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they will never be competition as they’re not WWE.

They shouldn't be trying to be competition, they should be trying to be a viable alternative. It will take a few years before they're even running as a fully functioning company (if managed well) I don't think any of those guys are expecting to go head to head with WWE.

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22 minutes ago, Factotum said:

They shouldn't be trying to be competition, they should be trying to be a viable alternative. It will take a few years before they're even running as a fully functioning company (if managed well) I don't think any of those guys are expecting to go head to head with WWE.

Which is why they should have been all about been completely different from the very start.

*Weight classes 

*Weigh ins 

*use of studio analysis presentation 

*fueds based on factions/promotional groups.

 

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What's the benefit of weight classes, though?

It makes sense in legitimate combat sports, but not in pro-wrestling. In wrestling, it just reduces the number of potential matches available to you, and takes away the simplest story wrestling can possibly tell - David vs. Goliath.

I don't know why anyone would want that, unless they were attempting to present wrestling as faux-MMA, and a promotion centred around the Young Bucks will be nothing of the sort.

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19 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

What's the benefit of weight classes, though?

It makes sense in legitimate combat sports, but not in pro-wrestling. In wrestling, it just reduces the number of potential matches available to you, and takes away the simplest story wrestling can possibly tell - David vs. Goliath.

I don't know why anyone would want that, unless they were attempting to present wrestling as faux-MMA, and a promotion centred around the Young Bucks will be nothing of the sort.

To be different. To not do what has gone before. To also not be lazy and stick with a concept and have the discipline to see it through which would hopefully over time educate the fan base into realising that they were watching a different style of pro wrestling. I'd go as far as having time limits for matches and have a judges scorecard should the match to the distance. Think of the storylines that would create.  

Surely having big fuckers like Ryback, Batista and Goldberg as your heavyweight torch bearers and then underneath a middleweight division with Your omegas etc and then under that a lightweight or welterweight division helps create a real difference when watching a card. 

Then say if your middleweight champion has cleaned out the division he then goes up and then has a whole new group of fresh matches but against clearly bigger and tougher opponents.

We've been accustomed and normalised seeing David up against goliath that going in the opposite direction would be an interesting change imo of couse.

Ultimately AEW aren't going in that direction and it will be interesting how long they last when they realise going up against the wwe and a product that caters to everyone won't work.

Edited by BigJackTaylor
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Having two weight classes, I can see an argument for - Heavy and Cruiser/Light-Heavy. There are storylines that can and have been done around weight, and everything implicit in it. But loads of weight classes is counter-productive; as Pat says, it reduces the number of matches you can have, and removes the David-Goliath dynamic that is pretty much the cornerstone of a lot of wrestling matches. Boxing's bad enough with the sheer number of weight classes based on small increments, and MMA's trying to resist that - when you have Heavy, Light Heavy, Super-Middle, Middle, Light Middle, Super-Welter, Welter, Light-Welter, blah blah blah, it all becomes much of a muchness, and with wrestling it's even less necessary. Having even MMA's number of divisions in wrestling would be problematic.

EDIT: I see what BigJackTaylor is going for, but I have to say I think doing it that way will only lead to the problem that fans are having with WWE, i.e. that there will just be guys having match after match after match with each other and getting stale. 

Again, bear in mind that MMA fighters and boxers don't fight all that often, and MMA and boxing promotions have much, much bigger rosters, so they can afford to put on loads of cards every couple of weeks or every month with fresh fights. Their fighters get paid more (in the big leagues, that is), so they can afford to take those necessary breaks between fights. Wrestlers don't get that luxury - they have to "fight" every week, which means potential over-exposure, especially when the pools they're in are artificially small because of weight limits.

Edited by Carbomb
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If people are wanting a more sportsy style with weigh-ins and pundits and things like that, again, I say go all in (ha) with it. Structure TV like Match of the Day with a couple of feature matches and undercard highlights. Have retired wrestlers on there doing Monsoon-to-the-nth-degree by pointing out how someone's cinched in an arm in a particular way.

In the matches, get rid of obvious heel cheating, or cheating in front of the cameras. It is such a recognised wrestling trope that the heel cheats behind the ref's back, and the ref doesn't see it, but in the modern world with all the technology and screens available, that just doesn't work. Have the heel cheat, the referee miss it, but then pause the match as the guy in his earpiece instructs him to go for an instant replay to see what he missed when he was being distracted. Have four officials at ringside to keep everything sporting and fair. Rope line technology.

