1989 Rookie List

[rainmakerrtv]

PCW has the 1st draft pick in the 2nd round from a trade with WCW.

[rainmakerrtv]

Early ECW mainstay Jason Knight was active in this time.

[LowBlowPodcast]

2 things -

 

1. Stampede sends their second round pick to WCW

 

2. What is the match minimum for an individual to be "debut" in accordance with this structure? I am doing some research on a couple of people who only had 5, 6, 7, 8 matches in 1989... does that mean they debut or do they need to have a minimum number in order to qualify?

[kevinmcfl]

To be considered a rookie, they only need to be active so those that you found would be active.  We would just need to see those matches listed on wrestlingdata.com or cagematch.com.

 

[rainmakerrtv]

Also, Steve "The Brawler" Lawler was active as well. 

[Blehschmidt]

Hello Gentleman!

Just looking around at the happenings in my old stomping ground and wanted to drop one small piece of information.

Trisa Hayes (aka Beulah McGillicutty) probably shouldn't be available until 1995.

She made one single appearance in Stampede in 1988 as an audience plant to help get Brian Pillman over (as she was dating him at the time) and then never appeared in wrestling again until her time in ECW began.

With the rules this game uses for debuts and retirements, I certainly don't think she fits the criteria for debuting at this point!

[rainmakerrtv]

I see that Ray "Glacier" Lloyd would have been active during this period, having had several matched in WCW/NWA in 1989.

[Control21]

2 hours ago, Blehschmidt said:

Hello Gentleman!

Just looking around at the happenings in my old stomping ground and wanted to drop one small piece of information.

Trisa Hayes (aka Beulah McGillicutty) probably shouldn't be available until 1995.

She made one single appearance in Stampede in 1988 as an audience plant to help get Brian Pillman over (as she was dating him at the time) and then never appeared in wrestling again until her time in ECW began.

With the rules this game uses for debuts and retirements, I certainly don't think she fits the criteria for debuting at this point!

Well, we have Dan Severn running wild now when he shouldn't have been near available until the mid-90s, so....

I'd say at this point there's some room for interpretation. Which is totally fine unless you totally break the realms of realism or possibility. 

[Jimmy Jack Punk]

I know I'm new here but I find it fascinating that there seem to be mysterious variables with this game that seem to make it possible for wrestlers to debut or jump ahead 10-15 years of their natural evolution where they are characters in this world that weren't conceived in some cases until the mid to late 90's but those some variables aren't allowed to effect when people died or retire in the "real world".  Not a complaint, just an observation.

[rainmakerrtv]

4 hours ago, Jimmy Jack Punk said:

I know I'm new here but I find it fascinating that there seem to be mysterious variables with this game that seem to make it possible for wrestlers to debut or jump ahead 10-15 years of their natural evolution where they are characters in this world that weren't conceived in some cases until the mid to late 90's but those some variables aren't allowed to effect when people died or retire in the "real world".  Not a complaint, just an observation.

I can at least address address the topic of when wrestlers died. This is a holdover from the previous project. When that project started, there were 3 options available with regards to the deaths of wrestlers :

1) Some sort of random death generation process ("Sorry, buddy, Ric Flair just died.") which would be creepy and weird.

2) Nobody ever dies ("1988 NWA World Champion David Von Erich!") which would be creepy and weird.

Or 3) People die when it happened IRL, which has the bizarre side effect of people being able to manage their booking around the deaths of the wrestlers (which the real life bookers certainly couldn't do), which was also a bit creepy and weird but ultimately seemed to be the best of the three otpions.

As far as retirement goes, it is a fairly generous rule, with the writers getting to use the wrestlers right up to the end of the year they retired. Along with the rookie rule, it helps to keep the rosters fresh and interesting for the writers and anyone reading.

[LastStopTour]

6 hours ago, Blehschmidt said:

Just looking around at the happenings in my old stomping ground and wanted to drop one small piece of information.

Trisa Hayes (aka Beulah McGillicutty) probably shouldn't be available until 1995.

She made one single appearance in Stampede in 1988 as an audience plant to help get Brian Pillman over (as she was dating him at the time) and then never appeared in wrestling again until her time in ECW began.

With the rules this game uses for debuts and retirements, I certainly don't think she fits the criteria for debuting at this point!

Shhhhhhh ...

[Control21]

2 minutes ago, rainmakerrtv said:

I can at least address address the topic of when wrestlers died. This is a holdover from the previous project. When that project started, there were 3 options available with regards to the deaths of wrestlers :

1) Some sort of random death generation process ("Sorry, buddy, Ric Flair just died.") which would be creepy and weird.

2) Nobody ever dies ("1988 NWA World Champion David Von Erich!") which would be creepy and weird.

