What You Want, What You Need

This will be the last PTC-related post I make. I'm not very happy about how GCW was treated recently, and I'm a bit bitter. But no matter how hard I try, I can't hate PTC. It was my home for a very long time, and I still have a lot of friends there.

I continue to lurk around the forums, mostly because I need to know what's going on with my members. But I'm encouraged to see that people are starting to get more interested in sparking new activity in the community. The trouble is, a lot of the ideas are a bit too idealistic. I think it's great that people are starting to work for something new (finally!), but the key to success is separating what you want from what you actually need. I've seen far too many projects fall apart in this game because people have tried too much too early, skipped the basic steps, and faltered for lack of foundation.

There's talk of a new PWA-style academy, there's talk of other ways to make PTC a bigger hub of interfed activity. Those are all good ideas, but people are still forgetting about the initial steps you have to take to make such things possible. Perhaps some day soon some of these things can be implemented, but if you really want PTC to work, you've got to start at the beginning. That starts with realizing that none of this is going to work if the feds continue to know nothing about one another. Fix that first.

Since most of PTC seems to have vilified me without even knowing why, I doubt many people will read this or be interested in my opinion. But for those of you who realize all I've ever done is try to help this community, I'll submit for your consideration my blueprint for fixing PTC.

1. Build a Website!
-This is the crucial first step. It's not sexy, it's not exciting, it's not new. But how can an interfed function without a website? As of now, the only place you can get fed news is through a poorly spotlighted sub-forum via RSS feeds. The news should be featured, should be one of the most important parts of PTC. And that goes hand in hand with the feds posting more of it.

The first step is getting everyone familiar with one another. You don't need an encyclopedic knowledge of each fed's angles and history, but you need to know who their wrestlers are and what they're all about.

Back when PTC was at its best, it was great because it had so many recognizable brand names and characters. OSW, FSW, PCW, PWC, NTICW, RUSH, PURE, and on and on and on. Those were top-tier feds filled with recognizable names. Boda, Meanstreak, Ivan Stanislav, the White Mexican, Kid Wonder, High Flyer, Scott Taylor, Angelo Deville, Ming, Timo Bolamba, The End, Clyde, El Diablo, Alan Kriegman, Xavier Kannon, those are all just names I can come up with off the top of my head without even thinking about it. And it's not just names I remember, it's gimmicks. I never even worked with most of those guys, but I knew them because you couldn't help but know them. If you spent time in PTC, you knew those guys.

But that's because the feds promoted them. They were identifiable as gimmicks and as members of specific feds. Nowadays people know the PTC feds just fine, but there are times when a good portion of the community doesn't even know who's running them. And sure, I could name most of the important characters in the community, but I couldn't give you a good read on the gimmicks or what they've accomplished in their feds. I just don't know. And if I wanted to know, I'd have to go to the fed's website and dig. The information just isn't out there.

Building a website is a big step, but all that does is give you a place to hype the characters and feds of PTC. The website should be a place where anyone can post news and opinion, but its success will hinge on step two:

2. Promote, Promote, Promote
-There's so much energy being dedicated to PTC right now, but it's not carrying the community very far because it's not focused in the right direction. Rather than trying to help PTC, help your own fed first. I wrote an entire post about this a few weeks ago; what PTC needs more than tournaments, more than titles, more than interfed matches, is strong member feds. I know people love PTC and love the interfed competition, but the community will benefit greatly in the long run from people directing their energies to their homes. PTC has become such a popular entity that it inspires just as much loyalty as its constituent feds. That's not a bad thing, but it does detract from the bottom line.

Rather than trying to throw together interfed matches and promoting the hell out of them, promote the hell out of your home fed! I didn't do a very good job of this myself during my time in PTC, so I'm certainly guilty of it as well. But recent events have made it clear that the thing PTC needs most is a sense of itself. How can you have really great interfed matches when you don't really know anything about the characters involved? It's become more about the matchup of handlers than the matchup of characters. That's actually a perk of the evolution of the game, but at the same time, it's easier to know a character than to know a handler's writing. I bet most of PTC hadn't actually read my work, but damnit, people knew Kimbusa. So whe Kimbusa was booked against Ivan Stanislav in OSW, people came rushing in to check it out. Not just because of the writing battle, but because it was a great story.