Like with the no-commentary idea, I don't actually want this, but if I'm going to watch AEW I want it to feel totally different to WWE and I'd rather that meant throwing away the accepted wrestling TV rulebook than trying to 'compete' by doing the same thing but superkickier.

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Well, for one, they're not going to have Batista, Goldberg and Ryback as heavyweights, and they may not even have Kenny Omega as middleweights.

All weight divisions - or divisions of any kind - achieve in wrestling is to impose needless limitations.

Because the first step in putting together an intriguing wrestling match is to put two wrestlers together that, either through their size, their characters, or their fighting style, makes the audience ask, on some level, "how will these two interact?" or, in many cases, "how could X possibly beat Y?". It's that question that fundamentally sells a wrestling match.

Same goes for stuff like @HarmonicGenerator's suggestions - they all sound well and good as a thought experiment, or an approach to booking an indie promotion marketed at workrate nerds, but it's insane to book a wrestling promotion aiming for mass appeal by removing every tool that allows wrestling to tell stories. By throwing in additional referees, instant replays, reversed decisions, you're adding a mock sense of "legitimacy" that no one will buy into because no one believes wrestling is legitimate, at the expense of storytelling tools that have served wrestling well for a century. There's a reason referees miss tags, make incorrect calls, or don't have decisions reversed, and it's because it's what best serves the stories pro-wrestling tells.

 

There are things wrestling can, and should, borrow from the world of legitimate sports (I like the idea of the Match of the Day style structure and punditry, that's largely how I would want to present TV wrestling), but not at the expense of everything that makes wrestling unique, and makes wrestling work.

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2 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

 There are things wrestling can, and should, borrow from the world of legitimate sports (I like the idea of the Match of the Day style structure and punditry, that's largely how I would want to present TV wrestling), but not at the expense of everything that makes wrestling unique, and makes wrestling work.

Darts has heavily borrowed from wrestling (entrances, music etc) but maybe wrestling's presentation can learn a bit from darts too? It is a legitimate sport but doesn't always take itself too seriously and still has punditry etc without being too over the top. I don't think you can get away with being too serious.

Mind you, doesn't the WWE have an element of punditry with those shite pre-shows they do with Booker T, Lawler etc?

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5 minutes ago, garynysmon said:

Mind you, doesn't the WWE have an element of punditry with those shite pre-shows they do with Booker T, Lawler etc?

The problem is that's too self-contained. It's not produced enough so it ends up with just Booker rambling rather than trying to get any element of the story over and it's completely separate to everything else so it serves no purpose. Compare that to that brilliant post-Smackdown show which had an element of Bryan and Young being pundits but featured the wrestlers themselves, gave them opportunities to improve their character and stories and allowed for storyline development and match-making. That was a great concept.

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55 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Well, for one, they're not going to have Batista, Goldberg and Ryback as heavyweights, and they may not even have Kenny Omega as middleweights.

All weight divisions - or divisions of any kind - achieve in wrestling is to impose needless limitations.

Because the first step in putting together an intriguing wrestling match is to put two wrestlers together that, either through their size, their characters, or their fighting style, makes the audience ask, on some level, "how will these two interact?" or, in many cases, "how could X possibly beat Y?". It's that question that fundamentally sells a wrestling match.

Same goes for stuff like @HarmonicGenerator's suggestions - they all sound well and good as a thought experiment, or an approach to booking an indie promotion marketed at workrate nerds, but it's insane to book a wrestling promotion aiming for mass appeal by removing every tool that allows wrestling to tell stories. By throwing in additional referees, instant replays, reversed decisions, you're adding a mock sense of "legitimacy" that no one will buy into because no one believes wrestling is legitimate, at the expense of storytelling tools that have served wrestling well for a century. There's a reason referees miss tags, make incorrect calls, or don't have decisions reversed, and it's because it's what best serves the stories pro-wrestling tells.

 

There are things wrestling can, and should, borrow from the world of legitimate sports (I like the idea of the Match of the Day style structure and punditry, that's largely how I would want to present TV wrestling), but not at the expense of everything that makes wrestling unique, and makes wrestling work.

Interesting.

Just because it's a work doesn't mean you can't create some sort of pseudo legitimacy. Hell, the fact that it is a work would mean although there were limitations with having the weight classes you could create a lucha  goes through the weight classes and gets his chance against the big monsters story. 

Your basically saying because it's fake just cabaret act it by which I mean make it hokey cos that's all people know.

Although NJPW has some sort of pseudo sport legitimacy and that seems to work doesn't it. 

 

Edited by BigJackTaylor
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