(FPWA structural discussion)

Let's just start from this particular point: if I'm putting up a thread about a thing and you're not engaging with it, meaningfully or even at all?
You don't get to complain about it.

If I'm putting up a thread about a thing and you just completely ignore it?
You don't get to complain about it.

If I'm putting up a thread about a thing and all you're doing is complaining about the thread being put up in the first place?
No, you don't fucking get to fucking complain about it.

If I'm putting up a thread about signing up for a show (like Milestone or Alliance) or a championship dealie (like trying to make the championships active again/keep them being active), and you don't sign up to participate or sign up to offer any help on it, or even reply to it?
Guess.

NOW I'm going to explain why I'm putting up so many separate threads to begin with.

FIRSTLY, If I put all of that stuff into a single thread, all those specific things would get lost in the shuffle and trying to sort it all out would be a nightmare.
Those threads are all separate to keep everything related SPECIFICALLY to those threads organized and as free from crossover clutter as possible.
You ever been on forums where people try to cram like 10 different topics into a single thread and then you can't find what you're looking for on ANY of those 10 topics? That's why the threads are all separate.
On the TEW forum, I can't find JACK SHIT on what I'm looking for in any of the info megathreads because THERE'S JUST SO MUCH DIFFERENT SHIT IN THEM that it would literally take an HOUR of looking through EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN PAGE to find even the FIRST mention of the thing I'm looking for!
THAT'S why the threads are all separate!
If you don't like how many of them there are, then kindly fuck off, because I'm not going to reduce the number of threads I make just to satisfy whatever reason you might have for only wanting a few threads with a bunch of topics crammed into them shown.

That's why all the threads are separate.

And the reason all those threads exist in the first place?
Steady and frequent community engagement, and I'm going to explain why that is, so maybe ACTUALLY pay attention here for once.

(Technical Note: People closer to the whole thing as it happened can and should expand on or correct specifics as needed)

For the 10 year period between the US release of Fire Pro Returns on PS2 in 2007 and World in 2017, how much of that time were you active on Arena, or even the Fire Pro Club forum before it basically died of a slow painful bleed-out?
I ask, because if you were there long enough, you'd have seen the Person Pack activity taking place in increasingly sporadic bursts, instead of a steady stream like it started as.
Over the course of those 10 years the official booking/showrunning team for the Person Pack experienced a fair bit of semi-frequent turnover, and every time it happened, the new people were installed because they promised that they'd be able to get events up sooner and hold and get them up more frequently, as the previous ones became more and more bogged down with outside-of-the-forum stuff. (Again, specifics and detail corrections may be needed)
As a result, it became more and more difficult for ALL of us just to communicate with them, let alone get any hard info about whether a show was going to happen at all, and never mind trying to get official angles and feuds started, because basically there were really only 2 or 3 "active" official storylines in the official Person Pack fed by the time World came out, or more specifically, by the time booking activity basically ceased altogether.
It eventually became akin to pulling teeth for somebody just to get a "we're working on the show, don't worry, it'll happen" response.
Questions on the matter would literally go unanswered for maybe months, even if you saw the person making a post an hour later somewhere else on the forum.

Keep in mind that this entire time, it was difficult enough even for the bookers/showrunners, let alone the independent e-fed runners just to
1) STREAM regularly because software and hardware specs weren't powerful enough yet
2) RUN PS2 emulation reliably enough just on native resolution, also because of software and hardware limitations
3) RECORD the videos, also because of software and hardware limitations
4) UPLOAD them regularly to YouTube because of late 2000's shitty internet and YouTube's limitation impositions (hey, remember when you had to meet a REQUIREMENT to put up videos longer than 10 minutes?), and to WATCH them on YouTube or streams reliably because of late 2000's shitty internet
5) keep the Person Pack up to date for the shows because eventually trying to get the updated/new edits to them became almost like pulling teeth due to "okay, I need the current version of your edit" "well, showrunner has it" "showrunner is incommunicado, bud"
-- and in this aspect, basically the best time to get your edits current and onto the Pack in the first place was basically before 10th Edition hit, because the runner absences really started to ramp up at around 2010/2011 or so. (again, people closer to the specifics please expand/correct the details of these points as necessary)

