'nt tried this out yet and I am sure some adjustments are going to be needed. The concept keeps all the fighters in their prime at all times and makes no attemp to adjust ratings as the years go by. Your feedback is welcomed.

Title Bout Career Concept

All active and retired fighters for each weight class are combined into one group. All fighters are adjusted to “prime”

Based on ratings each weight class is divided into thirds to be designated as Class A, Class B and Class C. For e.g. all the heavy weights would be combined, both active and retired. Based on ratings, the top 1/3 would be designated Heavyweight Class A fighters, the next 1/3 would be Heavyweight Class B fighters, and the bottom 1/3 would be Heavyweight Class C fighters. These classes are only used for randomly determining when a fighter's career begins, actual groups are not created.

To start the universe, each weight class would have thirty fighters randomly selected, 10 from Class A, 10 from Class B and 10 from Class C.

To start the universe off and get a ranking system going for the 1st year, each fighter would randomly have 10 fights against others in his weight class. Beginning in January of the 1st year, each fighter would fight once per month and every fight would occur on the 15th of the month. After the initial 10 fights, a ranking is established and the top 4 ranked fighters would enter into a single elimination tournament 1 vs 4, 2vs 3. Semi finals on November 15th and the Championship Bout on December 15th. This is the method used only for establishing the very first champion. Subsequent Title Bouts are conducted in the manner described below.

On the 1st of each following year, 6 more fighters are randomly added to each weight class. 2 from Class A, 2 from Class B and 2 from Class C. At the start of the year the Champion and other fighters who are considered to be prime contenders for the belt will not be subject to the automatic scheduler (say perhaps the top 10 fighters inthat weight class). All other fighters in the division will be subject to the automatic scheduler. Those subject to automatic scheduling will fight 10 random bouts again over the first 10 months of the year. The Champion and prime contenders will be scheduled manually fighting each other or lesser opponents. Every December 15th the Champion must defend his title against a worthy opponent who is manually selected. Additional Championship bouts could be scheduled earlier in the year if desired.

At the end of each year a check will be made to determine if a fighter is subject to "mandatory retirement." A fighter must retire at the end of the year when one of the following conditions exists:

1. The fighter has lost 50 or more fights
2. The fighter has been KO’d or TKO’d 20 or more times
3. The fighter has been winless in his last 15 or more bouts
4. The fighter has had 100 or more bouts in his career
5. The fighter has unsuccessfully challenged for the title 3 or more times.

When a fighter is subject to mandatory retirement then his name and stats will be copied and moved over to a retirement group for that weight class so that career stats for these retired boxers can be permanently maintained.

If more than 6 fighters retire at the end of December, then an equal number of new fighters will added in the following year. New fighters, no matter what they have for a rating will be subject to the auto scheduler the 1st year (as they will be unranked anyway) and cannot challenge for the title until they have fought at least 20 bouts.

So that's the concept. The conditions for mandatory retirement and scheduling can be adjusted as you like depending on how fast you want a boxer's career to turn over and how realistic you would like the career totals to be.

[dsvitak]

Heh. The very first thing I did was to delete all the women, combine all the Junior with the higher division above, change everyone to retired, and to make everyone prime.

Took about 15 hours.

I haven't (as yet) determined how to run my boxing universe. I am in the process of running all heavyweights (combined with cw) in a double elimination tournament......everyone gets to participate once.

The computer selects who fights, and if they have fought before, I manually change that specific fighter to one who hasn't fought yet.

Some boxers are 0-2, a few have 8 wins. Ali lost his very first match, due to DQ! He went 8-0 after that though, and holds down the #1 ranking.

I have noticed that cream does tend to rise to the top. Of the top 20 boxers or so, 19 are rated 8 or higher.

[yabanci]

lots of good ideas, but the problem I see is in adjusting fighters to their prime. To make it work, you have to extrapolate their prime ratings from their current ratings. Some of us have put together formulas to do this, but I don't know how trustworthy they are. It's also many hours of work if you try this with a lot of fighters. How do you plan to handle this?

[Puckett guy]

I was not aware that changing an active boxer from post-prime to prime ( for e.g.) did not change their ratings. I can live with that for my universe. I have tried out my career concept and so far it is working nicely. I manually keep track of what month and year is being simulated. I like that the length of each boxer's career is not a given and that new fighters are introduced into the field each year and others retire. While the cream does rise to the top, with this system there is new cream being introduced annually.

At this point I am only "careering" the Middleweights, there are over 300 in that group so there will be plenty of play before I will go through the entire field. If one wanted to be a bit more historically accurate you could try to introduce the fighters in chronological order, but that would involve more work and planning. I am OK with just starting each fighter's career in a random order.

When a fighter's career begins I add that year to his data field and I am keeping track of the more significant personal achievements by making additions to the boxer's biography.

One annoying thing is that each time I try to enter a sim date of each fight, the default date is the same as the computer system's date. This is OK if you just want to keep track of the day you simmed the bout, but is not much help if you want to create a fictitious date for each fight in your universe.