10-04-2023, 01:57 PM(This post was last modified: 10-07-2023, 10:24 AM by CptSquall. Edited 2 times in total.)
I have made my focus in the SJMHL clear, in no uncertain terms: To be the best at fighting, in whatever shape that took. Admittedly, my lack of experience with the league has led to disappointment in the form of low fighting numbers overall, largely due to points being spent elsewhere to help with things like "shooting" or "being able to win." This caused me to look into the history of fighting in the league, and its viability (or completely lack thereof) despite heavy investment by certain users. Without further ado, lets take a look at the total fights over the last ten seasons - as well as the user with the highest Fight total:
Almost immediately, as I imagine most of you are, I was drawn to what happened towards the end of my timeframe: an absolute explosion of fights, with Season 76's Fight Leader posting as many or more fights total than we've seen in 3 of the 7 seasons since. Intrigued, I decided to look further and found that there have been at least 30 fights in every season back to (other than Season 60, which I'm ignoring) season 53. In the vast majority of those seasons, there was at least one user with double digit fight wins - and unsurprisingly, those that won fights very rarely lost any of them. None of the fight leaders posted a fight loss, another stat I find surprising considering the amount of fighting they were doing. With that said, it appears that the complete degradation of fighting within the league is a recent occurrence. The median amount of fights over the last season is more than double the fights we saw in S72, and trends even higher if you cut out the biggest outliers on each side. Armed with this information, and a deep regret for not creating during the SMJHL's fighting glory days, I was left with one question: What's so different now? To answer this, I took a look at the average stats between fight leaders over the last 5 seasons, and the five seasons where we saw the highest amount of fighting in the recent era (Seasons 61-65).
I'll put their average stats below:
Surprisingly, the starkest difference is in user's applied TPE - with the earlier, more fight-heavy seasons typically seeing users with lower TPE totals. This meant that, even though Bravery, Aggression, and Fighting were slightly below their newer counterparts they were a much higher share of their overall TPE. With less emphasis put into stats like Speed, Positioning, and Offensive Read perhaps these players felt the need to fight more because of their lack of ability elsewhere? Needless to say, these stats alone don't shed enough light on exactly why fighting has fallen off a cliff over the last few seasons. To answer this, its more likely we'd need to take a look at player creation itself. And so, with too much time on my hands, I did just that. I looked at S69's average player stats, due to it being the season with the least fights in Index history, and compared them to S64 - one of the seasons with the highest amount of fights. And so, to continue exceeding well beyond my 500 character limit, I'll provide those numbers below:
Surprisingly, Fighting was actually the stat that changed the LEAST among these groupings. Bravery seems to be by far and away the biggest difference maker, which makes sense - if you aren't willing to put yourself in situations that are dangerous, the chances of you fighting are likely minimal. Aggression also saw a sizable boost, albeit not nearly as substantial as with Bravery. Fighting is one of those weird stats where it doesn't really function well enough on its own, and needs investment elsewhere to see a large amount of fights. When the majority of users in a class have below 10 bravery, the chance of finding anyone to tussle is minimal. Similarly, if a class isn't aggressive you're not likely to find much success when it comes to ice fisticuffs either. That aside, I'm left with few answers, but have my own contextual addition as well. While not stat based, I've noticed pretty consistently that Fighting (and its similar stats in Bravery and Aggression) to largely be considered useless by those I've spoken to with more experience in the league. Were I not so pig-headed, it's likely I would have spec'd out of them as well - and I get it, if you look at the seasons with high fighting they typically come at the expense of lower Offensive stats and less ability to perform when it comes to SOG or overall points. That said, I'm against the dissuasion of people going in the direction that they want. As I said in my own LR, homogenizing to only a handful of "suitable" builds is boring. I was even outright told that not being willing to do a free redistribution for my upper league team would cause me to fall on draft boards. Screw that lol. We ball.
honey![[Image: image.png?ex=651ef51e&is=651da39e&hm=abc...debc823f3&]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1043554506425782413/1159183347994603650/image.png?ex=651ef51e&is=651da39e&hm=abc33c38f0b1c5a8f12b01b26aca6fa5acb4211450c0d968984d0fddebc823f3&)
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