Or 3) People die when it happened IRL, which has the bizarre side effect of people being able to manage their booking around the deaths of the wrestlers (which the real life bookers certainly couldn't do), which was also a bit creepy and weird 

As far as retirement goes, it is a fairly generous rule, with the writers getting to use the wrestlers right up to the end of the year they retired. Along with the rookie rule, it helps to keep the rosters fresh and interesting for the writers and anyone reading.

I agree with this, it's probably the best way to go about it.

[LastStopTour]

As far as retirement goes, it really is kind of a crapshoot because 2 sites are largely used to determine one's activity when they for the most part don't have every appearance listed. Some of those "retired" guys were working the Indies for years off the beaten track. In some cases, there were dozens if not hundreds of guys getting regular work in this ('88) time period who aren't on the Free Agent list.

[rainmakerrtv]

39 minutes ago, LastStopTour said:

As far as retirement goes, it really is kind of a crapshoot because 2 sites are largely used to determine one's activity when they for the most part don't have every appearance listed. Some of those "retired" guys were working the Indies for years off the beaten track. 

*cough* Teijoh Khan *cough*

[kevinmcfl]

Just my thought on the subject of rookies and retirements...

I was always in favor of wrestlers not being eligible to be in our game until they had wrestled 10 matches in a given year in a major promotion which is pretty easy to track through either cagematch or wrestlingdata.  I know these are not perfect but the major promotions did a good job of keeping records.  This stops us all from pushing people way to fast.  Right now we have major players in Dawn of War who were never heard of by anyone in 1988 unless you lived in the small indy territory  that they worked in.  I was out voted on this idea and we went with the idea of wrestlers being allowed into our game as long as there is any evidence that they wrestled at all in any year.  

As far as retirements, I think our current rule is pretty good as we do allow for retired wrestlers to work in a territory and even participate in matches.  I do agree that many of the wrestlers who we have on the retired list did work in the indys for a long time.  My problem with this is that none of us are running small indys.  We are running major promotions with TV contracts, named pay per view shows and bloated rosters.  

I just looked at the Memphis roster from 1988 and they were getting by with like 16 guys per month with a few jobbers and guys doing some spot shows.  If you look at Georgia Championship Wrestling in 1982 they ran 30 shows per month and survived with only 10 wrestlers wrestling in 20 shows.  The rest of the roster were jobbers and part time role players and a few stars who came in for the monthly show at the Omni.  

If we feel that our rosters are not deep enough, large enough, or that there is not enough talent to go around, I think we are getting way off base.  I am truly struggling right now to even right shows because my roster is just too big with too much star power.  I would prefer to cut roster size, wait for rookies to be in major promotions before being allowed to be drafted and have wrestlers who are wrestling like once a month to be considered retired.  I understand that I am in the minority but if anyone would like to propose any rule changes, we can vote on anything here.  We are all equal here in Dawn of War.

 

 

[Control21]

19 minutes ago, kevinmcfl said:

Just my thought on the subject of rookies and retirements...

I was always in favor of wrestlers not being eligible to be in our game until they had wrestled 10 matches in a given year in a major promotion which is pretty easy to track through either cagematch or wrestlingdata.  I know these are not perfect but the major promotions did a good job of keeping records.  This stops us all from pushing people way to fast.  Right now we have major players in Dawn of War who were never heard of by anyone in 1988 unless you lived in the small indy territory  that they worked in.  I was out voted on this idea and we went with the idea of wrestlers being allowed into our game as long as there is any evidence that they wrestled at all in any year.  

As far as retirements, I think our current rule is pretty good as we do allow for retired wrestlers to work in a territory and even participate in matches.  I do agree that many of the wrestlers who we have on the retired list did work in the indys for a long time.  My problem with this is that none of us are running small indys.  We are running major promotions with TV contracts, named pay per view shows and bloated rosters.  

I just looked at the Memphis roster from 1988 and they were getting by with like 16 guys per month with a few jobbers and guys doing some spot shows.  If you look at Georgia Championship Wrestling in 1982 they ran 30 shows per month and survived with only 10 wrestlers wrestling in 20 shows.  The rest of the roster were jobbers and part time role players and a few stars who came in for the monthly show at the Omni.  

If we feel that our rosters are not deep enough, large enough, or that there is not enough talent to go around, I think we are getting way off base.  I am truly struggling right now to even right shows because my roster is just too big with too much star power.  I would prefer to cut roster size, wait for rookies to be in major promotions before being allowed to be drafted and have wrestlers who are wrestling like once a month to be considered retired.  I understand that I am in the minority but if anyone would like to propose any rule changes, we can vote on anything here.  We are all equal here in Dawn of War.

 

 

If there's a general feeling that rosters are getting bloated, then perhaps a universal roster reduction starting next year would help, bring the cap down to 50 or 45, or something like that. There are also other ways to manage roster bloat, such as limiting the number of "main eventers" one can have or whatever, but that is getting into the weeds I think and I don't think a lot of people would be happy with that sort of micromanagement. 

