[Rocco Del Sesto]

Mike was asking what I do about rating fighters. Nothing very scientific about it. I don't profess to say if my method is altogether that accurate, but, for the sake of wanting to create more heavyweights, especially in the European theater, I'm going about it the best way I know of not knowing anything about most of these guys other then what I learn about them on Boxing Rec.

Basically what I do it look at a guy's record and break it down his wins on how many are stoppages and his losses by how many times he was stopped in a fight. I also look at any DQ losses. If he has 1 to 2 DQ losses I'll make his Fouls rating Occassionally. 3 or more I'll make him Frequent. If he's somebody with say 20 or so fights or less in his career and he had 2 DQ's, I'd probably then make him a Frequent rating.

I then look to see who he's fought that's already in the game data base, guys that was in there originally or who I or others have added. I look at his other opponents who I don't have rated fighters for and looking at thier records make a determination if the rest of the opponents look to be mainly 1 rated fighters, maybe 1 to 3 or whatever. I'll then let the auto scheduler build a schedule first automatically for the total career bouts of the fighter I'm working on with the rating range of opponents I feel best suit. I'll then put in manually the fighters who I have in my data base and deleted as needed any of the auto scheduled fighters to come back to my career fights total. I'll then set the "Repeats" to 10. So then I'll keep rerunning this schedule in these set of 10 bouts to each opponent. So in other words if a fighter I'm working on had 30 career bouts, I'll have 30 opponents set in the schedule and the repeats set at 10 for each opponent. So when I sim the schedule, my fighter will have fought 300 bouts.

I then look at the total Wins/Losses/KO's/Times he's stopped/and DQ's to some extent. You simply divide the totals by 10 to compare the average of each of those to his actual career. It's then just a matter of keep simming and tweeking ratings around until I feel I've achieved a good average of Wins/Losses/KO's and Times he's stopped compared to actual career numbers.

A lot of the rating numbers you set are of course just random picks at what I give I guy. the Control ratings for most of these journeymen fighters you know I usually going to be 7 or less. The HP's you can determine should be so high depending on the number of KO's he has. His Chin, cut, recovering ratings can be determined to some extent by how many times he's stopped in his career. Most of these guys I figure their defense, fast/slow, draw power, conditioning, and Intellect are not especially good.

Again, I then just sim and tweek till I get his record numbers averaging out fairly close as I can. Now, some of you who've been rating fighters since the days of TF2001 or even the old Title Bout board game may find ways to totaly pick apart what I've just described as not being very accurate. But, all these guys, all I got to go on is the BoxREc of them so, I sim to get their career numbers to work out as close as possible. In the end I hope to create a pretty good data base of heavyweight fighters to then to a universe where I've got that bottom heavy portion of the punching bags, tomato cans, trailhorse fighters, whatever you want to call them, that the top maybe 10 to 15 percent if that much of the "cream" of the heavyweights fought many of thier fights against to build the early portions of thier career.

And of course your always welcome to tweek around what I've done to whatever suits you. I'm having fun with it just finding these other heavyweights.

Now I will say that my method I've found can have some problems with it if you got a figther who has fought maybe mostly unrated fighters who are mostly "punching bags" as far as thier career's were. What you could end up with is if you got a guy who had a real good Win/Loss record against these mostly "punching bags" your rating numbers could get spiked higher then probably what the guy deserves, because the rated 1 fighters in my data base are prabably currently better then even most of a guys actual opponents were. A good example of this is a fighter I'm working on right now. His name is Tony Hughes. He fought from1956 to 1963 compiling a 25-4-0 record with 9KO's. He was stopped only 3 times himself. The only guys he fought that I could find in my current data base were Alonzo Johnson, Henry Cooper, Franco DePiccoli(whom I rated) and Bob Cleroux. The rest where nothing much at all to talk about from what I could see. Well what's happened is with those handful of guys put in with a bunch of random 1's, to get his W/L and stoppage numbers to come out, his rating numbers are way higher then what you'd think this guy should deserve. His control ratings right now are both 8 and his punching numbers are very good. The game auto calcs an overall rating of 4! In my mind looking at what he's fought he no way can be a 4. His opponents are just too good on what I got in the data base currently. Now I've taken the auto rating for overall and at times have down graded it by 1 maybe, sometimes 2 or up 1 if I felt it should be, but for a 4 down to 1! What I'm realizing here is as I dig deeper into these more obscure fighters, I'm seeing where I'm probably going to have to create a bunch of generic "punching bag" fighters with terrible ratings to sim these guys against to get a better representation of what thier ratings probably should be.

Well anywho, I've rambled enough on this. So there it for what its' worth what I do. I've attached the Tony Hughes rated as I got him now, so you can see if you want what I mean by his higher then they should be ratings.

Rocco