Part II: Nuances and Fine Print!

Rating fighters to be used in Title Bout is one of the more enjoyable aspects of the boxing simulation. Everyone has their own ideas about a fighter’s strengths and weaknesses; and because of the subjective nature of the sport, it’s a lot of fun to tweak a fighter and discover that you can actually improve on the accuracy of his performance. Furthermore, even though almost 4000 fighters are included in the simulation as of this moment, there are 400,000 that aren’t! That leaves a lot of fighters just waiting to be added.

However, a recent message on the boxing boards prompted me to write a second, updated article on rating fighters. A knowledgeable boxing fan and an owner of Title Bout took exception to some of the ratings of the “Human Punching Bag” Joe Grim. He was particularly critical of Grim’s 10/10 control factor and overall “5” rating. The gentleman correctly cited the fact that Grim had a perfect record . . . a perfect losing record. Joe Grim somehow managed to go his entire career, consisting of five dozen bouts, without a win.

Grim’s claim to fame is that in spite of visiting the canvas on repeated occasions – often in the same round! – he was never stopped.

Freakish performers like this are the toughest to rate, just a notch ahead of talented but erratic performers like Floyd Patterson. It’s logical, of course, because the more consistent a performer the easier it is to duplicate that consistency.

Rating a “Joe Grim”

Now, back to Joe Grim. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that a fighter who’s lost all his fights should be a 1/1 CF rather than a 10/10 CF, or even a 5/5! But a 10/10? Well, here’s why and in the process of trying to justify the 10/10, perhaps some of the nuances of the overall rating process will come to light.

To begin with, we need to repeat the First Commandment of rating fighters: “Thou Shalt Not View a Rating in Isolation.” At the risk of becoming obnoxious, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times – the ratings are all related, one feeding off the other.

So, here we have in Grim, a fighter who gets knocked down frequently. No problem – we assign him a 4 KD1 rating. He never gets knocked out, however! Okay, we handle that by giving him a 1 or what would make more sense, in retrospect a 0 at his KO rating. He never wins against even half-decent competition. Low punches landed, few if any 3-point punches and poor defense should take care of Grim’s chances on earning a decision victory. But what about TKOs?

Ah, Here’s the Problem!

And there’s the rub. Certainly, we assign Grim a TKO of 1. However, for a fighter who is going to get knocked down repeatedly and hit more often than not, points are going to pile up, especially if he suffers a cut or swelling or both, which is more than likely. Our goal is to get this guy to the finish line, regardless of the number of rounds scheduled for the fight. What’s important ratings are left with which to work? CF or Control Factor!

If Grim is in control, he can’t get hit, except with counter punches. If he can stay in control enough, he doesn’t have the stats to win fights against decent competition (which is what he fought), but he should be able to avoid taking a single round’s worth of punishment and prevent a TKO. Ergo, a Control Factor of 10/10 seems to make perfect sense.

But a TKO1 isn’t Enough!

When Grim is not in control, he’s going to get pounded so we need to find the balance point where he can get knocked down round after round and yet be allowed to fight. We took care of the biggest factor by giving him an outlandish control factor for someone of his ilk. However, play-testing still revealed that Grim was getting stopped too often. His initial defense was a +6 so we tweaked it to a +2. His initial PL/CP was 32/30. We improved those categories to 34/34. The logic behind the adjustments should be obvious. Grim’s +6 defense allowed him to get hit so frequently that, coupled with the knockdowns, the points were still piling up too fast and leading to stoppages. His very low punch connect numbers were opening him up to too much counter-punching, resulting in the same high points being scored against him. By improving his defense and his punches landed, we prevented Grim’s opponents from simply overwhelming him.

So What’s the End Result?

On “paper”, Grim’s ratings look out of whack for a fighter with his record. His CF appears way too high. His overall rating seems out of line. And his Intellect of 5 seems skewed. Well, true but the proof is in the performance. When we rate a fighter we don’t really care about how he looks but rather how he performs. Sometimes to get a fighter to fight the way he should, you have to do some weird things with his ratings – not just a single rating but multiple ratings in conjunction WITH EACH OTHER!

Our Joe Grim is going to go down, be easy to hit and seldom if ever win. However, when he fights Jack Johnson (who wanted badly to knock out the man who had never been stopped but failed to do it – and broke his hand on Grim’s head in the process), Grim won’t be facing a PL/CP of 50/50 but rather one with ratings of 46/46 at punches landed and counter punching – a big difference. Grim’s own PL/CP will be a horrible 28/28 versus Lil’ Arthur but not the original 26/24 obscenity that they would have been originally. This Joe Grim has a chance of at least frequently being a representation of the real Joe Grim.

Change that CF to 5/5 or 5/4 as some have suggested, and I promise you that Grim will seldom make it to the final round without being stopped via TKO.

His Intellect of 5 and overall rating number? We’ll the Intellect is a bit high but if you are using strategies, you’ll want him to be able to follow them to give him a further edge toward going the distance. In truth, realistically, it should be a 1. His Overall Rating – well, we can’t make a scale for every fighter. His TKO2 and KO and CF ratings pump his overall up a bit higher than one would think. On the other hand, Grim went the distance with some outstanding fighters. Can any of the other fighters rated less than 5 do the same?

More Tweaking

As matters stand, Grim might still need some help to make it to the final bell. If you discover that he is being TKOd because of cuts and swelling, drop his Cut rating to 1. Play with his PL/CP. Maybe up his CF! God forbid! Remember your goal: keep this guy a loser but keep him around so that as the real Joe Grim would often scream “. . . but you couldn’t knock me out!”

Conclusion

The above example points out many of the nuances that we have frequently attempted to illustrate in other articles on how to rate fighters. Perhaps using an actual “test case” might make more of an impact. No matter what, the fighters are YOUR fighters and you can change them as you see fit. However, if you are going to re-rate fighters or add new ones to the simulation, we assume you want to do so in the best possible manner. With that in mind, we’ll continue to try to educate you in the process of how the ratings work behind the scenes.