Promote your characters. Work hard in your home feds to create badass storylines and incredible matches. The more people know about the characters, the more interested they become in them. Jonathan Rhine vs. Clinton Sage should have been bigger than it was in PTC, but people were only vaguely aware of it. I know a lot of the characters in PRIME, but I couldn't even tell you what they're doing right now. People just go about their business in their home feds and their PTC activity seems to be separate. Combine the two, make PTC an extension of your work in your home fed rather than a side project.

Use the website to let people know what's going on every week. Get someone to recap your fed's show each week. Spotlight your character and let people know why they should be watching. Then, when we see Andy Murray vs. Devin Shakur, it'll mean even more. Promote, promote, promote.

3. Draw Clear Borders and Protect Them
-I think wrestlers appearing in other feds is taken too lightly. It can and should be done, but it should be a major occurrance when it happens. One of my biggest reservations about the Elite Title was having to host the matches. I can't promote the Elite Title above my home fed's belt, so if an Elite Title match were to happen in GCW, it couldn't be promoted as well as it should be. And what's more, it's clear that at least one of the competitors would be from another fed. If I can't promote that very well, then the fact that an SCCW or PRIME wreslter was in GCW wouldn't have its optimum effect.

Remember the WCW-WWF wars? That's when wrestling was at its best, and there was zero cooperation there. The feds wanted to destroy one another. Now, I'm not advocating open warfare among the feds, because the cooperation is awesome. But there's too much of it!

An interfed isn't just about handlers vs. handlers. It's about feds against feds. Hell, the fed versus fed battle is the foundation of the interfed. When two handlers go at it now it's just about the one on one battle. But add in a huge SCCW vs. PRIME rivalry and suddenly such a match takes on an extra dimension. GTT3 wasn't just the biggest tournament of all time because of the quantity of wrestlers, but because everyone wanted to represent their home fed. It's about bragging rights, it's about pride, but most of all, it's about pushing one another to do better.

Right now, when the feds all cooperate and collaborate on everything, everyone ends up settling in at more or less the same level. Everyone's working to fairly promote the Elite Title, which is good, but that necessitates an obsessive level of commitment to the concept of fairness. There need to be some aspects to the interfed where it's not about being fair, it's about getting ahead. Competition is a good thing. Trying to be the best is a good thing. The PTC fedheads apparently are communicating very well, so use that. Don't tell each other everything. Push one another to be the best. Stop sharing talent and focus on pushing your own product.

Draw your borders and protect them. Do whatever you can to make your fed tops in PTC. Just keep it clean.

4. Let Things Happen Organically
-The fourth step in PTC's evolution would be... nothing. Just sit back and let things happen. There's an understandable inclination to want to manufacture things to spark new activity in the community, but that's the wrong way to do it. This takes patience and foresight, and I know people want things to happen right now. But you need to slow down, implement the previous steps, and then let it do what it's meant to do without trying to mess with its natural progression.

Give the feds time to get to know one another, give the rivalries time to blossom, and let them simmer. Great rivalries can't be flash-fried, they have to stew. You can't simply stand up and say "Right, SCCW, PRIME and EPW all want to be tops, so they hate each other." It doesn't work that way. You actually have to let the rivalry breed on its own.

Don't force anything. Don't try to make it happen artificially. If you put the PTC feds in one place (the website) and let them promote themselves, and establish them as unique brands rather than as one big conglomerate of PTC feds, the interfed activity will spark to life on its own.

5. Now Take Action
-Once things have developed on their own, say three or four months, you can start taking action. Now your Elite Title really starts to mean something, because it's more than just a writing prize for individual handlers. It's about massive bragging rights. Now you can have your tournaments and interfed shows. But use PTC for all of this; maintain your borders.

Now that the feds know one another and are pushing one another, you can harness that energy. If you've developed the right kind of interfed, you can then take some of those more advanced steps. Here are some options:

5a. PWA
-The Primetime Wrestling Academy worked great back in the day, but there were tons of handlers wanting to get better and break into the big feds. Such a thing simply won't work today, so don't even try it.

But if PTC wanted it, it could create something that would work. Now, while I've advocated hard competition between the feds, the cooperation for the greater good can be used here. When you get an application that isn't good enough but might show promise, you could suggest that that person join the PTC Developmental fed. This fed would need its own fedhead, would be its own fed. It would have shows, RPs, segments, matches, all the same things the PTC feds have. But it would be a place to learn. It would require some help from the community to give feedback to help people grow.

