Draft & ongoing booking project interest?

[goc]

On a different note, since some people may decide to make their territory about tag teams, what if someone wants to save a tag team off their existing roster? Since we only have 1 save and a tag team counts as 2 draft picks, would they forfeit their 1st round pick for saving a tag team?

[goc]

Another thing, how are we defining freelance? There are a lot of those names that fit but some others that I'm not sure about like Leo Burke. Burke was a journeyman but he would also go into a territory and work there for an extended time instead of being a true freelance like Abby or Brody who were in for short spurts and were never guys who were going to work the same place every night for 6 months.

[KrisZ]

Burke was working Maritimes then and had no affiliation

[goc]

Burke was working Maritimes then and had no affiliation

Oh ok. Have we come up with a plan for what to do with freelance guys in general? Are people going to be able to draft Bruiser Brody & Abdullah or is there going to be some kind of sharing agreement?

[KrisZ]

Well guys who were constant freelancers like those two are different....some of the guys on that list were there because they were active but had no real home then

[goc]

Maybe it would be better to put the guys without a home in a "Free Agent" category instead of freelancer? Because I noticed a few guys I have in my mind not on any rosters who I guess would be free agents at this time.

[Beast]

If we are drafting a mostly new roster for these promotions, how accurate are we aiming to be? Completely open to the participants?

 

Like if I had AWA (which I'm not planning on), would I be expected to book in a Verne-type way? Especially with the draft guaranteeing vastly different rosters than in real life, I assume we're just using the territory name for name value and booking whatever 1983-type shows that we want.

 

Edit - I guess what I'm getting at is I'll be very open to what territory I get as long as I'm not required to book Memphis-style or Dallas-style or AWA-style or whatever.

[Grimmas]

If we are drafting a mostly new roster for these promotions, how accurate are we aiming to be? Completely open to the participants?

 

Like if I had AWA (which I'm not planning on), would I be expected to book in a Verne-type way? Especially with the draft guaranteeing vastly different rosters than in real life, I assume we're just using the territory name for name value and booking whatever 1983-type shows that we want.

 

Edit - I guess what I'm getting at is I'll be very open to what territory I get as long as I'm not required to book Memphis-style or Dallas-style or AWA-style or whatever.

I think that is up to the individual. If you have WWF and want to follow the 3 MSG main event cycle, then cool. If you want to mix it up, then also cool.

[Grimmas]

Maybe it would be better to put the guys without a home in a "Free Agent" category instead of freelancer? Because I noticed a few guys I have in my mind not on any rosters who I guess would be free agents at this time.

That many freelancers would be hard to manage, for sure. I think maybe limit the freelancers to 10 or there abouts and have everyone else draftable.

[KrisZ]

You do what you want as far as booking

[Jesse Ewiak]

I'm actually with Parv - I think we've got enough people to at least get into the process of picking territories and our 'franchise' wrestlers. If somebody comes in late or after the roster is done, then there are promotions left over to choose from. For those that aren't picked up at the start of the game, we can either act like they don't exist or kind of treat them as ghost promotions that are running, but aren't doing anything newsworthy.

[El Boricua]

At the moment we have 11 (maybe 12 if dkookypunk43 makes it official in the sign-up thread). Hopefully we can get a few more people, but maybe we should establish a "final call" soft deadline for initial sign-ups for the draft? It could be next weekend to give people one week since the sign-up thread went up to decide. At most no more than two weeks. After that, someone can jump in and take over a vacant territory, although they will have missed the draft and make do with what's left in terms of wrestlers (unless the territories get a roster assigned during the draft anyway). It's a balancing act in giving time for those still on the fence or that have not yet seen the threads vs. not losing momentum with those already signed up.

[goc]

Since we are going to have some kind of re-alignment draft every 6 months or so, what if we made it so draft order in that draft would be decided by reader vote based on whose territory is doing the best? Meaning, since we're going to have people reading these why not incentivize everyone to really put an effort into it by rewarding the bookers who readers think are doing the best job at booking their territory by giving them higher picks in the draft. This would mirror reality also because the best talent would always want to go to the best territories.

 

Maybe some kind of points based deal based where people could rank the best 3-5 TV shows per week, or the best 3-5 overall territories by month.

[Grimmas]

Since we are going to have some kind of re-alignment draft every 6 months or so, what if we made it so draft order in that draft would be decided by reader vote based on whose territory is doing the best? Meaning, since we're going to have people reading these why not incentivize everyone to really put an effort into it by rewarding the bookers who readers think are doing the best job at booking their territory by giving them higher picks in the draft. This would mirror reality also because the best talent would always want to go to the best territories.

 

Maybe some kind of points based deal based where people could rank the best 3-5 TV shows per week, or the best 3-5 overall territories by month.

I like it.

