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[FULL RELEASE] 2020: Before The Fall

Rick Savant
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Rick Savant Newbie

Rick Savant

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So a confluence of A) getting into a protracted dispute with my landlord over whether he could, or could not, evict me, B) contracting Covid for longer than I would have liked, and C) for some reason, not getting notifications when comments on this thread were made (some reason being user error) combined to make me miss a whole bunch of this, but…

 

I’m here now! I’ll respond to this stuff in two parts, and then when I’m done… upload 2.0 which will address nearly all the issues mentioned in this tread! Hurray!

 

Dante Martin's name is spelled "Daunte" for some reason

 

That's how it was spelled at that point. He only dropped the U after Darius got injured earlier this year.

 

Raspy has the right of it.

 

My rule for how to list people (as best I can keep on it) is to name them as per their Wikipedia; if none, then as per cagematch.net; if none, Fandom; if none, as per my whims.

 

He's Dante on Wikipedia now, so this won't be annoying you anymore once I upload 2.0, which, in theory, should happen later today ;)

 

Couple things I noticed while setting up my AEW game:

 

- Matt Mahoney & Matt Makowski have the same photo.

- Max Caster is listed as 23. He's actually a lot older than I expected and born in July 1989, so he should be 30 here. His father is Rich Caster, who played in the NFL in the 70's.

- Ryan Davidson & Ryan Donavon have the same photo.

- Wheeler Yuta is listed as 26. As far as I can tell he was born ~1997 and should be 22-23 here. He started wrestling when he was 16 which might be why he's listed as older.

 

All fantastic catches, all fixed!

 

- Rok-C and Lee "TAIGASTYLE" Moriarty don't appear to be in the database. That was a tough one for me as they're two of my favorite young wrestlers.

 

Yeah, not having them included seems like a pretty big oversight. But it is now sighted! And by that I mean they are now in the game as of 2.0.

 

- Is there a reason not to add the AEW Dynamite Diamond Ring and Casino Battle Royales (men and women -- tag team might be hard to replicate) as accomplishment titles for AEW? These have been steady accomplishments AEW's used beginning before the game starts to the present day.

 

So, yes. And I acknowledge this is a close call. Originally, I had the Casino Ladder Match in, and took it out. Basically, with the Casino matches, they are irregularly held, and ultimately are rarely referred to again on AEW TV, let alone elsewhere in the world of wrestling. So, they feel more like a style of match than an accomplishment to me.

 

The Dynamite Diamond Ring and Face of the Revolution matches feel more like a Royal Rumble-esque title, to me. They're held annually, and have come up in storyline (to varying degrees) throughout AEW's year. But ultimately, at this point, the DD Ring feels like a gimmick to get MJF over and I wouldn't be shocked if it disappeared in a universe where he left for Hollywood tomorrow (don't worry, he won't). And the Face of the Revolution Ladder Match feels like minor deal to set up a mid-card challenger. It's not like they're really pushing Wardlow as the face of the revolution, right now. It's just, sort of, a match he won.

 

Anyway, that's my take on it, but I can totally get why someone might view it differently. I may even change my mind in time. Those are pretty easy titles to add, should someone want to, and I'll put pics for them in the 2.0 folder, in case someone wants to make them for their game.

 

Having a toddler and a baby pretty much limits me to playing through one mod at a time at a very very slow rate, and I'm very much stuck into a 98 ECW save for the moment...

 

But I've really been feeling alienated by the direction AEW has taken, especially since The First Dance. The pandemic definitely played its part in that too, what with the roster bloat as it set the wheels in motion for Tony Kahn to become a haven for both indy talent and WWE releases.

 

I enjoyed reading through the feedback and your own responses, it sounds like a lot of great work and thought has gone into this. So consider me provisionally on board! I need to scratch that early-days style AEW itch and would could have been.

 

That sounds like a lot of work, luckily 98 ECW is a rad place to be stuck in!

