TEW2008: Adam's Developer's Journal

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#99: Location, Location, Location[/B] The way that AI promotions choose where to hold their shows has been completely revamped to take into account a more business-oriented approach. Promotions, as mentioned earlier, are now much more aggressive at trying to use TV and PPV to break into new regions and areas; their venue selection takes this into mind too. Rather than take the extremely slow route of trying to build up a region purely on the strength of shows - which is both time consuming and expensive - promotions will now almost always use their live shows as a "second wave" attack; i.e. they use their broadcast capabilities to establish their presence in a region, and then start running shows there once they have a firm base. This is both more realistic, smarter, and financially more prudent. The AI has also been tweaked to allow promotions to show more strategic involvement, with them being smarter about using their live shows to help avoid losing popularity in areas that they are already big in.

[Adam Ryland]

[B]#100: Overhauled Negotiations[/B] One area I was keen to change from TEW07 was the negotiation process, as although it was technically sound it lacked drama and any competent player could get the best deal possible almost every time. The challenge for TEW08 was to make something that addressed that, and provided enough of a challenge that the user wouldn't always come out on top. Although the overhauled TEW08 negotiations look very similar - you still make selections from a variety of terms - the addition of a few new key concepts has added a great deal. The first key concept is feedback. In previous games, if the worker rejected an offer you would only see whatever his first complaint was; any other complaints would only be found once you'd dealt with it. This has been completely revamped in 08; the worker will give you full feedback on what he doesn't like in two ways. Firstly you will get an on-screen message, as before, telling you why he has rejected a certain term (for example, "the money is too low" or "I want a guaranteed title reign"). Secondly, a red "X" will appear next to the term he has rejected. This means that you have an on-screen visual of where your problem(s) lie so that you don't have to memorise everything. Of course, it is important to realise that terms can impact each other. So if a worker's only complaint is that he wants a written deal, not a PPA, that does not mean that everything else is OK just because he didn't reject them the first time around - once you've switched to offer him a PPA deal he may then reject further terms. The second key change may actually sound pretty small at first, but actually has a huge impact. When you make an offer and it is accepted, the contract is signed immediately. That is to say, you no longer get the "The offer has been accepted, would you like to sign the contract?" choice. Why? Because it means you can no longer simply offer a huge amount of money that you know will be accepted and then continually get it accepted, choose not to sign the contract, lower the amount, and repeat the process. With that "loophole" closed, you can no longer "cheat" to find out the lowest acceptable offer. The third, more dynamic key concept is that of patience. Along the bottom of the screen is a patience bar that shows you how willing the worker is to negotiate. Every time you make an offer that gets rejected, it goes down. Where it gets interesting is that the amount that it goes down depends on multiple factors, including their personality and the situation. For example, if you're the biggest promotion in the world and you're negotiating with young Jobby McJobberson who would give his left arm to work for you, his patience will barely go down at all, as he really wants to work for you. But, by the same token, if you're a cult promotion and you're trying to lure a huge star into your promotion, his patience may go down massively with each failed attempt as he simply doesn't care all that much. When combined with the other key concepts, this leads to dramatic and important "critical moments" in the negotiations where you will find that you have big decisions to make. For example, using the "cult promotion trying to sign a superstar" situation, let's say that you make two offers - $20,000 a month and $30,000 a month - and both get rejected, with the last offer being said to be "not quite high enough". If he's a big star with a big ego, just those two failed offers alone may have dropped his patience to almost zero. Now you have an big decision to make. How far are you willing to go to get him? Do you go up to $40,000? You'd be pretty sure of getting him, but if all he wanted was $31,000 then he's out-smarted you to the tune of an extra $108,000 a year! Do you go to $35,000? Not as big of a raise, but there's an increased risk that he might reject that too. Or do you go up to $45,000 just to make absolutely sure that you get him, and take the financial hit? Of course, that example only takes into account money - if you have multiple factors that he has rejected, your decision becomes even more complex. Added to this is the fact that negotiations now only happen once, there is no "let's come back tomorrow and try again" any more, and you cannot exit negotiations once they've started. All of these items means that there can be a lot of tension when trying to cut big deals, as if you mess up, you mess up - there's no second chances. The end result of all these changes is that in some negotiations (generally with bigger stars - if you're just dealing with lower-level stars then negotiations are usually fairly straight forward) you actually have to show nerve and skill as a negotiator in order to come out with a good deal, and sometimes the worker will come out with a better deal than he wanted because he got the better of you - and that extra $108,000 a year mentioned above can be very costly if you've got owner goals that want you to make money. On top of all that, a lot of terms impact each other. So you might be able to get a worker to sign for lower money if you're willing to give him creative control...but then you might have to spend the next three years dealing with a rampant egomaniac who refuses to job. And of course, on top of all of this, your owner can get still get involved in negotiations and block you from making offers he considers to be silly. So sometimes you may need to give incentives that you didn't really want to give, just to complete the deal. Oh, and did I mention that some workers can be complete b******s, and if they sense that you're under pressure and willing to make big offers that they can actually up their requests to take advantage of that? :D