Skummy

Yeah, this is the difference between a ring announcer in TV wrestling and a host or MC on smaller independent shows, which is a more expansive role and arguably easier to replicate in TEW - they are talent that, if you particularly wanted to, you could book in angles based on Microphone skills between matches. I don't think ring announcers will ever be added as a role, because they haven't been in any of the EW games so far. I wouldn't object to there being an additional slot on your announce team that's specifically for ring announcers/MCs, but I also think that them being included as part of Production or some other broad category is fine too. I have seen and worked shows where a bad announcer definitely dragged the quality of the show down, but it's hard to say that they negatively impacted on individual matches, just on the quality of the show as a whole, so treating them as an aspect of your Production quality feels more appropriate.

Some things I noticed:

These points are contradictory, though - you're arguing that changes in popularity should be less significant in one direction but more significant in another; there's no balance or consistency there, that's just asking for the game to be made easier. I do agree that changes in company size should be less abrupt - maybe some warnings before it happens, or some potential "buffers" in place to offset falls in company size; just thinking off the top of my head, but there could be some bonuses that add an extra (invisible) point or two to your popularity. Something like having a deal with a TV network of a certain size could add a point or two, having a certain number of wrestlers above a certain popularity, or having your figurehead be a certain popularity, might add a point or two, that's not enough to push you up a size but could stave off dropping down to a smaller size. A run of bad shows for WWE aren't going to make them a smaller company overnight if they still have great TV contracts and the biggest stars in the world, so that could protect them for a while, but if you don't turn the ship around, you end up in a late stage WCW situation where it doesn't matter how popular your stars are and how good your TV deal is, the show just isn't good enough.

Just a thought as I came across some stories from the '20s suggesting that Frank Gotch Jr. might become a wrestler - he never did, but what if things had gone differently? It could be interesting, particularly for fantasy mods, to include "Yet-to-debut" workers that might not necessarily ever show up. It could be based on percentages, or based on only debuting if they meet certain conditions - for an obvious if somewhat morbid example, a second-generation wrestler's debut would be reliant on their parent being alive at the right time; if you're playing a historical scenario and Dusty Rhodes dies in a freak accident in 1984, Cody Rhodes wouldn't be able to debut. Beyond that, there could be broader requirements - second generations of masked gimmicks (not necessarily family relations) not debuting if the original never got above a particular overness, as one such idea. I remember when Future Workers were first added to TEW, there were a few present-day real world mods that included a load of wrestlers' kids as workers set to debut later down the line - Undertaker's son was in there, that sort of thing. That's obviously not realistic, as we don't know if any of those kids will ever become wrestlers, or what they'll be like as wrestlers if they do. But having no future workers means that, in longer games, the game world will become depleted as existing workers age out and retire or die, and players might want a little bit more character and familiarity than purely randomly generated workers offer. So adding in a degree of chance to whether some future workers ever debut could add that extra sense of unpredictability to long-term games using current day mods, could really expand fantasy mods in dynamic ways that add more variety to different playthroughs, but could also open up potential curveballs to historical mods if some creative license is exercised and "what could have been" workers are added as potential debuts that never happened in real life. Thinking further on this, there could be different dates for potential debuts too - a story circulated recently of Koko B. Ware, as a talent scout, attempting to recruit Kurt Angle in 1987. He then showed up in ECW in 1996 (and was offered a ten-year deal by the WWF that same year), before finally debuting in 1998. So as well as there being a variable chance of a future worker debuting at all, there could be % scales for wrestlers debuting at different times - so in a historical playthrough it's most likely that Kurt Angle debuts in 1998, but there's an outside chance of him debuting in 1996, and an extremely slim chance of him debuting in 1987.

