Tips for Staying Invested in a Save

[MrJeeps]

I believe that when done right, TEW 2020 can be one of the most immersive games available, and yes I have put 150 hours into RDR2 BG3 and Cyberpunk as well as the Witcher (Each!)

 

For me, staying invested in what'd happening in the other companies helps me.  I am loving seeing Nicky Champion try to get his title back from Steve Frehley.  

 

Anyone else have some tips on how to keep a save going for many years?

[same-old-davey]

I do little tweaks in the editor to make certain AI decisions more flavorful. Like renaming thrown-together tag teams and stables, occasionally removing a wrestler from a roster when they "leave threatening message for a booker", and increase stats a slight bit when they get "blank has star potential" pieces.

[619]

I love this topic. Different things work for different people, so this might be useless for others, but here are six things I find helpful:

Start small
If you know you struggle to stay invested then having 80+ wrestlers, multiple brands and several shows a week increase your chances of burning out fast. With smaller companies, you can still do weekly TV if it's the model you're most familiar with, but with 20-30 wrestlers, you can put together an event card fairly quickly, and from there book four one-hour TV shows building those matches up. Then once you see how quickly you can get through a month of shows, it hopefully increases your motivation to tackle the next one.

Give the starting roster a chance
If you hire all your favourites at the start, you've got nowhere to go when burnout arrives. I find it more fun to see how much I can get out of what I've inherited. Why's this average wrestler got hot momentum and how do I capitalise on it? Someone may have awful stats, but a line in their bio could spark a fresh story idea. Then once you've exhausted all your initial inspiration, that's when you can start to bring people in to breathe new life, but they're moving into a company that's alive with its own flavour, rather than having an identikit company completely shaped by your usual hires.

Make one change to canon and play it out
This might sound contradictory to the above point, but I find that making one key change to a company's starting state can give you a narrative hook to sink your teeth into, setting in motion a butterfly effect. This is particularly useful if it's a company you like playing a lot. It could be giving someone new the book and exploring who they'd favour and sideline, having your champion out injured for a year so you need to quickly establish a new top guy or having a former favourite return.

Let the past guide the way forward
In keeping with the second point about always to trying to play each promotion on its own merits rather than book the same people in the same way where you go, I love getting immersed in the title histories, starting storylines, stables, relationships, etc. There's always something to inspire a storyline or match idea: the first grand slam champion, the first to five world titles, the longest reigning champion, the 20-year wait for a first career title, someone who lost every title they ever won to the same heel stable, etc. Then, as you get further in, you get to play with your own history as alliances and rivalries evolve over time and you get to find new ways to play off the dynamics you've established.

Have checkpoints and side missions
Maybe your main objective is to be the top company or reach a certain size, but I find it's important to have story/character-driven goals to break it down. Picking a midcarder you want to headline your season finale and working out the path to get them there (with the bonus challenge of having to adapt if it's not working out). Reacting when someone gets over more than their stats or your plans for them had you anticipating and testing how high their ceiling is. Taking a story you enjoyed outside of wrestling and seeing if you can apply it to wrestling. Having your Santino/R-Truth/Toru Yano figure (doesn't have to be a comedy character, those were just the first to come to mind) who you know isn't going to be a star game-mechanic-wise but always has something going on to give you an extra element to explore from show to show.

Log as much as possible before burnout strikes
It used to be the case for me that once I burnt out and took a break from a save, I could never get back into it again and had to start over (which in itself is the hardest part of the process for me). However, twice recently I've been able to feel my way back in due to having sufficient notes to piece together enough of what I had planned. One was a dynasty save so reading back the last five or so parts I'd drafted helped bring it all back, while the other I had my next two PPV cards outlined, and the combination of that and going through my show history did the trick.

I think writing a dynasty can also help you stay invested as the interaction is motivating, but it also increases your time investment and can slow your rate of progress, so isn't for everyone. Likewise, I haven't tried it myself but suspect that if your biggest obstacle is you've already figured out everything you want to do and lose motivation plugging your plans into the game, putting injuries, deaths, randomness and relationship on the highest frequency could keep you stimulated by throwing curveballs that always give you something new to think about.

