Urnchos

Beaut of a show today. Cole/MJF at All In, while historically not a match I’d have had much interest watching in that slot, works perfectly given the story they’re going for. I suppose this means that we’ll have CM Punk’s off-brand world title being a separate entity longer than All-In, which is perfectly good, that story’s got some legs on it for sure. I’ve had an inkling this eventually ends with Cole betraying MJF and validating everything he’s always felt about not trusting people, which is a compelling story, but the concept of them actually staying friends after and proving to MJF that there’s good in the world is equally compelling, could be fun.

So happy for Shida, she deserves a run in front of fans and the division needs a shake-up. I wasn’t sure whether they’d be willing to do it tonight so it was a pleasant surprise.

Swerve getting the promo we’ve all been waiting for him to get. A true mega-heel promo that makes him look legit as hell. This is how you start getting his character to the levels we’ve all wanted him to get to.

And a win for Trent? Over Moxley/Penta? That’s a heck of a win, glad for him.

The first bits of All In hype levels are starting to set in, and that’s good.

This is pretty much it. They need to be willing to commit more time slots to the division. Right now it’s like they’re afraid to give the division any more time because it has historically got lower ratings than the men’s, but it’s a chicken and egg situation, since they’ve always been shucked off to the worst timeslot and never given investment. So of course people are going to become accustomed to tuning out for that section.

Make a concerted effort to allocate more of the show’s time to the division and better booking and more focus will inherently come, since they’ll have a larger portion of the show ‘on the line’ depending on the division being good television. It was a rough transition at the start for WWE too - the first women’s rumble was weak because the division was tiny, and it felt forced to give a women’s version of every big match. After a couple years though, it was the norm and the strength of the division started to shine through. They’ve still got a ways to go on their side of things as well on the main roster nowadays, but it’s in a better state than AEW for sure.

Now’s the best time to do it with the brand split - there’s more television time to go around than ever.

Wonderful news! They’re the heart and soul of the company and it would be a gigantic hit to lose them at this stage of their career and AEW’s lifecycle.

Crazy good show this week. MJF and Adam Cole are obviously the highlight, and not much to say there that hasn’t already been covered. Best storyline they’ve got right now by a country mile.

The CM Punk stuff is interesting, I’m a fan of any belt defacing and/or duplicate belt angle, so this is right up my alley. Pleased to see they’re finally making strides toward All In.

The ladder match was crazy, they put it all out there and created a hell of a fun match.

The upcoming dynamite card is weirdly un-exciting for a special dynamite 200 in my opinion, outside of Storm/Shida which should be a banger. But sometimes the best shows are the ones with the least exciting cards.

I’m here, I just don’t watch shows live personally so I pop in for the post-show comments

I found this week’s to be a bit of a step below the last stretch. They’ve been on a real hot streak though lately so a down week one of these days was sure to come. With all of The Elite getting the week off though and them holding significant MJF/Cole developments for Saturday this was bound to happen. The in-ring action was really good though, as always. Swerve/Darby is such a good pairing that you can never complain about a Wednesday when you get to see them do what they do.

That sign about the Women’s division says it all though regarding them. I can’t help but wonder what the root cause here is, is it a WBD thing by any chance or just a Tony thing? You’ve heard scattered reports over the years about how WBD does have an influence on who gets screentime and whatnot and in ROH you’re seeing a much better booked women’s division. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a WBD directive to limit their minutes due to historically lower ratings for their segments and to focus primarily on the marketable women like Britt/Jade/etc which is hurting the division at large.

I’ve found that the encounter builder is usually fine, but I would spend lots of extra time setting up encounters using it only to find that the things I plucked haphazardly were only about, say, 20% less balanced on average.

At the end of the day it became a question on if it was worth it to run every encounter through that for being only marginally better than just grabbing and going. For some, they have the time to spare and it is worth it, and that’s perfectly great! For myself I found that the extra variance just made things interesting and that 20% extra imbalance could be made up by the odd sneaky adjustment on the fly if I was ridiculously off base in where I expected the fight to end up in difficulty.

I found long ago that trying to balance my 5E encounters in any way, shape, or form is just a hopeless endeavor.

I just throw things at my party and kind of let 'er rip. Some end up hard, some end up easy, after a while you get a general gist for what they tend to be able to handle.