Basically, by the end of FPC and well into the tenure of the Arena forum, we were lucky to get one, or even two if we were super lucky, official show(s) a year.
Or one in 2 years.
And the "official" distinction is quite important because, unless you were ON the booking/showrunning team or got explicit confirmed permission from the team or even just the head (if there were more than one booker at a given time), you couldn't book/run any official/canon shows under the FPCPP brand.
(this specific issue is the VERY reason I created the "Officially Branded" moniker and concept to delineate a canon/official CRITICAL! Club show from a non-canon/unofficial one -- if you want to do an official show? just say so, and BOOM, your show is now an Officially Branded Event, instead of waiting forever for zero response)
As examples from the time: Denizen could run ZIP JAPAN shows, Senator could run Senatorial Office shows, Level could run AMBITION shows, but unless they had specific permission from the booking team, they couldn't run even a single official FPCPP match, let alone a full show under the FPCPP brand itself.
Hell, even when Zealot was on the booking team, he couldn't make any of the Galastream things (Super Nova chief among them) as official FPCPP events without permission from the rest of the team. And Geese couldn't make, if he wanted to, any UBL or OG-JOSHI things FPCPP-official when HE was on the team, unless the REST of the team said he could (which they would've, because it's goddamn Orochi Geese, one of the literal best people of our ENTIRE community, but that's not actually the point here).
Even certain events from people not on the booking team at the time had to jump through increasingly tooth-pulling hoops just to exist, as time went on.
At first, it was easy to get the Thomazinger Memorial Tag Tournament and the Big Nasty Sunrise league pushed through because they took place early enough in the FPCPP tenure that somebody on the booking team would respond within a week, if not within a couple of days, to approve it, and the Misawa Memorial Show existed as an official FPCPP event just through the sheer amount of us who were in support of it being so and who asked for it to be.

And Zealot can probably explain this one in more detail, but if I remember correctly, March Madness almost didn't even happen at all (let alone manage to be the only "annual" independently-created occurrence left over from the FPCPP; the Rookie Jar/Star Of The Jar was an official creation, not an independent one), and if I'm not mistaken, it took Macho Man's death and the first tournament being dedicated to him to make it happen as an official FPCPP event. Again, Z can explain and correct any specific points there as needed.

The common element here is that the booking team became increasingly absent and essentially nobody after a certain point could put on "official" FPCPP matches or shows.

At various points during that time, there was also an unwritten rule that if you wanted to do official FPCPP matches/shows, it was heavily implied that you needed to at least be able to put some production values into it -- after all, who wanted to see an official FPCPP show at that time that was just a playlist of raw match recordings, when you had even the non-PPV shows having a produced intro and usually had production on the versus screen?

So, over the course of 10 years, we go from frequent shows, to literally years between 2 shows, to one show and then actually nothing afterwards until World came out.
Well, not actually nothing.
See, over the course of those 10 years, we went from just the World Title and Tag Titles to having an Anarchy Title (and a very memorable and wonderful feud between Wonderland and K over it), a Battlefront Title, and a Grand-Prix Title, just to make sure more people would actually see action on the increasingly infrequent official events.
Somebody on the team got the idea to make an FPCMMA division and championship at some point, and we got a logo and a bunch of MMA alts made (including myself), but we never held any shows. It basically died right out of the gate because nobody could commit to running that damn thing.
Plus, Ven0mous started the Joshivision Division to try and spark more activity and to showcase female edits more...and backstage politics basically scuppered THAT idea, even though I myself gave it a couple of tries at the Rising shows this year and last year to resurrect the division, more on that later.

So now, by the time Fire Pro Club the forum itself bit the dust, we had champions for every belt (except FPCMMA, cuz no official matches), but no officially sanctioned shows to defend them on.
I think it was 2012, when Ceese and CominAttraction won the Tag belts, but since we basically had no shows, unofficial affiliate shows were having matches for contenders, but no way to actually have the officially sanctioned title matches.
Omen was planning on booking a big huge event, Reunion, where all the championship storylines would finally hit their crescendo: Zealot was finally gonna face Riggs for the World Title after he and the now-defunct Prophets Of Doom mugged then-champ Sword (yes, that one) to basically steal the title; the Anarchy Title was gonna be defended in a big blowoff match involving Wonderland, K, Sonny-X, and a bunch of others, the Battlefront Title was gonna more clearly establish itself. The Tag and Grand-Prix belts didn't have any clear contenders yet, so presumably, the builds would be taking place.

Reunion never took place, because Omen's real life wound up taking over too much, and we had no mechanism put in place (and never really did, to be honest) to actually figure out how to install a new team (or even just one person) who could make sure official FPCPP shows took place at all.

Then Ceese died only a few months before World came out.
We were all around for that, so we all know what happened.

