Post by Dark Lord Simon de Montfort on Aug 31, 2015 2:03:22 GMT
What is the Immortal Era?
The Immortal Era is a new era in IWF, consisting of a change in the way the fed is both run and aspects of it's kayfabe presentation. You'll both be quite familiar with the WWE/F's "Golden Era, Attitude Era, Ruthless Aggression Era", the Immortal Era will follow in a similar vein signifying a fresh start for the fed to move forward from the vestiges of the past.
The previous period (roughly equating to two years) of IWF's existence will now be refereed to as the Origin Era to signify the establishment of the company and the transition from New Championship Wrestling to the Imperial Wrestling Federation.
So what does this new era and relaunch entail exactly? Let’s get straight into it.
Title Belts
The Imperial Championship, IWF Diamond’s Championship and IWF Man of Steel Championship will all be retained in our relaunch into the Immortal Era, although each one will sport a re-design following the launch of our new emblem. Whilst I appreciate that there were questions of whether we required so many championships our aim is to grow and build a larger roster and it must be remembered that belts can only really occupy 2-3 people at one time.
Champions from now on will be obligated to make at least one title defence per “month” (the weeks between the first Sacrifice following a pay-per-view and the next pay-per-view), this should eliminate the situation we’ve had in the past where champions have missed defences and belts have gradually fallen into obscurity and increase competition for them. If a champion, therefore, realises they will be unable to roleplay for a pay-per-view they will be obligated to select another week to defend their belt to fulfil their defence obligations, though this rule will not apply in matches which are already pre-determined.
The Invictus Championship
Following our re-launch into the Immortal Era I am pleased to announce that the Invictus Championship will be retained. The Invictus Championship will now be geared, primarily, towards more high risk, high octane match types, constantly pushing the boundaries further and further as men put their bodies on the line.
The Invictus Championship will now also be defended under a new feature for the fed: Invictus Rules.
What are Invictus Rules?
Matches fought under Invictus Rules are contests between roleplayers which will be judged based on the content of their trash talk. Essentially, when matches are judged they will be assessed on the quality of their trash portions of their roleplays and how well these portions reflect the character.
A common problem I have found when judging roleplays is that people will write quite complex character development which tells me a lot about the character in question and then their trash will be quite disconnected from this story and almost as if the person delivering it is another character entirely. Invictus Rules is designed for writers to be able to focus on getting their characters across more effectively in trash without having to worry about being judged on other aspects.
What this doesn’t mean is that matches fought under Invictus Rules should contain no character development at all, but rather that they will be judged on how well they reflect their character in their trash talk sections based on this week and previous weeks character development work. These rules are designed to help people practice their trash talk to prepare them to move up the roster where your effectiveness in portraying your character is a key component in making decisions on winners and losers and vital in creating successful characters in IWF.
Invictus Rules do not have any effect on the stipulation of matches (i.e. A Ladder match fought under Invictus Rules is still a standard Ladder Match in kayfabe). Invictus Rules will always be in effect for matches involving the Invictus Championship (from which they get their name), but may also be applied to other matches (or requested by both participants who must be in agreement) especially in the case of handlers who we feel require a little more work on their trash work.
Invictus Rules are not to be considered knocks on a person’s ability to write, but rather an opportunity to be a little more relaxed in your character development content whilst focusing on your trash in terms of obtaining a victory.
IWF Shieldmaiden
We are pleased to announce a new, re-branded, version of the IWF Ruby Championship, the IWF Shieldmaiden. IWF’s women’s division is one of the strongest female divisions in a mixed gender e-federation and has birthed some of our federation’s most memorable characters and is one that we are incredibly proud of. Due to the roster’s size and highly competitive nature it was vital to continue our tradition of two singles title for the Diamond’s to compete for, allowing our upcoming women a platform to prove themselves on before moving up to opportunities to compete for the IWF Diamond’s Championship.
The IWF Shieldmaiden will be a fighting champion and as such will be eligible to challenge anybody to a match for her title on any IWF broadcast alongside her obligatory monthly title defence, however if she should lose her title in a match she arranged personally she will be ineligible for another shot at the belt for two months. The IWF Shieldmaiden will also be rewarded with a tier of incentives for her performances and successes as champion.
If a Diamond manages to complete two successful months or four successful title defences she will be granted the opportunity to select the stipulation for each of her successive title defences until she loses her positions as the IWF Shieldmaiden.