[goc]

If we're going to do a reader vote thing then we'll need everyone to agree to at least do a summary version of their stuff if they are going to write out really elaborate TV shows and big events.

 

I don't know how the re-alignment thing is going to work yet but I think you should be able to keep, at a minimum, 40% of your roster.

[JerryvonKramer]

I'm a bit confused. Is there a draft or are there fixed rosters?

[El Boricua]

Draft for rosters. What goc is talking about is how much of that roster should be held onto every six months.

[dawho5]

I'm curious as to how the smaller promotions are being handled. Do they have smaller rosters, more local TV than regional? I don't know how functional I'd be in a project like this so I'd rather not be overly ambitious if I did it.

[Beast]

Roster turnover shouldn't be over 50 percent each six months, but gradual. Maybe 1-2 wrestlers each month are rotated in and out of each territory. I don't want to have an influx of new guys all coming in at the same time every six months.

[dawho5]

Seems like that is more for keeping things fresh rather than having certain wrestlers stay in the same territory for 5-6 years straight. I would agree that only 5-6 seems like a small number as holdovers. I listened to the Exile 6 podcast today and all the talk of losing the big regional names seems to ring true. You'd have to be able to hang on to the guys you have built up as your big name faces and heels for the regular crowd if you ask me. And you're not booking your show entirely on 5-6 guys. You've got your midcard attractions, tag division and guys like Arn who can either be a low end main event guy or a high end midcarder. If you couldn't protect a core of 10-12 guys you'd have a hard time keeping an audience engaged the way you needed to. Yeah you would want to make new stars as you went, but making new stars every year because most of your roster left seems a bit over the top. You'd think the guys being let go would be the expendable midcard types and jobbers. The jobbers can do that anywhere and midcarders that are expendable in one place are often great in others. It all depends on how "fresh" you're looking to keep things.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

Are people more into this project for the draft or the booking aspect? I ask because the booking aspect of this thing can easily turn into a chore and people will lose interest and drift away.

 

Not to hijack the thread, but I'll just throw this out there as an alternate format for something like this:

 

• We get 10 people signed up.
• One person picks a year. Anyone who worked in North America that year is eligible to be picked.
• Promotions are chosen by the 10 participants
• Promoters can keep one worker, manager or tag team
• We draft a roster of 12-15 workers and 1-2 managers
• After the draft, each promoter writes a single post detailing how they'd book the year.
• Readers vote on which promoter did the best job
• The winner gets some type of prize.....(a $10 pot? a free month of WWE Network? Some type of cheesy wrestling item one of us donates as the prize?)
• The next month, we replace anyone who dropped out, someone else picks a year, we draft all new rosters, and do the whole thing over again.

This way we're not obligated to write out weekly TV or do booking tasks that might seem like fun at first, but turn into work after a while. We're also not stuck with a roster we hate. After a month, we blow the whole thing up, redraft, and do something totally different.

 

I'll stop now and await feedback

[dawho5]

I don't know if I gauged this right or not. I looked at it as a long-term deal with a commitment to weekly TV write-ups with house show wraps included. There was an example earlier that I thought was pretty good as far as what the write-up would need to be. I'm sure it could be done in greater detail, but why do you need more than this?

 

Flair did a studio interview talking about his upcoming match with Dusty Rhodes for the NWA Heavyweight Title. He focused on how he would be a far better champion than Dusty because he lived the life of a champion while Dusty was not what a champion should be.

 

The Rock'n'Roll Express wrestled the Midnight Express in the main event with the Midnights going over in 17:38 after Cornette hit Gibson with the tennis racket behind the ref's back, allowing Eaton to get the pin.

 

Given that most people reading that will know exactly how that Flair interview looks and sounds and that tag match would unfold, there's really not that much need for more. So basically you'd be writing a few paragraph's worth per week to cover it unless you wanted to do more. I don't see where that would be a huge chore. I also get the feeling that folks like KrisZ, Dylan, goc, Parv and Grimmas are in this for the long haul and where it goes based on what happens. So maybe it should be clarified what exactly it entails a bit more clearly.

[goc]

Yea I was definitely looking to do a more long term thing and just see how long it plays out until everyone loses interest. I mean, booking one TV show a week really is nothing sometimes I sit and do a whole month of shows in my TEW game and I have 8 hours of TV a week in that game.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

Sorry. I probably should've started a separate thread. Just wanted to throw this out as an alternative. 1) Because I love drafts and 2) because I've done the whole e-fed, TEW and ambitious online fantasy booking project before. Everyone starts out all gung-ho, then most people lose interest within a few months.

[dawho5]

I understand why you are concerned with it, but I mentioned the names I did because all of them seem like they are the type to take this very seriously. One of the reasons I am on the fence is I know that I go in phases sometimes and can be unreliable. And I don't want to do that if other people are going to be giving it their all. Right now I'm trying to figure how much time it would take and how much I would be willing to give.