We Should Talk About The Title Scene

We somewhat discussed this over PM with you, Winner. ANd my opinion is pretty much the same as it was:

On "It's about who you know", well, politics will always be a thing on a site. Granted, you either stick your head into them or ignore them completely, and there will be a bit of conflict obviously. But I think I do agree with LtLukas on this, that (in theory) if I were to have and give away a title, I would like it to be someone I could trust.

On "rules" for titles... Yeah. I agree. Maybe change the limits slightly but other than that, it's reasonable. However, I feel like for the "Multiple TItles for the same user" rule should be able  to be broken sometimes, just for a little bit of time for the sake of a story. Maybe you need your stable (for example, 3 characters, 2 of them win tag titles and one of them wins a singles title) to have an "All the gold" moment, but you should agree that your character will lose one of their title in the first title defense. Just a thought, it's unlikely this would really truly happen.

As per "More belts"? Sorry, but I highly disagree with that. Especially for Friction, since that has a perfect balance of titles. There is a tag title, and then, depends on the road you need to take. If you go for regular wrestling, you need Entropy title (which was pretty much elevated in storyline by Gwen's and Alaina's title reigns to the point where they are basically IC Title on this site), Hardcore TItle and World title to be grand slam champion. For Hentai, there are Softcore and Hentai titles, plus again, world title to win for the Grand Slam championship. Plus Kawaii title as a cruiserweight title (for the record, I think that the age limit should be taken out for Kawaii's, or at least increased to 25 years) Seems pretty reasonable in terms of number. Problem is, my friend, is that if everyone is the champion, who is the best?

For Tension, yeah, maybe cruiserweight title is a good idea. And I do agree with you (when we discussed this) and with Lukas on the fact that 24/7 Title is just another belt. If there is another title that needs to be added it's something akin to DDT Ironman Heavymetalweight Championship. A title to change hands in every backstage thread it's in, in humorous situations, maybe defended in the ring sometimes. And, personally, I think this should be the belt for both Friction and Tension. If there is an option for just one belt to be added, this should be the title to be made.

(PS. I should add that I took time with this comment. The last commenter before I started was Lukas)

LtLukas wrote:
I for the most part, agree with you. But what is good writing? What makes a story compelling? People in academia debate what qualifies as good or bad writing constantly, and I feel as if I am personally woefully unqualified to say who is a superior writer, one way or another. Even then, writing can not be consistent within a match, let alone across several matches. It is odd to me that you don't like subjectivity, and then want to rely on something totally subjective.

So I did offer examples that were subjective. But I'd argue that they are less subjective that what it is the criteria currently are, or what they seem to be at any given moment. I wouldn't limit said criteria exclusively to what I said. There should definitely be more to it people being qualified than just writing well. But it should be a factor.

LtLukas wrote:
There is something I agree with here, and something I don't agree with here. Yes, it is super annoying when the title gets passed between one or two people, and maybe there should be something in place to ensure that once you win the belt, you can't get it back unless it has changed hands twice. But on the other hand, if I am giving the belt to someone, I would like to have a relationship and some level of trust with them. Let's say I have a belt, and someone I have worked with before. That means that a) I have some faith that they won't up and leave (which has happened before) and b) I know how they write, and I know how to make a good story line with them. The vast amounts of time part of your quote really stuck out to me. If I am giving the belt to someone, I am not going to give it to someone who has only spent a small amount of time on the site, whose characters have only a few matches. It would not be fair to people who have been here for years, and who have had multiple story lines, etc.

I agree that there is an advantage to giving titles to those you are familiar with. But there needs to be a middle ground between that privilege getting abused and being fair to other users. A situation in which a belt is given to character who's only wrestled a few matches is exactly what I'm trying to prevent in my point about pre-requisites.

LtLukas wrote:
Some of these rules seem reasonable, others not so much. The defense thing makes sense to me, but I don't want this to be like a video game where you must engage in a certain number of matches before you 'level up'. You mentioned previously that you wanted good story lines, good matches, etc., but this seems to easy to game, just like swapping it with your pals does. But I agree with you, if there are rules, everyone should know them.

