Saturday, November 14, 2009

a new scoring system

We all hate buzzer shots. It's an evil of the game that people will wait till the last second to get the last word in before a deadline for a card. That's the nature of people when it comes to Rp'ing. So I was thinking about if there is any way to stop buzzer shots from being effective or a logical way to mitigate their use.

So let's say we set an Rp period for 8 days, now we should chop it up, day 1-3 are round 1, days 3-6 are round 2 7-8 are round 3. Score the Rp like a boxing/MMA match where you award rounds to each person. Don't allow stacking in a round, which is a 72 hour window if somebody fired off really early in the first 2 rounds. Now you give a real incentive to Rp'ing early, because if I'm the only one to Rp for a round, I win it, I'm the only one to Rp for the first two rounds, I win the match. If somebody wants to buzzer shot round 1 or 2, they give me materal to work with for the next round, and now they have to write three Rp's to do three buzzer shots, not just 1 at the end of a promo period.

And a well written buzzer shot can often times be better quality wise then 3 Rp's by your opponent, here's an easy example, I'm fighting someone I don't know, not a lot of history, I do a generic opening Rp, it's not great, the standard "I'm gonna win!" stuff...Then I get off a stack, because they aren't Rp'ing, but stacks tend to suck because you don't have anything to work with, a stack is mostly just a 'gimme something for the effort I'm putting out, effort my opponent has not shown' kind off thing...I value stacks a lot cause I love effort, but others hate writing them/don't care for them, so the value of your stack is always unknown. Then my opponent fires off a great rebuttal an hour before deadline, just a beautiful piece by piece dismantling of my arguments, just makes me look horrible. I scramble and get in a reply like 5 minutes before deadline, but I didn't have time to think things out or make sense of anything, so my Rp sucked, quality wise, I lose the Rp thread and now have a very good chance of losing the match, becuase my opponent took full advantage of what the rules allowed him to do.

By splitting this into rounds, my first Rp and my stack win rounds 1 and 2, and my opponent can't steal the match by never Rp'ing against me until the deadline, it forces him to engage me more then just 1 hour before deadline, makes us have an honest Rp thread, instead of just a sneak attack at the buzzer.

I'm sure there are flaws with this, and I'd love to hear counter-arguements. So agree/debate me in comments!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

What if Booking II, Stevens Vs Cruise

Yeah I haven't posted in forever, I'm lazy...But we're back after Billy's fantastic rankings column, that you all need to read right now...Honest, go read it, this will be waiting for you.

OK you're back...

Today's what if booking...What if Cameron Cruise had accepted Sean Stevens demand for a title Vs Title match at Agg 44?

The main event is now that, so now Copycat and The First's issue doesn't get resolved at all, unless both men find new partners. So maybe that storyline is left hanging/dropped, or it continues for a series of cards or might even lead to the two of them meeting at the PPV...This means Layne Winters gets a different opponent to feud with (Edmunds?)

So we got a whole hell of a lot potentally changing just there, but now we really have to up the chaos with figuring out how to book Cruise/Stevens

Stevens winning makes almost no sense at all unless we're just going to make him both Champion and God of EPW....Costing Cruise the IC Title and then making it vacant seems like really crazy booking, so let's just dismiss this out of hand.

The overwhelming likelyhood of this match is that it's a screwjob double DQ of some kind, but the question is, who runs in? If Anthology runs in, that only further builds Stevens/Cruise, Stalker running in for Stevens does the same. The First running in on either guy would build their issue...(Most likely Cruise in this case)...So let's say Anthology does the run-in...Does that get Cruise into the main event at Russian Roulette? What happens then to the IC title, does he lose it before to someone? Is it also at risk?

Now the last option is that Cruise wins the World Title, if you recall that card, Siegel and I did about 400 Rp's each, so he assuredly would have kept up with Jamar if not done more then him, Anthology was coming off a big run at Wrestleverse. Could Cruise had rode that wave to the belt? I'd say it's 80% screwjob finish 20% Cruise wins World title...Now does Stevens stay in the main event at Roulette? Maybe he ends up facing The First in a #1 contenders match and he's the poor bastard who suffers the brunt of the HOPE reveal.

So much wackyness could have happened if Cruise takes the match...And all we can do is ask...What if?