[Shooltra]

I think the key is to book a Season Finale in advance. What do you want to see happen there? Who are the new stars that could rise?

Then, by the time you can be there, your save will have changed so much, it will be almost painful to delete it and you will want to keep pushing to see what can happen next.

[WalterSobchak]

Great shared ideas in here, thank you everybody!

[Self]

Having an annual cycle of traditions helps me forward. 

WWE have the Royal Rumble leading to WrestleMania leading to Summerslam leading to Survivor Series and back to the Royal Rumble. Dotted in between you have these big gimmick events (I forget where Money in the Bank and Elimination Chamber fall nowadays) that can throw ideas at you, when you're not feeling so creative.

In my CGC games I developed my own sequence that I use in pretty much every game with them. Elimination kicking off the Road to WrestleFestival followed by Cage matches before the Ultimate Showdown Series etc. I always have something set in stone to work towards, and usually the landscape of the roster changes enough so that each year feels different. 

I also like to book game changers. The Manager's Cup was an organised stable war where the losing team must disband. The loser of the ultimate Showdown Series is fired. Roster stagnation absolutely kills games for me.

[Bailey1985]

Some great suggestions in here already. I'm doing a CWF 1983 save (yes, I watched that episode of DSOTR) and I've found that these have helped me:

1) Pick four wrestlers each year to get behind. Mix it up over the card (so when I started my CWF game I had Terry Allen (Magnum TA) and Scott McGhee as Tag Champs but they were Unimportant/Jobbers and so they needed boosting. Then Mike Graham was someone that (realistically) you'd get behind as the owner's son and Manny Fernandez is in a feud with Dusty but he's lower-midcard and Dusty is a Main Eventer so it was a good idea to get the Raging Bull up the card. Lastly, Yoshiaki Yatsu is a jobber on the roster when you start and his stats told me he'd be worth pushing.

2) Don't sign people just because you can. I'm in 1984 now and have picked up Hogan and Piper purely because WWF/MACW offered contracts for them and if they were going to be tied up for three years, it may as well be with me. Conversely, I've let Bobby Eaton, Harley Race, and others be signed by the competition because I don't have room on my lone TV show for them and I'll get annoyed squandering them.

3) Sometimes it's best to leave people where they are, Stampede and Georgia Championship Wrestling have been in debt pretty much from Day One. I'd like the Hart's Dungeon as a training facility but Bret, Neidhart, and the Bulldogs are getting regular matches and improving. Likewise, I will at some point have a feud where it's Dusty against the West Texas Outlaws (Hansen and the Funks) but I tend to run storylines for a calendar year (my finale is in January). As I have Dusty in a feud right now, I won't sign them unless someone else does (and in the case of the Funks, they're freelancers so I might not even bid given the short-term nature).

4) The side missions suggestion is a great one and I tend to do similarly. It's a long road from Medium to Big so having a goal to get TV in new areas is a lot shorter and achievable a goal than just focusing on the big prize.

5) Don't turn off the penalty for repeat bookings, it's tempting but spamming Dusty vs Hogan would be boring whereas the penalty forces you to get creative.

6) Lastly, and this relates to a few of my previous points, give those who dial in high-performance ratings above their perception some exposure. Tully was giving me high-rated (70s) as a lower-midcarder, same as Yatsu. Give them some main event matches with your big stars (see picture)

 

 

[ShaunGBD]

On 12/4/2023 at 12:08 PM, same-old-davey said:

I do little tweaks in the editor to make certain AI decisions more flavorful. Like renaming thrown-together tag teams and stables, occasionally removing a wrestler from a roster when they "leave threatening message for a booker", and increase stats a slight bit when they get "blank has star potential" pieces.

Stealing this 

[SanX]

As other have stated don't hire everyone, another is let people go!

