[professordp]

One of the things that often causes me to tinker around is the designation of "prime" for a fighter's ratings. While both the TBCB team and individual forum members (Dean's "Day Cooncil" in particular) have offered specific career stage ratings for the boxing greats, i.e., Ali, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, etc., the standard boxer has one rating called "prime." If you wish, you can adjust automatically or manually for career stage.

Sounds okay thus far. But here's the problem that I have. In reality, the typical rating is not actually based upon a fighter's prime years but rather reflects a cumulative assessment of his entire career. If you make a career adjustment prior to fight sim, you generally are taking another step further from accuracy since your adjusting a rating that is not really prime to begin with.

In a number of instances, particularly with lower rated fighters, the values for HP, Chin, and Endurance are off, sometimes substantially. This obviously effects accuracy whenever you use these fighters against another in a career replay or simulation.

The problem is quite accute when you are dealing with guys who've had long careers and/or had retired but came back to pick up some more pay days several years later. (I've rated two such boxers below).

Obviously only a person with an obsessive-compulsive disorder such as I would care about such things. And I'm aware that the reasons for this situation are grounded in the game's historic roots and the need for practicality. Thus, I don't mean to be critical here. I'm just stating what I believe to be a fact. And while I don't personally update from the pool, there's been a diligent and continuous effort by Ice Tea and others to revisit the ratings and revise them accordingly.

When this game first came out in 1976, you had a few dozen heavyweights, roughly two dozen champions and the rest the top crop of current heavies. Focusing on fifty or so boxers with a considerable degree of intensity is a lot different from the task at hand today whereby you are providing evaluations in the form of ratings for over 5,000 fighters. With that type of workload, it really is impossible to do the career analysis for each fighter.

With the ratings that I post in this context, all I'm doing is sharing with the members my adjustments to my personal date base. I'm not claiming any exceptional ability or insight. Overall, the TBCB rating team's end product is pretty accurate, and in a majority of instances, I'm not inclined to tweak their final assessment of a boxer.

I've outlined it before, but it might be a good thing to say it again, here's what I look for when evaluating the prime stage. Age, quality of opponents, point at which the boxer starts fighting longer fights, and so on. I have no formula nor applied science. Pure instinct and subjectivity.

One note or aside, concerning "Knockouts". Since TBCB has a chin rating for knockouts, I distinguish between a KO and a TKO. The former you can pretty much cover with the chin rating. With the latter, you are dealing with a variety of factors such as "Recovery", "Absorb Punishment", "Endurance", "Conditioning", "Defense", and the number of opporunities to "Cover UP."