I don't see any major issues with the game right now regarding roster sizes, talent "hogging", or what have you. It might also be a good idea to have a feedback thread every few months to make sure everyone is happy with the way things are going and listen to any concerns. As I said earlier, I think we are fine with setting a general frame of realism, but making things open to interpretation because if we did things by the book 100%, things might get boring for some. I know that if I was limited to the real-life UWF Newborn roster of only 6-7 guys and the occasional "special attraction" like Gerard Gordeau, things would get repetitive quite fast...so I appreciated being able to stretch the timeline a bit.

It's going to be difficult to generate rookie lists if we got too strict about who is eligible or not, so I favor a more lenient approach (as long as they were active that year in some form or another).

 

[Jimmy Jack Punk]

To Rainmaker's point...I get that to some degree but at the same time it seems like with the premise of these games being "fantasy" booking it would be interesting/fun to explore how things could have played out if fate hadn't had other plans and while I guess some may find that creepy, it certainly wouldn't be any weirder than things like Crash Holly existing in 1988. But, I get for whatever reason that seems to be commonplace in these sorts of games so it's understandable.

 

To Kevin's point....you make a great point as the rosters in the game seem absurdly bloated even for 80's WWF standards, there's no way to effectively book 60 people in the average territory in real life or in a game such as this which also to your point Kevin, with rosters that are overflowing with well known established stars it feels even stranger to have the need to push people with their 90's (and some late 90's) gimmicks in their first couple of years when they were either job guys in real life or cutting their teeth in opening matches in regional territories.  But anyway, again not complaining or trying to bring forth any rule changes, just trying to get a feel for things and wrap my head around what the aspects are where we are trying to be as "realistic" as possible and other aspects where it seems we're operating in a different stratusphere.  Thanks everyone for the insight.

[Control21]

In general, I agree with the idea of being careful about rolling out famous gimmicks too quickly. I recognize that there is no guarantee we'll get to certain points where things happen that are exciting to people, but I would encourage some restraint when it comes to that type of thing.

Another thing I would propose is limiting the number of foreign wrestlers one can have permanently signed to their territories. During this time, it was quite rare to have wrestlers like Tenryu or Hashimoto permanently signed to a western promotion. We can keep these wrestlers in a general "talent pool" in case someone wants to start a territory in Japan or Mexico, for example. And then people can use some of the wrestlers for "tours" like we currently do, but not have them permanently attached to any roster. I was thinking that perhaps having guys like Tenryu or Tsuruta in another promotion might deter some from joining if they wanted to run NJPW/AJPW.

[LastStopTour]

40 minutes ago, kevinmcfl said:

My problem with this is that none of us are running small indys.  We are running major promotions with TV contracts, named pay per view shows and bloated rosters.  

I just looked at the Memphis roster from 1988 and they were getting by with like 16 guys per month with a few jobbers and guys doing some spot shows.  If you look at Georgia Championship Wrestling in 1982 they ran 30 shows per month and survived with only 10 wrestlers wrestling in 20 shows.  The rest of the roster were jobbers and part time role players and a few stars who came in for the monthly show at the Omni.  

If we feel that our rosters are not deep enough, large enough, or that there is not enough talent to go around, I think we are getting way off base.  I am truly struggling right now to even write shows because my roster is just too big with too much star power.  I would prefer to cut roster size, wait for rookies to be in major promotions before being allowed to be drafted and have wrestlers who are wrestling like once a month to be considered retired.  I understand that I am in the minority but if anyone would like to propose any rule changes, we can vote on anything here.  We are all equal here in Dawn of War.

Hold on now ... some of us are!

I agree that most promotions around this time period, only used a handful of top talent supplimented by enhancement guys and lower tier fill-ins.

Personally, I think the rosters are too big and top heavy but that is just me. On top of the large numbers, the added use of enhancement guys that don't count, make it even larger numbers of guys being used.

[kevinmcfl]

We have been down this road a few times in the past and the debate has cost us writers on numerous occasions.  We have a divide in the opinions of what the best roster size is, what the jobber rule should be, when a person is considered to be a rookie, when a person should get pushed, when a person is considered retired and when a writer should should be replaced due to inactivity.  

Over the past 4 and a half years, the writers here have changed often with a core of 3 or 4 being involved for the entire length of the game.  With the changing of writers over time, maybe the beliefs of the majority have also changed.  With that being said, feel free to propose any rules change to my in a private message.  Then I can put it out to the group of writers anonymously and we can all get on the same page.

If you have no suggestions for rules changes, please stop complaining about the rules of the game as it only serves to pull us apart as it has done in the past.  I have said this before, we are all equal here and the majority rules the game.  Please feel free to propose as many rules changes as you like to make Dawn of War a better and more inviting place.  