If a Diamond manages to complete three successful months or six successful title defences she will be granted an automatic opportunity are the IWF Diamond’s Championship once she loses her position as the IWF Shieldmaiden.
If a Diamond manages to complete four successful months or eight successful title defences she will be granted the opportunity to select the stipulation for her shot at the IWF Diamond’s Championship once she loses her position as the IWF Shieldmaiden.
IWF Open Fight Night
One of our new concepts is the IWF Open Fight Night which has been created in response to requests for more input on your booking. Whilst we hope that you understand that, to a degree, staff will retain control over booking cards we recognised that it would be nice to give you a monthly opportunity to book some of your own matches with characters you want.
IWF Open Fight Night will be hosted every second week after a pay-per-view and is your opportunity to help shape your own booking. Is there somebody you want to challenge to a fight? Ever wanted to go toe to toe with best of the best to prove yourself? Just enjoy running your mouth on Twitter? Now you’ll have the opportunity to challenge one another to matches on the Open Fight Night card and have an input in your booking.
So, how does IWF Open Fight Night work?
After each pay-per-view a new thread will be opened (IWF Open Fight Night #1 etc) in the social media forum where you can make “tweets” either offering yourself for a fight or challenging somebody else to one. Here people can either respond to your open challenge or accept or decline your challenge to a fight. Once a match has been agreed by both participants it will be booked on the second Sacrifice following a pay-per-view.
The only exception will be if matches have been determined in advance for storyline reasons, but we will try to be mindful that this week is your opportunity to make your own matches. It is also important to note that you are free to make matches in the main Twitter thread for other weeks, but please use the Open Fight Night threads for the specific week.
IWF: Fallout
IWF: Fallout is a forum where members will be able to post post-match interviews, reactions to events on the show, review the latest episode and much more. Think of it as an amalgamation of the WWE App with short interviews and a place to review and offer feedback for a show. We encourage members to make use of this subforum to increase on-board interaction and participation and to help build your characters; post match interviews are great ways to respond to results and launch new character developments and even start new feuds (or continue current ones).
Awards
As you may be aware IWF hosts it’s very own yearly awards at the end of a calendar year in a number of categories to recognise our members accomplishments throughout the year and we are pleased to announce that there will now be some minor changes to awards, including the return of monthly awards.
Our monthly awards will be determined after pay-per-views and the candidates will be selected by the staff for members to vote on. These awards will take the form of polls where you are free to register your vote in a number of categories, although please be aware that votes are restricted to ONE VOTE PER HANDLER. Abuse of this will result in punishment.
The winners of our monthly awards will now also be automatically added to the ballot for the yearly awards, this will allow recognition for exceptional performances throughout the year at our yearly awards rather than a focus on the latter portion of the calendar year. Whilst you will still be able to submit nominations, all monthly award wins will take up one place in the list of candidates. Characters who win multiple awards will only be added once.
Feedback
I am sure you’re all fully aware that A Girl Has No Name has provided in depth feedback for members on a regular basis and I know that one of the key features that attracted people to IWF was feedback. A Girl Has No Name’s position as a Scriptor is to provide feedback and she will be continuing in this capacity, but we will now be offering something called Advanced Feedback.
In Advanced Feedback we will make specific suggestions for ways to improve your roleplays; these will include where to take your storylines, suggestions for ways to better get across your character, feedback on what part of your gimmick just aren’t working, structural advice and any other suggestions we feel would help you. Advanced Feedback is strictly limited to how many handlers we can take on at one time and is not a weekly service, but rather a request for in depth feedback on a number of weeks work and is targeted more at areas of weakness you would like help with or even just creative suggestions for character direction.
Please await further announcements as to who will be involved in this service specifically.
Results and Result Feedback
I will be hosting a thread where members are able to request feedback from myself specifically as to why they won or lost a match. Please be aware that this feedback will primarily explain the reasons for your victory or defeat and isn’t designed, per se, to be an extensive breakdown of your overall work, but rather an explanation for reasons why you either won or lost a specific match. In this thread you will be able to request either public or private feedback and I encourage anybody who has questions about their result to make use of this thread rather than sitting on any grievances or wondering about what they did well and allowing this to sour their enjoyment in the fed.