One of your Star or Major Star who hasn't been part of any big storylines or doesn't get featured on PPV or TV? Let him go! A talented jobber who hasn't progressed from unimportant to recognizable in 15–18 months? Let them go. Try to do this with guys not on decline and watch them renew themselves and come back to your company in the future.

If you are playing a real life save, it adds so much to your internalized cannons in the game.

Another thing I like doing is shortening contracts of top guys to 2–3 years at maximum if there are multiple national level companies in a country. Game incentivizes those monster 5-8 years contracts to get them to sign the contracts, but I don't think anyone would sign that if they have multiple options.

[chm39]

On 12/8/2023 at 9:29 AM, Self said:

Having an annual cycle of traditions helps me forward. 

WWE have the Royal Rumble leading to WrestleMania leading to Summerslam leading to Survivor Series and back to the Royal Rumble. Dotted in between you have these big gimmick events (I forget where Money in the Bank and Elimination Chamber fall nowadays) that can throw ideas at you, when you're not feeling so creative.

In my CGC games I developed my own sequence that I use in pretty much every game with them. Elimination kicking off the Road to WrestleFestival followed by Cage matches before the Ultimate Showdown Series etc. I always have something set in stone to work towards, and usually the landscape of the roster changes enough so that each year feels different. 

I also like to book game changers. The Manager's Cup was an organised stable war where the losing team must disband. The loser of the ultimate Showdown Series is fired. Roster stagnation absolutely kills games for me.

What's the Ultimate Showdown Series? Sounds fun. 

[Self]

10 hours ago, chm39 said:

What's the Ultimate Showdown Series? Sounds fun. 

It's mostly just a ripoff of the G1.  8-10 wrestler round robin. Everyone fights everyone. 2 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, minus 2 if you get DQ'd. Bonus point if you win in a special way (submission, count out, under 5 minutes, depending on the year). Whoever has most points at the end gets Three Wishes to use in whatever ludicrous ways they can imagine. The loser is fired/banished from the company. 

[chm39]

4 hours ago, Self said:

It's mostly just a ripoff of the G1.  8-10 wrestler round robin. Everyone fights everyone. 2 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, minus 2 if you get DQ'd. Bonus point if you win in a special way (submission, count out, under 5 minutes, depending on the year). Whoever has most points at the end gets Three Wishes to use in whatever ludicrous ways they can imagine. The loser is fired/banished from the company. 

Not gonna Lie I'm about to steal this. Do you do it with a TV schedule or something else? 

Also is it real Firing or kayfabe? Do you already know who you don't want anymore?

Edited January 1 by chm39

[Self]

56 minutes ago, chm39 said:

Not gonna Lie I'm about to steal this. Do you do it with a TV schedule or something else? 

Also is it real Firing or kayfabe? Do you already know who you don't want anymore?

It usually takes over the regular TV show for two months. An 8-person round robin is 28 matches, split between 8 episodes of and 2/3 events. It varies how much I televise and how much happens on pre-shows and untelevised events, but final four matches always take place on a big event. Recently I think 2 series matches per episode is plenty, and AEW seem to agree, from what I've read of their version. 

The firing varies, but more often than not it's really someone leaving the company (albeit in a nicer way, to a better job, or with a fat bonus to accompany the on-screen humiliation). Often it's a veteran who's outlived his usefulness, or a youngster who can come back in a year or two with a fresh look, or someone who is probably going to be poached soon anyway. Or you can storyline it, and have the guy mask up and try to weasel his way back into a job. It's a harsh punishment, but it gives storyline options, rotates the roster, and makes the back half of the tournament far more interesting. No pointless matches.  

I tend to have 2+ options for winners, and the same for losers. Just in case something odd happens. Generally I'll know by the half way point who gets the nod/punt. 