 

I totally get the AEW malaise, although I think I might be slightly less disillusioned than you are. In my case, I waited a long (long) time for a high production value alternative to WWE, so when it finally came, I couldn't help but project 20 years of desires onto a wrestling company completely out of my control. I can't fully blame them for not living up to my PERFECT IDEAL. Luckily, I have this mod to right the wrongs of the wrestling world. (Except that Cash Wheeler went on hiatus less than a week before I was about to debut FTR. /scream of anguish)

 

Some quick notes on things I found with AEW and others:

 

-The AEW Casino Ladder Match has Brian Cage in its title history but it hasn't happened yet.

-Jake Roberts should be set as Lance Archer's manager.

-Kenny Omega was not portraying an Awkward Weeaboo in March 2020, or really at any point in AEW.

-I'm not sure if Ethnic Hero is the right gimmick for Scorpio Sky.

-Orange Cassidy could use a fairly large bump in popularity. This was peak Cassidy, coming off of the Revolution match vs. PAC. Recognizable at 48 pop seems super low.

-MJF is also at 49 pop which is lower than the likes of Jake Hager (54) and Lance Archer (53). He just beat Cody at Revolution.

 

-As above, CLM removed entirely, along with the spoilers about Brian Cage's win :p

 

-Archer had only signed with AEW four days prior, when the mod starts. I can see an argument on assigning Roberts as his manager, in case someone wants to go that route, but misses that it isn't set up already. But, on the other hand, as this is a fantasy booking game, many people will want to go a different direction, and also not check, getting an unexpected appearance by The Snake. Given either situation is annoying, I default to what was happening in reality at the time of the Mod, which was that Archer did not have a manager, or direction of any kind, as of yet.

 

-Oh man! You didn't watch his heel run? You really have to avoid checking that out. :p Obviously, this is subjective. If you have a better descriptor for Kenny Omega's on air persona, I encourage you to make the change in the editor. But I can't imagine what that would be.

 

-He, along with Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian, are the proud representatives of Southern California! SCU! Obviously, if there's a better descriptor of that gimmick, change away. Now, I can appreciate that someone might think the play on the old TEW stock gimmick is saying something about his racial ethnicity. It's not. But I certainly don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, so if your flagging Scopio's gimmick is a sign of that kind of discomfort, let me know, and I'll change it. But, technically speaking, it is an accurate description of the SCU gimmick.

 

-Your Orange Cassidy point is an interesting one. I disagree that this was peak Cassidy. To my perception, that came at the height of the Jericho feud. But, ultimately, I think you're right that the PAC match significantly changed his perception. He's been bumped up to a well known act coming off of that performance!

 

-Likewise, MJF is an interesting case. He was not very well known at this point on a national level, but in the AEW markets the Cody win was big. But it was the first, and really only, big thing that had happened with him in AEW at that point, so it would have boosted him up from indy cred, plus some really good promos. But I think you make a case for him being higher than he currently is, so I've given him a buff!

 

-Marty Scurll should have some negative attributes. At least Sleazy if not Scumbag. He is also the polar opposite of A Marketing Dream. I understand this is March 2020 but the events in question have already happened and you assigned appropriate attributes to the likes of Starr/Ryan/Havoc.

 

Totally. I've added the Sleazy tag for Scurll. Honestly thought I'd already done it, so good catch! Small note about the Scumbag vs Sleazy tag. Like, for most of the people caught up in the Speaking Out situation, 'scumbag' feels like an appropriate descriptor, and 'sleazy' feels a little light. But in the game, if you give them 'scumbag' then they do a bunch of stuff like rip people off for money, which isn't really the issue. Whereas the 'sleazy' tag, I believe, but could be wrong, gets you creepier behavior. So, I'm leaning towards the 'sleazy' tag in general... but am very much undecided, so any thoughts on this would be great. Honestly, given how big a deal that was, there should just be a tag for 'sexual predator'.