The exact rules can be fleshed out. But I'm glad to see that at least one other person agrees that there should be rules set in place. I have to clarify my point and answer the whole 'system gaming' and 'level up' thing. I am staunchly opposed to the idea of a character wrestling 3-4 matches and getting a title opportunity. This happens up to this very day, there are champions that have fought 6 matches or less, and in my opinion, it needs to stop. For this particular point, I'm not saying people with seniority or characters who wrestle the most matches should be placed ahead of others. I'm saying there need to be minimums set in place.

LtLukas wrote:
For your other points, I sort of agreed, but this one, I am totally against. We already have too many belts as it is. There are lots of cool belts (Entropy, 24/7) that are nice in theory, and awesome sometimes in practice, but other times they feel just meh. Like, the 24/7 champion should be a new person basically every week. When the volatility of the belt slows down, it feels like just another belt. And there are other belts which no one gives two craps about (we had to ask someone to claim the tension hentai belt, and there are very few posters who could even be in contention for either of the tag belts). What is to stop the submission champ belt from being like that? Hell, what is to stop the softcore belt from being like that? This may be just me, but I would genuinely not care if Eka wore the Southeastern belt. Maybe we should consolidate a few belts, even.

So I agree that belts should have some level of volatility and that there should be rules about that. I don't think it makes sense to have a 24/7 title that's never defended when logically, it's the belt that should defended most often. Maybe some belts should be deprecated if the amount of people available for contention is small. My argument here is that the user-base itself is big. The problem isn't that there aren't enough active people. There are probably well over 100 users that post everyday or every other day. The demand is there. Maybe not the demand for the tag belts, but certainly the demand for belts they would like. I'd argue that there aren't enough belts in existence right now to meet that demand. We would just need to go about finding out what kind of belts they want.

I should clarify here for everyone else as well. When I 'more' I don't mean "We have 11 but we need 15.". I should say additional. Yes we should get rid of the ones that there is less demand for. But when we do, I feel that we should add others that people may be more interested in.

LtLukas wrote:But I don't mean to pick on you or anything.

Noted. Thank you for making that clear. I didn't feel picked on. Thank you for your post and responding to my points.

Winner3 wrote:It's not what you know, it's who you know.

For my own sanity on this point (because I have heard it before), I went back through the records of Friction champions (seems we don't have Tension champion history listed out as clearly).... There has been 44 title changes and from what I can see only about 5 or 6 of them changes actually involved the same two members (across the board regardless of character used and title involved).. And I think 2 or 3 of them cases may have occured been due to ongoing storylines.

Yes, a person who has the belt is going to be more likely play a title match against someone that they have played with a few times in the past rather than someone new but can they be chastised too heavily for that? They are going to want to play with a member whose style they are familiar with and perhaps a character who their character has a relationship or rivalry with... New rivalries *can* spring up with new member pairings, but I guess there is some uncertainty when approaching that scenario...

I believe though, that the focus should be more upon: Getting newer members to feel more confident about asking for storylines that lead to title shots from title holding members... To help with this, I might suggest some kind of thread where people can list their interests in certain title belts, but I fear that everyone would end up posting their desires on it and it would become an unusable mess...

Winner3 wrote:No established rules/pre-requisites.

I can't go into this in too much detail right now, but I prefer not to have a system that is too strict or that can potentially be mis used.. I actually *do* do a little bit of checking on challangers for belts (Assuming that the title holder liaises with me before engaging their storylines, as they should be doing)... I have suggested to some title holders that they change the member they wished to engage matches with (so as to give others a chance), long inactive title belts are in the process of getting action now (eg. kawaii belt, Tension Hentai belt) and I have been aiding/actively trying to get more members (who haven't had title belts) a shot here and there... For better or worse, all of the Friction title belts were actually on the line in the last Avalanche (which was avoided before)

But none of these things happen over night and sometimes because people like immediate considerable change, I feel they might not see this

Winner3 wrote:The number available and the diversity.

Sorry, as Lobo said we have loads of belts... ¬.¬

I like the 24/7 belt, I just think it's been...glacial slow for a while. Also I agree with scorns Idea as well. But I really don't think we have enough belts when people aren't using some they have or are getting them right back in some cases.