Edited January 1 by Self
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[Dawn]

The thing that I found helps me keep invested the most (having struggled to find my footing with a save for years) is having a major overarching plotline that my entire company will revolve around for multiple years. Much like the nWo or the Bloodline or utilizing an example from a legendary diary in these boards, The KoW from Beejus' WCW 94 masterpiece. I simply cannot just start a random save without any long term planning and just mess around, see what happens. WWF/E is the company I play the most and for my ongoing diary (paused in here, ongoing on Discord) save I have the full next WrestleMania card written down, and the next two have rough drafts planned in advance. I then write how we're going to get to that point through the year and make the appropriate changes based off of injuries or an unexpected overperformer (I gave Curtis Axel the WWE Championship because he got so popular and would not stop giving me cracked ratings) but I try not to lose the overall vision.

The game throwing curveballs at you such as injuries and forcing you to change these plans on the fly is fun, much like realizing your longterm plans, so either way works. You may end up happening upon a breakout star necessitated by an injury replacement. But it's simply impossible that ALL of the wrestlers involved in your major storyline will suffer such a fate, so once again I reiterate that having a big storyline for the roster to rally around is the way to go if you're struggling to stay invested in random saves you create from every mod in the book like I used to.

Even if you'll take a while to get through, when you come up with a big story that you want to tell, you will keep being drawn back to that save. I hope this tip helps anyone.

Edited January 1 by Dawn

[chm39]

13 hours ago, Dawn said:

The thing that I found helps me keep invested the most (having struggled to find my footing with a save for years) is having a major overarching plotline that my entire company will revolve around for multiple years. Much like the nWo or the Bloodline or utilizing an example from a legendary diary in these boards, The KoW from Beejus' WCW 94 masterpiece. I simply cannot just start a random save without any long term planning and just mess around, see what happens. WWF/E is the company I play the most and for my ongoing diary (paused in here, ongoing on Discord) save I have the full next WrestleMania card written down, and the next two have rough drafts planned in advance. I then write how we're going to get to that point through the year and make the appropriate changes based off of injuries or an unexpected overperformer (I gave Curtis Axel the WWE Championship because he got so popular and would not stop giving me cracked ratings) but I try not to lose the overall vision.

The game throwing curveballs at you such as injuries and forcing you to change these plans on the fly is fun, much like realizing your longterm plans, so either way works. You may end up happening upon a breakout star necessitated by an injury replacement. But it's simply impossible that ALL of the wrestlers involved in your major storyline will suffer such a fate, so once again I reiterate that having a big storyline for the roster to rally around is the way to go if you're struggling to stay invested in random saves you create from every mod in the book like I used to.

Even if you'll take a while to get through, when you come up with a big story that you want to tell, you will keep being drawn back to that save. I hope this tip helps anyone.

This is something I'm trying to do now. I haven't really planned anything though, just rough ideas. Like having Remo Richardson hold the Title hostage this year after holding it all of last year. I know he will lose it at the end of the year but don't know if it will be cheated off of him by my heel stable, a babyface he has probably already beaten finally winning the rematch, or maybe one of the newer guys can get as popular as he is by the end of the Year to dethrone him.

Where do you draw your inspiration from for your long term planning?

[Dawn]

14 hours ago, chm39 said:

This is something I'm trying to do now. I haven't really planned anything though, just rough ideas. Like having Remo Richardson hold the Title hostage this year after holding it all of last year. I know he will lose it at the end of the year but don't know if it will be cheated off of him by my heel stable, a babyface he has probably already beaten finally winning the rematch, or maybe one of the newer guys can get as popular as he is by the end of the Year to dethrone him.

Where do you draw your inspiration from for your long term planning?

That is a very good question that I'll do my best to answer. Bear with me because it'll probably be quite long but again I hope it helps.

As an actor I do due dilligence to consume as much media as I can for study and that ends up helping with my writing. My opinions aren't perfect and I deviate from the norm a lot but I do believe I do an ok job at knowing what works and what doesn't for the style of writing, so with that in mind I first come up with the big idea and then try to take elements from a little bit of everything that I think would work within a wrestling context to spice that idea up. Series, movies, plays, animes, games, diaries from this very forum, even missed opportunities from real life wrestling itself etc etc. I'll first tell you how ample my inspirations are and then try to do a step by step as to how I do my long term planning.