 

As for the marketing issue, I don’t think it’s controversial that Scurll’s T-Shirt sales and general merch presence far exceeded his stature as a draw, which is essentially what the marketing tags are for.

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Rick Savant Newbie

Rick Savant

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I really liked this mod but have some things that i've adjusted before start a real save.

As a non-pandemic world, there are some start absences that doesn't need to be in the database.

I don't have the game open now but one I remember is Roman Reigns.

Another one is CM Punk, is rumored that he only signed with AEW in August/21 because with the pandemic scenario isn't financially viable to sign him without crowd.

There are others who made returns before the hiatus setting in this mod, for now I only remember Ronda Rousey and Sting.

 

But this is for sure a really good mod.

Thanks for this.

 

So, Roman is a tough one. He never makes a televised appearance after the start of the mod, but he does have one last house show match with the WWE on March 1st. He wasn't officially taken off WM until April 3rd. I thought I remembered, at the time, him saying that his time off wasn't pandemic related, but every article I can find now contradicts my memory.

 

Maybe it's not that hard. I think your proposal that in a non-pandemic world, Roman Reigns main events WrestleMania is a strong one. And truthfully, WWE would just be so much more fun to play with him available. You've convinced me. He's reinstated!

 

Punk, on the other hand, I'm not convinced on. I've heard rumors there were two Ultimate Warriors, I wouldn't put the second one in a mod. We know that TK wanted Punk from the get go of AEW, without a pandemic in play, and Punk balked. He obviously changed his mind somewhere along the line, and if there was no pandemic would it have happened sooner? Probably. Do we really have any idea as to when? No. The way I figure it, anyone who wants to run a game centered around the return of Punk, will probably want to tweak his return to a date of their choosing in the editor, anyway.

 

Rhonda comes back in the last week of January, 2022. There's 48 weeks in a TEW year, so she should be gone for 91 weeks... you're right! She was gone a bit too long. Fixed!

 

Sting's a huge catch. WWE removes him from their website at the end of Oct, 2020. He debuts in the first week of Dec for AEW. So, I think it's reasonable to have him be available to negotiate with as of the first week of Nov. Fixed!

 

I appreciate the kind words! If you think of any more lemme know. And maybe I'll do a full review of the starting absences at some point. (edit: Think of any more hiatus errors, not kind words. But honestly, I'll take more kind words too.)

 

Reuploaded them for the people who couldn't download:

 

Thank you so much for doing this while I was awol. You truly are the King of Kings.

 

Not one for nitpicking ratings cos that's mod maker's discretion and the user can always just edit and tweak as necessary (e.g I know some people complained about your ratings for Kenny but that's w/e to me) but I do wonder if there's an issue with SQ across the board. I particularly wanted to flag it up because my favourite thing about this mod is that you did your research and compared ratings with the C-Verse.

 

If we go back to comparing stats with the C-Verse, at game start there are 34 active wrestlers with 90 or above SQ. Guys with numbers like this are basically can't miss, sure fire superstars - the kind of guys who could transcend the industry into the mainstream. The sort of people who are candidates to be company Figureheads. In Before The Fall there are 28 wrestlers with 90 or above SQ in WWE alone. That seems disproportionately high.

 

It makes sense for someone like Sasha Banks (who was spotted by film director Jon Favreau and immediately earmarked as someone with impressive charisma and mainstream potential) but why do e.g Lars Sullivan and Rusev have SQ so high? Lars Sullivan's Star Quality is 93 which is the sort of rating I would expect someone like Stone Cold to have. Rusev is popular and all but can you really imagine someone building a whole company around him or seeing him main eventing WrestleMania year after year?

 

Like I say I don't want to get into specific "this guy should be this, this guy should be that" discussions because I don't think that's helpful to the mod maker but I would expect there to be, at most, 4 or 5 active full time roster members in WWE to have an SQ rating so massive that they could be the next Hulk Hogan. As it stands there are 6 among the women's division alone.

