Saturday, July 01, 2006

Shelf Life, e-fed vs. real wrestling, plus shows, shows and more shows

Before I get to the meat of my blog today, some pimpage.

First in the queue, FUSE's latest show, KillZone 3 is up for your perusal. FUSE has become a fed to watch over at PTC. Jason's got a good thing going here, and hopefully, with the influx of some new guys, they'll climb up and join AWC and PRIME as the cream of the PTC crop.

Speaking of AWC... Divide and Conquer! Once again, AWC turns in a fine PPV effort, punctuated by a brief Unfuckable reunion, new Alliance and Frontier Champions, some big returns and a nice set of backstage brawling segments featuring Chainz and Aimz. Congrats to Mike Wade for making the AWC Legends Roll and farewell for now... please come back soon!

NEW finally came out with their anniversary RAUCOUS. A very solid show, and hopefully it marks a return to regularity for NEW, a fed that when it's running on all cylinders is one of the best around.

And now, the entry for today.

I was talking to Joe Schmidt (handler of Adam Dick) the other day and he told me he was leaving AWC. I was pretty taken aback by it, especially since AWC was losing Wade too. I asked him why, and he said he had done everything there was to do in AWC. That's a good enough reason to leave, I suppose.

But if you look at real wrestlers, guys like Hulk Hogan or Shawn Michaels or Steve Austin, they achieved it all in the real business, but they kept sticking around. In fact, it's the nature of professional wrestlers to keep holding onto their limelight, taking jobs in indie feds just so they can keep wrestling, hoping that people will plunk down money to see them.

In e-fedding, there are a lot of things we take from the real thing, but for the most part, this desperation to hold onto our spots isn't one of them. There have been several people who've walked away or tried to walk away, from just one fed or from the hobby itself. Some were successful, others weren't. However, unless you're The Rock or Brock Lesnar, it's almost unheard of in the real thing.

Why is that? Well, the obvious reason is they get paid, we often juggled this with doing things for which we get paid. Easy enough.

But there's still exploration into why some people can put such short shelf-lives on their characters. Why isn't there a desire to become multiple time Champions? Why don't people try to "do it all" again, using a different route? Perhaps there's life in AWC for Dick as a face, who knows.

Honestly, I think that people have an easier time walking away because most of us aren't ego-driven to the point of needing to prove things over and over again. Once again, we don't get paid for it. We're not slaves to ratings. Theoretically, we do this for fun. So proving that we can do things once is enough, at least with one character.

I think another huge reason is the timetables at which things happen. Normally, wrestler X enters the business and his first World Championship doesn't come for years after the fact. In e-feds, that timetable is shrunk considerably. If it took five years for people to become World Championship contenders in e-feds, then there probably wouldn't be as extensive an e-fed network as there is.

The point is, though, that people walk away. Do I think that guys may come back later in different feds or with different characters? Sure, it happens all the time.

However, one way that our world will never relate to the real wrestling world is that our characters do not have nearly the shelf-life as the real guys do for the most part.

There are exceptions to this though. A1E is the most like a real life fed in this regard. Beast, Big Dog, Fly and even to an extent my own JA have been around forever, through World Titles and without them.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think its crap when someone says "I've done all there is to do."

To me that says their creativity well is quite shallow...

...or they're not smoking enough pot to come up with zany ideas. ;)

--JK

Thomas Ford said...

I dunno, personally, I've gotta think to myself that the whole point of the fed is creating an enviorment where your character can call the place home. And with a longer time spent inside the federation, the bigger the pay outs are for the big feuds.

I mean, one of the coolest things about fWo is the history that the federation has, that can be played off of. If you've got a character that has almost as much history with the federation as say, the federation itself, it opens up a wealth of possibilities. Not to mention the ongoing everchanging relationships between like-minded individuals(or other characters) can continue to be manipulated and played with.

*shrug* But I'm all about joining somewhere and just staying put. I like to create history with a roster. I mean, if everyone on the roster has run into everyone else in the roster, they've all got relationships, they've all got meanings to one another, and it truly glues the federation together.

Maybe that's one of the reason the longer feds stay around for so long. *shrug* Was that a third shrug? I could go for a fourth.

Anonymous said...

tom, while my leaving revolves around many aspects, particularly real-life and my career, i did say that i've done "all there is to do," which i know isn't true. i could become a three or more TA champion if things work out. and i do have ideas for adam dick and co. in the fed, some great RP ideas, but there are times where priorities need to be aligned and really, prime just seems like the better fit for me right now in terms of one or the other. so it's not just a factor of me doing it all and leaving. just thought i should respond since i put the wheel in motion for this post.

and katz, to say my creative well is tapped is bullshit. i'm stanley fucking steamer, and that shit is zany

Jamar said...

Oh, there's plenty of limelight-whores in this hobby, my man. That's pretty obvious.

Anonymous said...

Part of the problem is that when someone creates a wrestler, they create them as a long established star. Very rarely will you find someone create a true rookie.

Most e-fedders are after the limelight from day one, instead of getting their character to develop and mature. One of my characters, I've developed over the five or so years since I introduced him. I retconned his identity to make him older, but that's about it.

Anonymous said...

Everything happens too fast in e-wrestling. My Tim Shipley was the "true rookie" mentioned above two years ago; within a year he was a former cW Tag Team champion and AWC Frontier champion; clearly a lifetime in the indies beforehand would better suit most paths realistically.

Jamar said...

From where I come from in this hobby, most of the guys actually have the years to prove their guys' status. When I started in 1991/2 on *Prodigy, the high-end feds were so hard to climb in, and certainly DID take years to get to a push. We didn't really have a lot of guys who created 'ghost histories' and showed up on Day One with numerous title notches - we did them for real.

But now is a different day, and a different culture, and people have zero patience to play out angles, storylines or character development at all - everybody wants the brass ring NOW, and that's a hige problem. I don't think you can teach the new generation of hobbyists patience.

Anonymous said...

The thing about e-wrestling as opposed to real wrestling is the payoff.

At this level, there are a lot of feds out there who are pretty much at the ceiling, and with a max of 30-40 people in one of these high end feds, there's really nowhere to rise to where more people will be reading your work.

Of the people in the fed, you're lucky if half the people read you consistently, and out of that, the most you'll get is a "hey, nice RP" or something of the like. Of course there's the obvious winning matches and titles, but ultimately those are just silly goals if you think about it.

I love to write, and efedding is something I can't get away from for various reasons. When I first started out in 1999, it was because I was all about wrestling. Now, I still do like wrestling, but more nostalgically, and my main priority is that its a good forum to write with deadlines where your writing will be judged and gauged against other writing. It keeps me writing and keeps me sharp.

I've left many times for various amounts of time because the tolls of e-fedding oftentimes can outweigh the rewards.

-It's really time consuming (which makes it a good hobby when you're broke)
-Sometimes deadlines turn into obligations.
-Unlike other fantasy sports, it's subjectively judged rather than objectively judged- making the game vague and oftentimes frustrating.
-There's really no attachment to it to make it a high priority when other priorities come up.

Overall, e-fedding is an involved e-hobby that can be oftentimes fun and rewarding, but it's easy to walk away from, sometimes relaxing to walk away from. Cause you can always come back at your own leisure.