Though in terms of Person Pack stuff, that meant the Tag Titles were vacated, and we had no way of "sanctioning" any matches to crown new champions, so BFX literally had to just go "fuck it, I'll do it on MY WMD-branded show" (maybe not his exact words). (He's also the reason the Anarchy Title continued to exist after official FPCPP shows stopped happening, and I'm eternally grateful to him for caring enough about it to do that.)
At that point, the only people in charge were Sword, because the Arena was his website, and C-Drive, who did the coding.
Jim Freeman wasn't part of running it, Phil Parent wasn't part of running it, Bill Wood wasn't part of running it, and Maikeru wasn't part of running it.
Or Geese, or Wonderland, or Omen, or Zealot, or anybody else who helped run the fed before, the 2nd thing at the foundation of the forum that wasn't the specific Fire Pro Wrestling game series itself.
In my own personal opinion for this particular situation, I got the feeling that neither Sword nor C-Drive seemed to actually be very interested in running the Person Pack itself (C-Drive can clarify his position and details on his side if he feels like, and Sword is...you know...in jail or whatever), so I'm just gonna assume that the reaction was them shrugging their shoulders and just going "whatever, fine" when BFX wanted to do the Anarchy and Tag stuff, since we were all basically just emotionally exhausted from Ceese dying,

Guess what? You know what happened then. We all got super mad hyped for resurrecting the Person Pack, but at this point, the rest of the Arena just had to finally admit that the fed wasn't "FPCPP" anymore, but "Fire Pro Arena".
(I'm going to point out here that I personally pitched the full rebranding well before 2017, but since I didn't "go through proper channels" at the time when I did it, it was shot down hard.)
(I'm ALSO going to point out that I was 100% right in pitching a fed rebrand back then, and then again in 2017, and then again a year later when Arena closed and we migrated to CRITICAL! Club, because it was 100% abso-fucking-lutely necessary each and every single one of those times.)

And you know what else happened: the first few months of World's release was mainly just us porting our PS2 guys and nobody could really turn their attention to stepping up to continue the operations of the community fed itself.

Denizen was and still is mainly busy with ZIP JAPAN, Senator is busy with the Senatorial Office and making boxing edits, Level was interested with doing showrunning things but he's busy with AMBITION and is currently focusing his time on WWE 2k e-fedding stuff (for some reason?), Zealot with the Galastream, Geese with UBL stuff and just unable to run community stuff (he helped run things very early on in Fire Pro Club, and in fact, he's one of the maybe 3 or 4 people in the entire history of the Fire Pro Club/Arena/C!C that, if at any point he decided to seriously say "hey, Metal, I think you should stop entirely altogether, hand your portion of the ball over to me, cuz I want to take over", I would drop all of the Officially Branded stuff that I'm doing and just give them that entire portion of the ball that I'm carrying, even if they hold 1 show and then decided they can't actually run the C!C fed), and for new people who were showing up, those new people were busy mainly with their own e-feds.
So literally, in the first calendar year of Fire Pro Wrestling World's release, there were exactly 3 people out of hundreds on the Arena forum who actually stepped forward, raised their hands, and went on the record and said "I'm ready, willing, able, and interested in picking up where we left off and reviving operations of the Community Fed".

As has been previously talked about in previous discussions, those 3 people were:
1) Level (who wound up having to step back from his offer, but would be welcome at any point if he's willing and able)
2) BFX (who does put out content when he can, but can't do it as often as he would like because of various technical issues that arise)
3) and (drum roll and dramatic pause) me.

And you know what one of the MOST important things IS in doing something like running shows for the Community Fed?
ENGAGING with the Community involved in the Fed, on a regular basis.
And on a TEXT-based forum? That involves POSTS. THREADS. A hundred of them, if necessary. A THOUSAND.

And you know what ELSE is important?
The Community engaging right back with the operations of the Community Fed.
I don't own CRITICAL! Club, the forum, and I don't own CRITICAL! Club, the Community Fed.
I'm just a caretaker, putting out as much content as I can and inviting and encouraging involvement from as many of you as much as possible.
That includes things like trying to make basically-dead divisions like the MMA and Joshivision ones active again.

From day one of me taking the reins and essentially going "hey, I'm able to try and do this thing, so I'm gonna give it a shot trying to get the fed back up and running and do official shows", I basically said right after that "if any of you want to also do an official show or help me out, just say so" and I would help as much as you need me to.
And you know how long it was before ANYBODY specifically went "I want to do an official show"?
Almost a year, and then Critical Edge happened, and it happened partly literally out of spite for how I'VE been doing things for the past year-plus.

Yeah, I'm butthurt that it was done to spite me -- and don't you dare even try to pretend otherwise -- but I'm fucking OVER THE MOON that I'm not the only one actually volunteering to do official C!C events anymore!
By the way, the show itself was AWESOME, though I don't appreciate the dig at me on the commentary at the beginning.
And by the way, where the fuck was all of that LAST YEAR when I was asking people to help out?
Oh right, it was nowhere from you.

