Unfamiliarity Breeds Contempt

What is it about tournaments that gets everyone's panties in an uproar? Christ, you would think that we'd all have learned our lessons by now... tournaments where diverse crowds come together and mesh are recipes for disaster. A lot of times, you get guys who think their shit doesn't stink coming into a tournament, posting something that is unfamiliar to the tournament administration and then ends up losing. Then, afterwards, there's some kind of stink. This time, it wasn't so much raised publicly in the area of e-fedding by the guy who felt he was wronged, but it by two of my other fellow bloggers, Billy Ferraro and Dave Brunk.

The incident happened in something called the Total J Cup Tournament, which was entered by a bunch of people from feds that I don't know... and then Pete Russo, who entered Impulse/Randall Knox. Apparently, he got jobbed in the first round to a guy who broke some of the cardinal rules of e-fedding, some real asshole n00b shit. I read the excerpt of the RP that this guy wrote and actually bete Impulse with. He basically rewrote history for Impulse's character to retrofit the promo he had in mind for whatever opponent he had going for him. It's one thing to put on the no-sell for a guy you don't know about (one of the more annoying techniques I come across in my travels), but it's downright unfair to write someone else's character, especially someone foreign to the community.

Billy was the first to speak out, and he tore the whole operation, the organizer, the RPer (whom I wouldn't let within a 5-website radius of any tournament or fed I would theoretically run), Ben Halkum for associating with them and trying to bring them into the FW fold... Brunk then followed up with a scathing tome of isolationism, with Katz following up in the comments that the reason why it happened was because folks like me and Halkum are too nice.

Let's face it... it's basically the kind of thing that I took the WfWA to task for. The fact that objectively, Pete's beef is way, way, way, WAY more legit than the assfucks at the WfWA who bitched about Nova's talent amounting to that of a midcarder in their feds beating out the "stellar" writing of their luminaries like Khalid Jad, really doesn't make much of a difference. On the surface it's bush league, but not because they're complaining about this kind of shabby treatment.

I won't take them to task for feeling the way they do, but I will say I told you so.

I was naive once, I thought I could invite people from different communities to partake in a TEAM event and judge it fairly enough that everyone would be happy, even if they didn't win. Hey, I had PTC guys in my tournaments and they adjusted fine. Of course, it didn't hurt that they were enough good e-wrestlers coming over to give the image that they'd be treated fairly, but I can't put over the maturity of their guys that came over and even didn't place well in events enough, the straggling Chris Bagwell aside (a straggler that actually didn't get disgruntled until I left my post, actually).

So I sought out more communities, which was a mistake. I had the luxury of going to a community that featured a lot of older handlers, a lot of handlers who knew FW personalities via the fWo and Katz's headway that he made shilling for NFW over there first. And I paid the price. It took a long time for me to get my enthusiasm back, and you could say that I never fully did maybe until now.

But the thing was that the lesson was mainly public. It was there plain as day - People fear what they don't understand, and they lash out at the stranger because it's the easy thing to do, especially when the people we're talking about are younger and more stubborn in what they think is good. A tactic that most sane people think is bushleague might be considered "taking the bull by the horns" or... wait for it... "avant-garde" by some other retarded communities where dick-measuring between characters is done mainly with banners and graphics rather than writing quality.

It's because of crap like that that I don't fully disagree with what Brunk had to say. Sure, e-fed isolationism is a sad thing to practice, but it's a very welcoming strategy to practice at times. In a world where every community is different and where partnerships like the one shared by FW and PTC are few and far between, it's not worth the effort to make a bridge so that testy armies can have chances to get at someone else's throats.

That's why I give this advice. If you want to try something new, go to a different community or the like, be prepared to take a lot of shit. Carry the burden silently. Don't bitch in public when you get beat on bullshit tactics. It's bullshit, but take it to the man, and if he doesn't listen to you, fuck, it's their loss, not yours. Know that you're going into hostile territory and that you may never be able to win anyone over with a style of writing that is unfamiliar.

This is still a game dominated by the immature and the insular. FW and PTC are the exceptions to the rule. We do this for fun, and I think that the options available to us are good enough to satisfy unless you're not a fan of delays between cards and want something more regular. It's not worth it to go somewhere where the kids rule the roost and just want more fresh meat to carve up and serve to their n00bish "main eventers".