In the particular case of my current diary there's elements from Game of Thrones with different stables vying for power with the central conflict stemming from the one main group commanded by those who already hold it. Eisenverse's old SWF diary where he had Eric Eisen start acting as if he was literally God after a spat with Vengeance had me write my own character from that vein (won't spoil who it is, it's already been revealed on Discord but not here) and for the feud that I'm slowly building up that'll end the current overarching storyline the diary is written around I am taking elements from Game of Thrones again, but also Naruto and his relationship with Orochimaru, plus a sprinkle of what I think the major idea was for one of the characters who didn't get to realize their full potential in real life. Even the way I portrayed Cheshire Cat in an Alice in Wonderland play IRL has inspired a character in the save. Mix in the things you like and put your own spin in them.

I have been at this save (at the very least the idea of the save had its first version created around then) for about a decade now, you can take that in a good or a bad light for sure. On the bad side I am owing that to a ton of bad luck with my hardware and it's put me off from a consistent schedule in posting my shows many times before, but on the flip side it was actually a blessing in disguise since growing up I could add a lot more depth to it and now it has equalled my longest save as I'm currently in 2015 (began in 2013). Just the fact I want to tell the story keeps drawing me back to the save and that's why I have bent over backwards to keep the game file alive even through much hardship with hard drives and bad luck. It's just human instinct to do that, right? Me and my friends would hold on to memory cards for dear life as kids.

Another reason why I take so long to advance with the save and write sometimes comes down to seeking consistency. If I find that I wrote something that makes no sense for the character I've been building for years now I will be quite peeved by it and turned off from writing for a bit so I try to think about consistency for every single character and their decisions in each segment/match but that isn't a trait I recommend you share  and it's mostly a me thing as I do enjoy reading simple saves/diaries. Writing them is just not for me.

By comparison, my younger self's longest running save was a 91 to 93 WWF save where I don't think I strayed away from the real life characters much or cared for consistency at all. Direction wise, sure, building up Rick Martel and giving him the world title could be seen as bold. But storyline wise I wasn't really challenging myself by keeping things simple all the way through and I wouldn't have brought something to the table that I would look back on as interesting had I presented that save in here as a diary.

Simple can be good, but you've got to take some risks for the save to stand out.

The point is, mix in a sprinkle of everything you like with your own ideas and you'll end up writing more complex stories than before. I'll be separating the two posts I promised you because this is already quite huge and I was kinda winging this one but I'll want to leave no detail behind with the step by step for longterm planning so I'll need some time to think about and write that.

Edited January 2 by Dawn

[Zero]

Some fantastic advice in this thread.  I agree with everything that has been stated.

For me, it is having a roster that is always being turned over constantly. 

For example, in my 85-2016 game, the main story (2 plus years) is The New World Order taking over the WWF(NWO didn't exist until 2015).  Jon Moxley is my Sting character.  I wrote him off after being beaten up by the NWO and not being trusted by the rest of TEAM WWF.  I wanted Moxley to sit out at least two years before returning to dethrone Cena.  

Instead of giving him a vacation or time off, I changed his contract through the editor to expire the next day.  Moxley signed with NJPW.  In my head, Moxley is the quiet assassin in NJPW and other promotions. Luckily, NJPW has relationships with WCW, ECW, AJPW, and many others.  Moxley has been turning up everywhere putting on bangers but in my head, he NEVER speaks.  Points to posters in the audience that reference the WWF disowning him.  Builds in-game canon.

[schachmal]

My advice is purely to do with the cosmetic.

After coming back to two saved promotions after a year or more away from the game, it didn't take long to hit the same wall of apathy/fatigue that made me put off the game and go play something else for a change.