 

I really appreciate your being cognizant of not wanting to argue about matters of opinion! The issue you brought up here is in no way that, and, conversely, I think super interesting.

 

Here's the distribution of the BTF and CV Star Quality stats in 2.0:

 

hfKr9Yi.jpg

 

So, just eyeballing that, I'd say it might be a good idea to take some people in the mid to high 70s and drop them down to the low to mid 70s. But, in general, things look good to me.

 

My first thought about some of the numbers you put forward was to do with the sheer size of the database. Looking at active men, there's 1487 workers in the CV, vs 2256 in BTF (again, that's in 2.0 which I haven't released yet, but will shortly). So, you would expect to see more high SQ workers floating around in that larger pool at somewhere around 1.5x the number. In the CV, I count 31 active male (you got 34, so I could be wrong, but it's close enough that I think this all still works), full-time, workers who have =>90 SQ. In BTF we have 41, which, if anything, is a little low. And I do think the difference in size is part of what is creating your impression.

 

But! That doesn't explain why 21 of those 41 workers (over half!) work for the WWE. By comparison, the highest concentration of =>90 SQ workers in the CV is found in RAW with 9 of the 31 (or 29%). That is a big difference in distribution. But I think there's a reason for that, which is that the CV and BTF are just simulating different scenarios.

 

BTF is a world which has spent 20 years being dominated by a market hegemon. Not just that, but one run by a man who genuinely prefers bodybuilding to professional wrestling, and puts a famously outsized value on looks. The CV, by comparison, is a much better world. It's a world built to be interesting to play in. Where there is a three way war for the North American wrestling fan's attention, and the UK has a company that starts off with 80% prestige and 7.5 million dollars in the bank. Given those differences, I think it's explainable that there's a concentration of star quality inside the roster of the most powerful company in the game.

 

And the last thing that, might be a factor, is that Star Quality is (I think, notoriously) the most wishy washy stat in TEW. Honestly I don't like it, and if I was in charge (and decidedly, am not) would have its properties be disseminated into Charisma, Look, and Poise. Which is not to say that Poise is a synonym for the current Star Quality stat, nor, in the last paragraph, was I trying to say that I think bodybuilding, or looks, are what it represents. But it kind of represents a mishmash of all of those things, since it's so loosely defined. And when stats are loosely defined, they can end up meaning different things to different people.

 

With this in mind, you brought up Lars Sullivan, which I think is a great example both in the differences in our thinking on SQ, but also in how frustrating the stat can be. So, just focusing on what makes Lars Lars in TEW terms, the first, obvious thing is menace. He's gotta have a high menace. But, what separates him from Rezar (Gzim Selmani)? They're both 330lbs monsters, pedestrian in the ring. Neither are overflowing with charisma, and while I give the tie break to Gzim in sex appeal, neither is defined by the stat. And yet one was earmarked to main event WrestleMania, and one was a tag team wrestler who got released. So what's the difference? There will be people who don't see one (Gzim, probably) and chalk it up to arbitrariness, but that's not what I see. There was something special about the way Lars came across on television. Something that doesn't feel right to put into the Charisma column, or sum up with a high Menace. Given that the (unsatisfactory) definition of SQ is "intangibles / 'X factor' / aura", to me, Lars is a prime example of what the stat is there to represent.

 

This is just a different way of thinking about it than you have, and I don't think there's anything wrong with your definition. I'm making an overly concerted effort to separate Cha and SQ, and if someone told me they thought SQ was just a second Cha score, I'd think they were in a pretty strong position. But the way I approach the stat, a 100 SQ doesn't make you Hulk Hogan. A 100 SQ, with a 97 Mic, 100 Cha, and a 90+ Psy makes you Hulk Hogan. Where-as a 100 SQ with a 15 Cha makes you... Byron Saxton? Not sure. SQ makes me dizzy.