I also feel it is important to make a small note on how roleplays in this fed are judged in general here. I hear people make a lot of assumptions for how I pick winners, these range from "quantity over quality" to "only care about complex character development". To be very candid and completely open, roleplays are judged primarily on this one over riding principles: how well did you sell your character? This basically means did you roleplay portray your character effectively and this means not just by writing character development, but did their trash reflect the sort of views and language the character should be using? How far does the overall package really sell this character and how they view this upcoming match? This means that yes, a 1200 word roleplay with solid CD and trash which really reflect who that person is meant to be can easily beat a 3000 word roleplay that droned on, didn't really make any more pertinent points and had other issues.
That is how I pick winners, on character work and then very general things like how you structured the work. You don't need to wow me with cliffhangers or massive roleplays, just sell me your characters, make me believe they're living breathing people and they will win. If they just come across as generic and start saying things they shouldn't be saying based on the character you've built, they will lose. Go wild, get creative, bring these characters to life, just don't worry that if it's not this or that it can't win.
Feuds
Some of you may remember that previously PM threads were set up to discuss feuds, this will be resuming and will involve all the participants and the Consuls and Imperator to discuss an upcoming feud. Here we will pitch our idea to members and help you discuss how to build the feud over each week and we strongly encourage you to keep your input updated. For members who have agreed their own feuds, we will now require that you also set up a PM thread including Riley Gordon, Katherine Lockheart and Dark Lord Simon de Montfort. This is absolutely vital that you set these up and update them to keep staff informed of agreed feud developments or we will exercise our right of refusal for submitted segments. Staff must be kept up to date with plans or we simply can’t plan effectively to make the fed as fun as it can be for you.
Roleplay Deadlines & Penalties
Roleplay Deadlines will be officially extended now until 6am GMT. That is an increase of SIX hours for our American members giving you more time to use your Sunday evenings for roleplaying. Originally deadlines were introduced to suit GMT as myself and other staff members are British, however, I felt that as far as roleplay deadlines are concerned it is no longer necessary to be as rigid. I must make it quite clear that match submission for shows, and segments, will STILL be very much set to a GMT schedule to allow me to prepare shows. This extension therefor brings me to something else.
Bags of Sand (or as it is affectionately filtered to here, oral stimulation of very leathery old mountain folk) has always been a problem in e-fedding and it is something I am keen to address here. Whilst I appreciate that it is not always possible to post early and sometimes you really have to try and rush a roleplay up I am also not completely stupid and I am quite aware that some people drop roleplays at deadline on a repeated basis which isn’t fair on everybody else. Not only is this clearly trying to game the system, it’s unfair that you constantly have the right of reply to everybody else and you shouldn’t be trying to be reliant on that to win matches because it’s poor sportsmanship. You now have four extra hours, if you can get the roleplays up for midnight GMT, that means you shouldn’t need to drop them at 6am GMT either.
Repeated offenders will now be placed under an eight hour penalty, essentially this means that their deadline will be eight hours earlier than everybody else. This is to discourage repeated deadline drops and can be revoked and invoked at the staff’s discretion.
Other
Of course, there are also features of this relaunch which haven’t received a detail category in their own right but warrant mention. You'll notice a fair few cosmetic changes and even just smaller ones, but here are a few others.
You will notice there are a few more sub-forums for “News, Dirtsheets and Rumours” which will have more content generated for them by the staff to help build up excitement for shows, hyping possible returns, announcing matches officially for the pay-per-view and so on. There will be a greater push for content creation and generation in general to try and make this place much more interactive and feel like you're truly in a wrestling company.
We as a staff are aware that recently feud generation has been below the standards we set ourselves, with the relaunch we promise to remain much more vigilant to feuds and increase our creation levels to try and ensure members have the opportunity to be involved in angles with at least one of their characters if not more to keep their activity levels up in the fed. You will notice that we have retained a forum where you are able to request feuds and we strongly encourage you to use your voice if you feel overlooked and post in these forums.
Last but not least, if you know people who you think would make kick ass additions to our roster we fully encourage you to invite them to join the federation. Despite everything I would like to think that most of us do have fun here and want to see the place to the best it possibly can and that includes getting new blood into the roster every so often to keep everything fresh. I appreciate some people may not want to join for whatever reason but if you can think of anyone who may be interested I’d love for your to invite them to come and join the family. IWF is two years strong, which is an impressive feats in e-feds as they usually die off fairly quickly, let’s open a new chapter and forge forward.