Something I should have done awhile ago

I was going to rant about GTT5 being more a free-form writing competition rather than an e-wrestling tournament, but it would probably seem like sour grapes because I lost, it's a little too late for my time scope, and I have too much respect for Ross and the operation he's running, especially given the fact that any tournament of that size is nearly impossible to run, and he gets it done year in and year out.

Anyway, what I want to write about now is match psychology and strategies for e-fedders. More often than not, n00bs and those who aren't that good at this game will just write down random moves that sound cool. I've been guilty of that in the past.

But to really understand nuances of wrestling and to give matchwriters an easier time of writing for your character, you need to have a sense of psychology. But it's not that important if you don't, if you think about it. A lot of guys who wrestle for a living have no idea about match psychology, and I'm not just talking about the kings of the indie spotfest you see in bingo halls and high school gyms.

But then again, if you realize this, and you explicitly state that your character doesn't know a damn thing about psychology, then you already have a leg up in the development of your character's ring identity.

In e-fedding though, it's hard, especially in RP-based feds, because the bulk of what is judged and written are match promos and angles. Still though, everyone takes pride in having insane movesets, and I know matchwriters take MUCH pride in the matches they write, whether people read them or not.

There was one fed on the Net that was run by matchwriters for matchwriters. I guess you could say they were the ROH of e-feds. Run by Mike Renner, The Magically Delicious Pants and others, the Squared Circle was an angle fed that had strict kayfabe match rules, and very detailed cards.

Matchwriting, psychology, wrestling... they were all keystones to the fed, and it showed as most of the handlers had extensive matchwriting guides for their characters. Those guides were interesting to read, to say the least.

But the drawbacks to tSC cards were that they were often times too long, and no one could really read them in three sittings let alone one. When you have a fed that is by matchwriters, for matchwriters, well you can get self-indulgence.

But we can learn something from tSC, aside from the "don't have massive cards" thing, is that having a matchwriting guide can make things easier.

And I don't mean to keep mentioning NFW in a positive light here (because I hear Katz gets embarrassed), but them mandating the listing of three strengths and weaknesses for their applications is a really good wrinkle to the establishment of psychology. It forces you to actually sell for your character, something that some folks are hesitant to do.

So I think that applications/profiles should include these things. For all feds. I think I may revamp TEAM applications to include all that.

Of course, a matchwriting guide doesn't have to be a 5 page dissertation on how to write for your character. A paragraph should do in most cases.

But yeah. And I'm going to do proper profiles tonight for JA and Maggot and post them here. Just as an example. BUt not now.