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Dalton Proficient

Dalton

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-As above, CLM removed entirely, along with the spoilers about Brian Cage's win :p

 

-Archer had only signed with AEW four days prior, when the mod starts. I can see an argument on assigning Roberts as his manager, in case someone wants to go that route, but misses that it isn't set up already. But, on the other hand, as this is a fantasy booking game, many people will want to go a different direction, and also not check, getting an unexpected appearance by The Snake. Given either situation is annoying, I default to what was happening in reality at the time of the Mod, which was that Archer did not have a manager, or direction of any kind, as of yet.

 

-Oh man! You didn't watch his heel run? You really have to avoid checking that out. :p Obviously, this is subjective. If you have a better descriptor for Kenny Omega's on air persona, I encourage you to make the change in the editor. But I can't imagine what that would be.

 

-He, along with Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian, are the proud representatives of Southern California! SCU! Obviously, if there's a better descriptor of that gimmick, change away. Now, I can appreciate that someone might think the play on the old TEW stock gimmick is saying something about his racial ethnicity. It's not. But I certainly don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, so if your flagging Scopio's gimmick is a sign of that kind of discomfort, let me know, and I'll change it. But, technically speaking, it is an accurate description of the SCU gimmick.

 

-Your Orange Cassidy point is an interesting one. I disagree that this was peak Cassidy. To my perception, that came at the height of the Jericho feud. But, ultimately, I think you're right that the PAC match significantly changed his perception. He's been bumped up to a well known act coming off of that performance!

 

-Likewise, MJF is an interesting case. He was not very well known at this point on a national level, but in the AEW markets the Cody win was big. But it was the first, and really only, big thing that had happened with him in AEW at that point, so it would have boosted him up from indy cred, plus some really good promos. But I think you make a case for him being higher than he currently is, so I've given him a buff!

 

 

 

Totally. I've added the Sleazy tag for Scurll. Honestly thought I'd already done it, so good catch! Small note about the Scumbag vs Sleazy tag. Like, for most of the people caught up in the Speaking Out situation, 'scumbag' feels like an appropriate descriptor, and 'sleazy' feels a little light. But in the game, if you give them 'scumbag' then they do a bunch of stuff like rip people off for money, which isn't really the issue. Whereas the 'sleazy' tag, I believe, but could be wrong, gets you creepier behavior. So, I'm leaning towards the 'sleazy' tag in general... but am very much undecided, so any thoughts on this would be great. Honestly, given how big a deal that was, there should just be a tag for 'sexual predator'.

 

As for the marketing issue, I don’t think it’s controversial that Scurll’s T-Shirt sales and general merch presence far exceeded his stature as a draw, which is essentially what the marketing tags are for.

 

Thank you addressing every bullet point I had! I agree with nearly all of it, some of my points were subjective :)

 

Oh and just to add, email notifications aren't working across the board, so that's why you aren't receiving any.

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Rick Savant Newbie

Rick Savant

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Thank you addressing every bullet point I had! I agree with nearly all of it, some of my points were subjective :)

 

Oh and just to add, email notifications aren't working across the board, so that's why you aren't receiving any.

 

Totally! I really appreciate the feedback.

 

And thanks for a heads up on the email notes. Makes me feel less like I've gone crazy.

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Rick Savant Newbie

Rick Savant

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Why play this mod instead of RWC? How is it better? I'm asking about the quality of the database and long-term playability.

 

I mean, I'm not going to say anything against RWC. Their mod looks great!

 

But I can tell you that this mod is tested for 20 year sims, and has come out with an interesting wrestling scene at the end of all of them. I spent a lot of time working on getting it to still be vibrant past the ten year mark, and every 10+ year sim, past 1.0, that I've run (which is dozens) is a world I'd be happy to play in.

 

But honestly, I'd just DL the mod, run a watcher game while you're at work and see for yourself. I'm very confident in it's stability, and think of it's long term playability as one of the biggest benefits that came from the approach I took in building it.

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