Every member of this fed would be a free agent, free to sign anywhere. I know the concept of a draft is both exciting and awesome, but it won't work. Because it assumes the ultimate authority of the feds to dictate where these people handle, and that's not fair. Assume someone has spent four months working hard to improve because they really want to get into SCCW, but they get drafted by PRIME. They won't be happy, and they won't work hard for PRIME because it's not where they want to be. So you can't have a draft.

But everyone would be a free agent, free to sign with whatever fed they like whenever they like (perhaps mandate that they spend at least two months there or something). It's been suggested, then, that a problem might arise if a fed needed a lot of members and attempted to restock by hiring a ton of people out of the developmental fed. Well, that's a potential problem, but again, this is where competition comes into play. If a fed needed members that badly, odds are there are better feds in PTC. So it would be on the handler to decide if they wanted to go to a "major" fed right away, or hold out for a better offer. So make your fed a place people want to be, and you won't have to worry about a massive exodus of developmental people to some other fed.

5b. Tournaments
-Tournaments are fun. But they're far better when they have the added context of interfed rivalries. Yeah, it's a great opportunity to try out a new character, but it helps the community so much more when the tournament is populated with the wrestlers of the member feds. It's all about squeezing the hype out of these things. Archibald MacGreggor was a great storyline, but when it was over, what did it help? Ryan's the only one that benefitted, because Archie Mac never appeared in a fed. I'm not knocking Ryan, because I loved the whole thing, but at the end of the day it's wasted heat.

Granted, the heat from that situation was mostly sparked by the fact that he wasn't in a fed, but what if he'd popped up in FUSE the next week? How much would that piss off the other feds? That's the kind of thing PTC needs. Andrew did some great stuff with Iblis, but that only helped him, as Iblis never had a real run anywhere. PTC has become too handler-oriented. I'm not saying individuals shouldn't get credit for their accomplishments; there are some amazing writers in PTC and they deserve the spotlight. But the handlers need to represent something bigger than themselves in order to make PTC what you want it to be. As long as it's handler-specific, PTC will be its own fed and not an interfed.

This is what I envisioned for the Caldera Invitational Tournament. Keep it linked to the feds. Make it about fed-pride and bragging rights. Keep it kayfabe.

5c. Titles
-See above.

6. Don't Stop Being Elitist
-Some have said it's tough to break into PTC because it's a bit elitist, and it's set in its ways. That's not necessarily a bad thing. PTC is different from EWZine and F-Wrestling, and it needs to stay that way. If you try to be more like someone else, you lose your identity.

But PTC does need to be more accommodating to people who want to get involved. It's intimidating, because there are so many great writers in PTC and the community tends to put them on a very high pedestal. With the developmental fed, you'd have a place where anyone could join with hopes of getting noticed by their PTC fed of choice. How many applications do PTC feds routinely shoot down and never hear from again? Each one of those is a potential new member of the community, even if it means they join another fed.

Plus, with the promoting tools in place, it will be easier to get to know the community and get involved with it. As it is, it's pretty much impossible to know who everyone is on the forums. It's impossible to know anything about the feds unless you've been there for a while. That doesn't make newcomers very comfortable. Put the information out there, tie the website to the forums so it's easy to know who is who, and you might see a few new people start creeping in because the door will be open and a light will be on inside.

So that's my blueprint. You've got to be patient, PTC. Don't skip the first little steps. They're tough to do, because you don't see results right away and there's nothing tangible about it. But believe me, this is how it needs to be done.

And I still think PTC needs a leader to drive these things. Someone who knows how PTC worked back in its heyday and can steer it in that direction. Ross can do that for you, if he's willing. If not, someone else needs to be given the car keys. Ross doesn't think PTC needs a dictatorial leader like Ron, and he's probably right. All I'm saying is that everyone's in the same car, but nobody's driving. PTC just needs a driver who knows the right roads to take.

But I'll caution the community about this: keep your minds open. Don't rush into something just because it promises immediate results. GCW just got cast out, one of PTC's cornerstones, and nobody really seemed to notice or care. But the more you sacrifice your foundation in a search for the quick satisfaction of your immediate desires, the more you dig PTC into a hole. Ask questions, don't assume something's right just because it looks right. Think about what I've said, and hopefully you'll start to see that PTC needs to go back a few steps in order to move forward.