There's only drama right now because people like you are complaining about things you're not offering involvement in, and complaining without offering solutions.
"Oh, we should actually have RPs on this thread before you ask for it to be pinned"
YEAH, THAT'S WHAT IT'S HERE FOR, and it being pinned means it won't get BURIED on the 2nd or 3rd page! DUH!!
PEOPLE WILL SEE IT IF IT GETS PINNED.
THAT'S THE POINT OF PINNING A THREAD.
WHY SHOULD I EVEN HAVE HAD TO EXPLAIN THAT?
THAT'S WHY I'VE BEEN ASKING FOR THE OTHER THREADS TO GET PINNED, like the Info thread, the Champions/Ranking thread.
FOR FUCK'S SAKE, IT'S NOT GODDAMN ROCKET SCIENCE. (technically, it's Psycho-Social Science, operating under the principle of "out of sight => out of mind")

Frankly, somebody should've already had the RP thread (as well as the accompanying "RP Discussion" thread) put up during the forum testing period BEFORE I migrated over on the official launch, and I'll admit that I personally was derelict in my duty by not putting it up myself on day one of joining the C!C forum (I was busy actually working on shows and matches, so excuse the fuck out of me for forgetting at the time), but you don't get to stand there and bitch about it EXISTING, when we've HAD dedicated RP threads separated between the individual e-feds subforum and the community fed forum LITERALLY SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRE PRO CLUB PERSON PACK FED.

Like, literally, fucking THINK for like 60 seconds, or even just ONE second, when you see a thread and the name of the thread's poster says "fullMETAL" next to it.
I'm not making that thread to increase my post count, I'm making that thread for the reason laid out in the thread's title (and usually the post itself inside the thread, what a novel concept!), and if THAT doesn't click for you when you see the thread exist, maybe spend a few MORE seconds using your brain on "HMM, I wonder WHY this thread is here? Maybe I should engage with it in order to be better informed on it."

Instead of going "why are you doing the sensible thing in making all these separate threads for separate topics when you could just instead put them all together into like 1 or 2 megathreads of mixed different information and stuff where all the original points get buried?" like an actual idiot.

I'm. TIRED. Of. This.

Do you have any edits on the C!C roster? Volunteer them for shows.
Do you have any plans to do your own official C!C shows?
DO THEM!
Make a HUNDRED or a THOUSAND or a HUNDRED-THOUSAND episodes of Critical Edge or whatever, or bring back Hand Cat In The Back, or WHATEVER, or do what Chen did and actually make a new community championship, OR WHAT-FUCKING-EVER!
Just don't fucking throw ME under the bus FOR FUCKING DOING MY JOB and trying to actually DO SHIT AROUND HERE and actually get people INVOLVED when I say I'm going to make an official C!C show.

Don't complain about ARENA Rising if you didn't volunteer an edit or any help.
Don't complain about Milestone if you didn't volunteer an edit or any help.
Don't complain about Alliance if you didn't volunteer an edit or any help.
Don't complain about the Live Events matches if you're not volunteering any edits or any help.
Don't go around saying "oh, you're focusing on older inactive guys and not giving the newer ones a chance", when LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE is happening, because both Milestone and Alliance were stocked SPECIFICALLY with people CURRENTLY active who ACTIVELY said "yeah, I wanna be on that show" when I put the Sign-Ups up for them.
And I actually CHANGED the stipulation of the Grand-Prix Championship JUST for the newer guys to get showcased, AFTER I put up a POLL asking ALL OF YOU whether that should be the case or not.
And you remember how ARENA Rising had all those battle royals and was SO big that it had to ALSO have a PRE-SHOW? MOST of the edits on that whole 6-hour show were the NEW guys, and it was NEW GUYS fighting for the Internet Championship, the Grand-Prix Championship, the Battlefront Championship, and the Cruiserweight Championship.
And there are NEW GUYS who actually VOLUNTEERED to join the rankings for the MAIN GODDAMN CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE FED. And I didn't see YOU volunteering anybody for that, or for the Grand-Prix Championship. Or for the Cruiserweight Championship. Or for the Battlefront Championship. Or the Tag Team Championship. Or even the Internet Championship where literally ANYBODY can book ANY match they want for it at ANY time but DON'T because of completely pointless and unnecessary complaining about the EXISTENCE of the belt itself. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! This bullshit is why we didn't get a new Fire Pro for 10 years!
Don't complain about "FullMETAL doing FullMETAL things" if you're not volunteering to help get the things get done better (or faster, or both).
Don't complain about ME being the one doing anything CLOSE to RUNNING this fed IF YOU'RE NOT VOLUNTEERING TO HELP RUN IT.

And I don't mean "starting an independent committee to make REAL official C!C shows with the intention of completely ignoring FM's stuff, oh wait, fuck, FM volunteered to help out".
(And you KNOW that's what you were goddamn doing.)

And just one more time, in case I didn't get it across clearly enough: DON'T FUCKING COMPLAIN ABOUT HOW *I* DO THINGS, IF *YOU'RE* NOT OFFERING TO FUCKING HELP ME DO IT BETTER.
Not "doing it INSTEAD", "helping me do it BETTER".
If you want to do YOUR thing (and I don't mean getting rid of my thing and replacing it with your thing, I mean doing your thing while I still do mine), do YOUR thing WITHOUT shitting over MY thing.