Just to add to this that NGD have subsequently lost the belts to Los Vipers - Psicosis, Abismo Negro Jr and Toxin - with El Hijo de Mascara Ano 2000 subbing for Cuatrero. Ano 2000 has been teaming with his cousins pretty regularly since April, so I think it's safe to asssume El Cuatrero is out of the picture for the time being.

some random notes based on going through workers on the June mod: Alexxis Falcon should be able to work in Europe - she's worked France, Germany, Austria and Spain Alpha Female shouldn't be signed to Stardom, she hasn't appeared for them since last November. Avery Good should be active as a Personality Baliyan Akki should be able to work the USA Cara Noir should be out with a long-term foot/leg injury - unknown recovery time, but it's in the multiple months Cassandro should be either On Hiatus or have a starting injury; I don't think he's wrestled since early last year. Charles Crowley should be able to work Canada - he's done some work for Smash Doug Williams has retired Drago is now going by Dios del Inframundo and has left AAA. They have debuted a new Drago. Janai Kai should be able to work the UK, she has wrestled for EVE in London Jinny and WALTER/Gunther are married Lana Austin should be able to work Europe Little Miss Roxxy is based in the US now Mariah May should be active in Japan Mei Suruga should be active in the UK

I don't see it as requiring that level of detail at all. There's no reason it needs to be any more complex than a "Crazy Bump" note, or a risk value on a match, in how it relates to the worker, the match quality, and the broadcaster. After that, it's basically a roll of the dice. My point on nuance is that it needs to be - as I feel the majority of features in TEW should be - a balance of risk and reward, rather than the "instantly make this match more interesting" button that some posters were interpreting it as. It needn't be complex.

All of this are nuances to how it could work, not drawbacks, though. Austin bleeding in that match got over because he's Steve Austin. The blood wasn't what made it work, it was his selling and charisma combined with the blood, at the end of an all-time great match. A lesser worker, without Bret and Austin's psychology stats, Austin's selling, and Austin's charisma, wouldn't have made it mean as much, and wouldn't have got the associated bonuses/perks, if we're considering this in TEW terms. The same goes for Becky Lynch bleeding after the brawl with Nia Jax - if she'd covered her face and meekly rushed to the back, she wouldn't have got any more over from it, and might actually have risked killing her credibility. But because she made it work, it was a star-making moment. It's a risk/reward system. A wrestler bleeding accidentally could make a match better, or it could slow it down and make it much worse as wrestlers/referees stop the match to try and deal with the bleeding, or slow things down while they figure out how bad things are and get things back on track. Maybe it does make the match better, but even then, the broadcaster doesn't want blood on their show, and it affects that relationship as well. It's far from as simple as an "add blood to improve matches/make stars" button. And then there's overexposure - blood starts to mean less if it's in every match on the card, or if you use it in every main event every week. The extent to which you can get away with can depend on the company's product - a hardcore promotion will expect more blood, so you can get away with using it more, but its effects won't be as strong because it's less of an "event". A family-friendly promotion wouldn't want blood at all, so you'd risk turning your crowd off if someone bleeds in a match on that show. Any number of products falling in the middle can benefit from blood used sparingly, but not to excess. Full-blown deathmatch promotions would likely get no real perks from blood at all, because it's expected as a matter of course, but you might be penalised if nobody bleeds across a show.

Adrian Finch wrestled as one half of the UK Nasty Boys, and in the early '90s as "Macho Man", if that makes it any easier to track down a picture. He also teamed with Scott Conway around '92; I've been looking through Scott's Instagram, and while there's plenty of posters with them as a team, I've yet to find any with a picture of Adrian! Not found anything of either Finch brother on a couple of World of Sport Facebook groups either. Is it this Mario Milano, or a different wrestler using the same name - Mario Milano - Wikipedia? This appears to be Greg Stekker - Greg Stekker Greg Smith Australian Wrestling Champion Submission Master AWE Australian Wrestling Entertainment Australian Sports and Entertainment Portal (australiansportsentertainment.com)

