Cage Deathmatches are bad

They're perfectly fine if you turn escapes off. Which I prefer anyway, because escape rules never made sense to me. Why would anyone ever win a fight by running away from their opponent?

Aside from the general suckiness of the match mechanics and everything else mentioned so far in the thread, my biggest complaint about cage matches is that for a FreeCam loyalist such as myself, watching a cage match from angles other than the default cam can be extremely disorienting. It seems to cause this sort of parallax scrolling between the far panels of the cage and the foreground panels that messes with my eyeballs and makes me feel almost seasick. The effect isn't so pronounced if I change from the chain-link cage to an old school square-style steel cage, but it's still pretty dizzying.

You can put weapons in without a mod. You an add weapons to all the deathmatch match types.

Would be cool if the cpu would follow you outside the cage instead of automatically going to the center of the ring until you come back.

Escape cage matches in FPW are really difficult because the AI is just not suited for it.   

I think Flexibility controls how often you go for Cage Escapes but that just isn't a precise enough tool. You can get really anticlimactic endings as a result of an edit hitting a non-signature move and then just deciding to hightail it out of there.  

If you are playing 1P vs. 2P you can agree on certain rules to make the mode work. But AI vs. AI is really rough. And you almost never see cage dives either which essentially just turns these matches into Ice Climbers. 


I happen to hate Escape Cage matches in modern pro wrestling 99% of the time.  I grew up watching pro wrestling in the 80's and the purpose and psychology of cage matches were completely different than today's "Ultimate Ninja" parkour spot stuffing style. 

Back then, cage matches were reserved for two people who hated each other or to restrict a cowardly heel or a heel in a faction from getting the best of a face in a feud-ending match. Often the cage was specifically chosen as a reaction to the story up until that point. Wanna stop the Horseman from continuing to help Flair cheat to win? Throw him in a cage with Dusty or Sting.  Wanna stop a cowardly heel from escaping the anger of a face and ensure they receive their comeuppance? Throw them in a cage. The face doesn't WANT to escape, they want their fair match and maybe their revenge.  The last thing they want to do is to leave the cage. The cage is meant to keep people in. It's not a f'n jungle gym play set!

I do like 1 aspect of modern "escape" cage matches. There's that moment in some Title matches where a face has to decide whether they want to win the match (and often a Championship) by climbing out of the cage OR deal more damage to the heel who likely hurt/cheated them in the past. That story element always intrigues me.  

But you can actually get that element with modified escape cage match rules.  If you set a stipulation that says: "Both wrestlers have to escape to win but they are only allowed to attempt an escape once they score a pin/submission," you keep all the psychology of a regular match but add an extra element of intrigue to the end of the match.  It's a pretty good compromise that keeps the Cage match from becoming a rope-climbing contest in high school gym class.

Because like everything else, it eroded over time. These days the cage is just a prop to bump off of. :)

The original point was to keep the heel in, and his buddies out. Then they fight to the finish to settle things and the winner walks out when he's done.