So much can change in 3 years

[Greg2511]

Okay, so I was killing time waiting for dinner to be cooked and I happened to be on my old computer. I opened up TEW 05 and had a quick look around. TEW 08 is such an improvement on both it and 07 and, well all previous versions of the EW series, it really has improved in leaps and bounds. Thing that striked my interest though was the SWF. I never touched them until 08, with a sever lack of DaVE, I went searching for something new and ended up falling in love with the SWF. I look in 05 and realise that there upper midcard are all sitting at between B- and B+, while there isnt a single Main Eventer with less than A popularity. Compare this to TEW 08 where SWF's main event scene consists of B's and B+ if lucky. With only one man at A (Steve Frehley). How can these workers who had gained such notoriety (Enygma at A* for example) have slipped into nothingness? I always pictured an A* to be the Austins, Hogans and Rocks of the world. Who even 5 years on after doing NOTHING in pro wrestling are the most over guys in the industry so how could someone who has acheived this rating in the year 2005 be only a B- three years down the line? Thoughts?

[Marcel Fromage]

I don't think you can really look at popularity levels and ratings from one game to another and compare them like for like. The game mechanics have changed too much and the requirements for success are a bit different now to what they were in 07 and certainly 05. For instance, this year the AI has been given a boost when booking its cards whereas it's supposed to be harder for the user to match those ratings. If all those wrestlers in SWF were still up at A* popularity this year, it wouldn't have made things harder for the user. So whilst events, title changes, roster shifts etc do follow on from game to game, I'm not really sure that popularity and overness is quite in the same boat.

[Rob4590]

The other thing you have to remember is that in 05 there were less grades - so an A grade then meant 80-90%, A* was 90+. Compare that to this year, and someone at 81% (A in 05) is only a B now (77-83) - so they haven't really changed that much - just in the way its presented graphically.

[nik6241]

Or, if you want to look at it from a "CornellVerse" point-of-view, maybe wrestling isn't as popular as it was in 2005? Maybe the guys in SWF are well-known in the world of wrestling (reflected by the B/B+ ratings) but few of them have the mainstream popularity to deserve a rating of A? In your Enygma example, he was World Champion from January to February of 2004 and had enjoyed an undefeated streak until he lost the belt to Christian Faith. The data for TEW 2005 had a start date of January 1, 2006, so, it is conceivable that Enygma could still be riding high from that success. Two years later--as the start date of TEW 2008 is January 1, 2008--Enygma's popularity could conceivably have fallen because, as his bio states, his momentum had died and he was "falling further and further down the card". I like to think of things in terms of the story of the CornelleVerse, not so much the game mechanics. Your questions do bring up some good points, though.