I think perhaps the counterbalance to it overpowering families, or other relationships, is that there could be more of a negative side to relationships too. You'll always hear Steve Austin talk about "booking the territory" on long car journeys, and old wrestlers talking about how much they learned just from riding with veterans and learning bits of psychology and understanding of wrestling that way - in my experience, you do far more talking about the nuts and bolts of how wrestling works in the car than you ever do at shows, when everyone's busy with their own stuff going on. But the car's also where the most gossiping gets done, and being on the road with more negative influences would be even worse, and relationships could reflect that kind of out-of-the ring stuff. So while at the moment we have mentors passing on experience to their trainees, and the prospect of expanding this to other relationships. But what if that's not always a good thing? What if there's a risk that a wrestler with bad habits passes them on to their student, friend or relative? Two wrestlers with drink or drug habits becoming friends, and working in the same company together, could heighten the chances of drink or drug-related incidents occurring to those wrestlers - so do you keep them both around, or separate them, either by releasing one, or keeping them on separate ends of a brand split? Maybe a wrestler with a high opinion of themselves but low Psychology and Respect might try to pass on knowledge to their blood relatives, but that actually hampers them because he doesn't know what he's talking about. So in that case, again, it might be worth considering not keeping both members of that family under contract, and having to balance the family's morale against other concerns.

Some very minor corrections/updates I've noticed when going through the database. Mostly related to the UK scene, with a couple of Mexico and Japan notes too: It's probably one for the RWC+ thread, but if I ever have time, I might look at suggesting stats or making my own importable database for some other British promotions, talent, and particularly supporting roles like refs, announcers and so on, to help flesh things out there.

Cut of ticket sales would be a useful one historically - Gorgeous George used to take a pretty sizeable cut of the gate for shows he was booked on, and that was true to a lesser extent of a lot of big name wrestlers before him. It would also be a useful option for Tiny promotions, to try and gamble on bringing someone in based on a % of ticket sales if they can't afford their upfront fee, but then run the risk of the ticket sales being too low to pay everyone what they'd expect...

On the discussion of AJW's retirement age, I've never managed to get a clear answer on when that rule was introduced - to the point that I've literally asked people who worked there and they couldn't answer me. I would be surprised if it was already in play in 1970, though - Miyuki Yanagi, who worked early AJW shows as "Masked Killer", was in her 30s, and I'm sure that a lot of the American talent they were using early on would have been older. I think it would be perfectly fair to raise their hiring rule to nobody under 40, for this time period. If I had to take an educated guess, I would say that the enforced retirement age didn't come in until around '75/'76 with The Beauty Pair. Unfortunately, there's no narrative to change hiring rules, to allow for that rule being implemented later, as far as I can tell - maybe one for the suggestions thread.

That's the main issue for me - when somebody is filming a movie or agrees to an MMA fight, you have a few weeks or months notice to finish up your plans with them, but when someone goes into politics it's immediate, and you might end up losing them for multiple years. I'm a year into a game using the Millennium Bug 2000 mod, and I've had Steve Austin, Mick Foley, Chris Jericho and Jeff Jarrett all go into politics within a year, all while contracted to the WWF. I have random incidents set to High, so I know that's part of it, as I've spoken to other players who have never seen this happen at all.

Kung Fu was born in 1943. L'Angle Blanc was - according to Wrestling Heritage - born in November 1930. Also from Wrestling Heritage, there's a mention of Steve Adonis celebrating his 50th birthday in 2013, which would put his birth year in 1963. Tina St. Clair-Gregory also worked as Tina Starr, if that's any help at pinning down her age. Shane Stevens I'm assuming is "Psycho" Shane Stevens - I worked with him about 11-12 years ago, unfortunately. The Sunday Mail ran an exposé on his tribute shows, fraud, bounced cheques and other assorted dodgy dealings back in 2001, and I found a newspaper account claiming (using "Shane's" real name) that he was 49 at the time, which would put his birth year at 1952, which sounds about right.