Both promotions had 10+ years of history, child companies and training facilities, world-wide media coverage of Huge - Enormous, and fairly large rosters. Just coming to grips with the rosters was enough to tire me out, and with the size of my development roster added to that, i wasn't enjoying the prospect of doing anything other than starting again. What put me off the most was the lack of wrestler's pics for my new talent, robbing them of character. Admittedly, I wasn't using the forums much and decided to check the updates for inspiration and, after checking out a few graphic pack updates, I decided that maybe a facelift was all I needed.

And I was right.

After downloading the works of shipshirt, king bison, smw88, cooldude, asaemon, willr0ck, sockpuppet, jtlant, london, esteele20, poputt, parker_stiles, mammoth, blackman and undertaker (I think I got them all), I began patiently working through them, removing the prehistoric and cartoonish renders first, renaming and reassigning images until my new picture database was how I liked it. Then I went through the picture-less wrestlers, actually reading their basic, organic descriptions, and reading their stats to get a better idea has to how they would look before finding the appropriate CVFP image to fit them to. I became invested in each wrestler, some more than others, but even the worst wrestler now had an identity that made me feel they were more than a faceless jabroni needing to prove themselves.

This did take me months with no advance in time for either game but in recreating the game universe, I felt refreshed because the game universe was refreshed. When I held my first event with all new images, I stopped on each match description, checking out the dirt report, imagining these new faces twisting and screaming in imaginary bouts, feeling the new emotional investment in characters I had long felt apathy for. Before I just spammed through the matches only looking to see if the magic number was high enough - there's no investment in that, none at all, it's the act of grinding, and this game is not meant to be a game of grinding. You're simply doing it wrong if that's how it's going.

If you go the way of cosmetic reinvention, you must do it yourself, don't ask me for my database because you wont get it, it's mine and your database should be yours, otherwise you will miss the point. It is about the time you spend discarding the old and selecting which of the new pictures becomes the primary representation and which become the alternatives. That's the only way this works, take a few months off the game to bring the game back to life.

It worked for me.

BTW, Walter Sobchack? Walter? Pipe down Donny, it's not always about you - Walter? Walter, when you gonna put all your amazing pics into one big .rar or .zip file so I can add them to my universe? Such a great body of work deserves it's place in my universe, and I greatly admire what you've brought to the table, but downloading each pic individually is like going to a smorgasbord where there are no plates and you're given a single toothpick.

No pressure, Walter, no pressure. (Slaps Sobchack in a figure-4 leglock) No pressure. I'm enjoying what I've got.

The magic word again: investment. Take the time to give your world a fresh coat of paint and make it truly your world.

[s7eve_s]

Some great advice in this thread!!

 

Just to add my thoughts and experience. I absolutely love Real Life Historic MOD's and especially around 2001, I'd just gotten into wrestling about two years earlier and 2001 marks a pivotal point where everything changed (much the same as territories back in the 80's, the emergence of WCW in the early 90's or start of the Monday Night Wars in 95)

 

The above point being that I like to use a point in history where I can take things a different way, that being said I often struggle to move away from what really happened but once you do get away from real life, its more easier to stay invested as things evolve differently. Due to injuries and scandals I had a WWF save starting in 1997, now in 99 and I have the Ministry of Darkness storyline, but Kurt Angle is the hero taking them on as Austin and Rock are out.

 

A 2001 save I started was to rescue WCW, this was probably the most success I had with a save going into it 3 years as it was a blank canvas, I had nothing to base my storylines on and found myself being more creative.

 

It's been mentioned but don't just get everyone as soon as you can, there's a temptation to rush through storylines and eventually they have all gone, plot them out over the years. In my 97 save, I put big moments I wanted to happen down over 3 or 4 years and could see them approaching as I moved through time and built up to them

 

 

[Paxlux]

To be honest, for me it was getting rid of my aversion to "cheating." For example in my 1992 save I wanted to simulate Kane's debut by giving him a major popularity bump in the editor. Normally I'd feel kinda guilty about it since it's cheating, but at the end of the day it's your save and how you play it impacts nobody but yourself.

So I guess my advice is to not take the game too seriously. Do what you want with it even if it involves using the in-game editor to work some things in your favor.