[Blehschmidt]

I wasn't intending to start some shit. Seriously just wanted to point out that Beulah spends the next 7 years as a back up dancer for Prince amongst other gigs and not in professional wrestling!

and I have no dogs in this fight, so I won't leave any opinion on the meat of this argument, but I did want to comment on one thing Rain said about the deaths.

David Von Erich as NWA Champion in 88, creepy?

See, I think that would be interesting as hell.

I truly hope if this game ever re-boots back to the early 80's or we start another one, that some of the deaths can be looked at on a case by case basis and since we are already booking an alternate history, we can book one where David goes to the doctor, Gino gets help, or Magnum gets home. Then if David lives, do Mike and Kerry do what Mike and Kerry do? Does Mike even become a wrestler?

The what if scenarios are endless. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities that in truth are at least as plausible if not more realistic than 1988 Crash Holly or mulleted newcomer Shane Douglas already being the franchise. (No offense meant, just using those as examples.)

[rainmakerrtv]

I am fine with things the way they are now and don't have any problems writing this way.

[LastStopTour]

53 minutes ago, Blehschmidt said:

I wasn't intending to start some shit. Seriously just wanted to point out that Beulah spends the next 7 years as a back up dancer for Prince amongst other gigs and not in professional wrestling!

David Von Erich as NWA Champion in 88, creepy?

See, I think that would be interesting as hell.

I truly hope if this game ever re-boots back to the early 80's or we start another one, that some of the deaths can be looked at on a case by case basis and since we are already booking an alternate history, we can book one where David goes to the doctor, Gino gets help, or Magnum gets home. Then if David lives, do Mike and Kerry do what Mike and Kerry do? Does Mike even become a wrestler?

The what if scenarios are endless. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities that in truth are at least as plausible if not more realistic than 1988 Crash Holly or mulleted newcomer Shane Douglas already being the franchise. (No offense meant, just using those as examples.)

I don't think you started any shit. It was a simple comment that took on a life of it's own.

As far as the rules go, despite thinking the rosters are too big, I really have no problems with them as they are. I will just run things my way within the framework of the ruleset being used. My little corner of the world doesn't need to be bigger than what I have out there since starting. Things are clean and efficiently run and for the most part a nice set of writers who are friendly. Can't really ask for anything more than that.

The "What If" scenario of allowing those who died in real life to continue on raises other questions. Sure, if history played out differently and David Von Erich missed his plane and didn't make his Japan tour dates, would he have still died? Don't know. I guess it would be possible or would it have gone down a different road where he became World Champion, made more money and became a bigger "celebrity" in the wrestling world which might have made his life spiral even more out of control?

With the Crash Holly and Shane Douglas examples becoming their better known/more popular gimmicks earlier, I think the writers really miss out on having a go at their earlier history. Holly as the Green Ghost or his Leprechaun gimmick would take him in a different direction. Douglas as a skater/surfer teamed with surfer Sandman puts him in a whole different light. Taz taken right to Taz misses out on the Tazmaniac and his Kid Krush days. Granted, there are some guys out there that can and did make an instant impact but not many of them.

[LowBlowPodcast]

1 hour ago, LastStopTour said:

I don't think you started any shit. It was a simple comment that took on a life of it's own.

As far as the rules go, despite thinking the rosters are too big, I really have no problems with them as they are. I will just run things my way within the framework of the ruleset being used. My little corner of the world doesn't need to be bigger than what I have out there since starting. Things are clean and efficiently run and for the most part a nice set of writers who are friendly. Can't really ask for anything more than that.

The "What If" scenario of allowing those who died in real life to continue on raises other questions. Sure, if history played out differently and David Von Erich missed his plane and didn't make his Japan tour dates, would he have still died? Don't know. I guess it would be possible or would it have gone down a different road where he became World Champion, made more money and became a bigger "celebrity" in the wrestling world which might have made his life spiral even more out of control?

With the Crash Holly and Shane Douglas examples becoming their better known/more popular gimmicks earlier, I think the writers really miss out on having a go at their earlier history. Holly as the Green Ghost or his Leprechaun gimmick would take him in a different direction. Douglas as a skater/surfer teamed with surfer Sandman puts him in a whole different light. Taz taken right to Taz misses out on the Tazmaniac and his Kid Krush days. Granted, there are some guys out there that can and did make an instant impact but not many of them.

For whatever it is worth, I would’ve preferred to use the Tazmaniac gimmick, especially to team up with Sabu like they did. I just didn’t have that head for a figure

[LastStopTour]

42 minutes ago, LowBlowPodcast said:

For whatever it is worth, I would’ve preferred to use the Tazmaniac gimmick, especially to team up with Sabu like they did. I just didn’t have that head for a figure

I am looking for a Tazmaniac head for you!