So if not more belts, can we just start giving them to people who have zero, and add a three month or even four month rule. I mean what is the danger of trying it out? If you're right about it then just remove the belt.

This is kind of a slope. For one Yeah I agree that the main event scene could be more diverse but Lunarwolf is actually aware of this and wants to expand the main event scene, but it takes time and he cant be the only one reaching out for people, it has to be two way communication.

I'm not sure how a system on titles could work, if we start having rankings or something there might be people less inclined to do anything that would cost them there ranking or like Kelsea said they would abuse the system to there advantage. And I think we have plenty of titles, its more of a matter of using the ones we got properly.

I honestly think it depends on how active the user is with the belt. If we have someone not being active, vacating the belt should be a valid option. Like for example, if my Tracer got the entropy belt, but i am dealing with stuff IRL that jeopardizes my time on the site, I should vacate the belt (whether through kayfabe injury or the like)

Kelsea wrote:
I believe though, that the focus should be more upon: Getting newer members to feel more confident about asking for storylines that lead to title shots from title holding members... To help with this, I might suggest some kind of thread where people can list their interests in certain title belts, but I fear that everyone would end up posting their desires on it and it would become an unusable mess...

So everyone just knows to ask? It would be real helpful if that were specified somewhere. Do you feel that this is optimal? A thread dedicated to this would make more sense. You could just pm or answer people who's requests are approved rather than sift through your mailbox for the same requests. Also, if the demand for newer members in the title scene was actually desired at any point, wouldn't it makes sense to maybe reach out to some of them?

Kelsea wrote:I can't go into this in too much detail right now, but I prefer not to have a system that is too strict or that can potentially be mis used.. I actually *do* do a little bit of checking on challangers for belts (Assuming that the title holder liaises with me before engaging their storylines, as they should be doing)... I have suggested to some title holders that they change the member they wished to engage matches with (so as to give others a chance), long inactive title belts are in the process of getting action now (eg. kawaii belt, Tension Hentai belt) and I have been aiding/actively trying to get more members (who haven't had title belts) a shot here and there... For better or worse, all of the Friction title belts were actually on the line in the last Avalanche (which was avoided before)

But none of these things happen over night and sometimes because people like immediate considerable change, I feel they might not see this

I don't know how to contend this point without incorporating some of my own opinion, which I hope is shared by at least a few others. There should be more effort going into this than some checking. I'm not going to say that I don't have faith in your judgement. I do and I'm sure most everyone does, but there should be ground rules. There really ought to be. I don't know any other way to put it. Someone showing up to a wrestling promotion and wrestling 5 matches before earning a title doesn't often happen, and for good reason. It doesn't make sense. And that's just one issue.

Kelsea wrote:Sorry, as Lobo said we have loads of belts... ¬.¬

As I tried pointed out previously, and I say without intending any disrespect, you have loads of belts that people either don't want, or don't feel they'd be allowed to pursue.

Gonna immediately break the wall I just put up and step back into this, given..

Kelsea wrote:Getting newer members to feel more confident about asking for story lines that lead to title shots from title holding members

Save for a extremely small number, the general unspoken fact on this site is that if someone is experienced/veteran enough to have a title, they do not even register newer (not specifically brand new) people as competent to even reply back to, let alone get a story going with, let alone give them a title.

Curious to see how effective a open-thread will be in which this group will be forced to RP with someone will be.

^ THIS. I agree 100% with this.

Mystery Dragon wrote:This is kind of a slope. For one Yeah I agree that the main event scene could be more diverse but Lunarwolf is actually aware of this and wants to expand the main event scene, but it takes time and he cant be the only one reaching out for people, it has to be two way communication.

I'm not sure how a system on titles could work, if we start having rankings or something there might be people less inclined to do anything that would cost them there ranking or like Kelsea said they would abuse the system to there advantage. And I think we have plenty of titles, its more of a matter of using the ones we got properly.

I agree completely MD about titles. But if people don't use them properly, or at all, then add a belt. It's like there's no incentive to use a belt that much cause the person's already got it.

Just add a vacate rule so things can be a little more fair.

Also scorn's got a point (*For MD I don't mean all vets, I just mean they're hard to approach and a few have kinda been harsh with me)