From episode 49, the first of this year, to episode 96, the last one, 343 days passed. Technically this means the second year was "longer" with the first being 336 days. Well, in reality both had 48 episodes. And we're so close to 100.
You may vote on Match of the Year, Storyline/Moment of the Year and Newcome of the year by clicking on this text you are currently reading.Y'know, at the start if the year I figured I might make Day 666, which ended up being Judgement Night II, the final episode. I figured I'd probably be ready to end it by then. Out of the three LPFWA runs two were shorter than a year. Only one made it over. But nah. I still feel like going on. As long as it's fun for me I won't stop. Despite this year feeling longer than usual for most of us for OHPW I feel like it went by fast.
We had a retirement Angle with Nero Sin, who gave it his all for his final match. We had the Hellfire Tournament that ended up earning Grace the big one and probably our most memorable title reign yet. We raised $100 for BLM Charities (which I matched, bringing us up to 200 bucks.) Flamander and Majin Bob Sapp had their crazy bout, Angus got back the G after over a year of being Anus, Dash and Vacation Skeleton FINALLY fought in a real underwhelming match, which was the perfect outcome of their feud. Somewhere in the middle our Bunny Title :3 evolved like a freaking Pokemon and turned into the Pokeymanz Title. There was more of course, these are just some of the highlights.
But let's look back through the last year through a more objective lens. My stupid-ass spreadsheet I keep around just so I can really dig into it once a year. But you know what I say? It's not the numbers that matter, but how you read them. Much like last year (
Check here if you want) I'll be going over some core statistics for the year, talk about why things be like they are, look at stories we had and how they look in the cold, merciless world of numbers. There will also be behind the scenes stuff I'll talk about where applicable. And because this is our second year we can actually draw comparisons to the first year in some cases.
Before we get into the nitty gritty, all the stuff you'll see below is also viewable
here as a web page.
For this year's round-up let's start it off with some general comparisons to 2019. You can see we have less matches, that's most certainly due to the fact of us not having the Showdown Tournament during which we booked shows with more matches to fit in the (shorter than usual) MMA-Style bouts for both the Round-Robin blocks we had.
Another observation worth making is that we booked more singles matches, but less tag matches and battle royals (listed as "Multi" here). This is part of an effort of mine to prevent shows from becoming too long. When I started the show I balanced wrestlers in a very different way. Which is to say, I didn't worry about it too much. But over time I got more of a feel for it. Bottom line is I balance around limiting the number of possible match enders (often limiting it further for bigger matches). While I don't use the default finish values mod that lets me straight up disqualify a move from ever finishing a match (I just think it's more interesting when a match CAN end with a freaking Neck Crank) I'm just more conscious of the potentially match-ending moves I give to people and when in the match I let them do these moves. This has the effect that the average matches last a bit longer, which you'll be able to see in our next set of stats. This doesn't impact tag matches and battle royals as much as singles matches. Anyway, more singles matches because matches overall got longer and singles matches are the shortest. So they are the best to book more of if you want to make a show shorter.
One last thing to mention is that the numbers of KOs and TKOs sunk drastically. This has multiple reasons: First, the aforementioned Showdown Tournament didn't happen in 2020. But also, the VACANT Open Challenge went on a hiatus some time in 2020. Those are the match types that mainly ended in KO or TKO.
Now, every time I talk about match ratings I feel the need to mention that they don't matter. The game's algorithm not only doesn't necessarily know what we as viewers think makes a good match but it also varies between in-game venues. Which mainly becomes relevant when you consider I'm lazy and run the Jabroni matches in technically a different venue. Then there's the Wrestler and Charisma ranks a wrestler has that also affects that (and I really don't care about changing those around to make sense) then there's also certain moves affect match rating differently and... yeah. Match time also plays a factor which is probably why the ratings have gone higher on average.
What I probably find the most interesting is less the exact ratings and match durations but the count of matches within certain ranges further down. That's where you can really see how it shifted. We had three really long singles matches, approaching an hour in short succession. Hell, two of them have been on the same show. But that's just freakish RNG happening sometimes.
Right, so let's see who our top singles people were. While I do use an ELO rating here (most commonly used to rate the skill level of chess players, players gain and lose points based on each other's respective ratings) I don't actually use it for booking. It's just one of these numbers I like to look at on occasion. Particularly, I like to see how it develops over time. Which is what we can see above. A thing to keep in mind is that even though I list specific timeframes my formula can't calculate a rating specific to that timeframe but only the end-date. The Final column, for the entire year would only deviate from that of the final quarter if we didn't book one of the people in the top four at all in the final quarter.
Our best in terms of ELO rating still have a tendency to hold the Hellweight Title. So if anyone has had the title at any point in the specified episode ranges I've made their name yellow. This is only partially due to the fact that I make sure that you always have to earn your Hellweight shot due to singles performance. Whether it's an explicit No. 1 Contender match or more general performance it's reflected in the ELO rating as that only works for singles matches. At least with my setup. It technically would be viable for any zero sum game.
If you look at the Elite Four for each quartal over the two years you can see quite a shift.
Now, this uses a simpler formula. It's not nearly as accurate but it has two distinct advantages. First: It works for all match types, not just singles. And second the ratings listed above are actually calculated for that specific timeframe rather than just until the end date. I forgot how to calculate it, but basically it adds points for wins and subtracts them for losses. For team or battle royal situations taking the fall would grant/remove more points. But again, this is just a number I keep around for my own amusement. I only very rarely consult either this or the ELO rating for booking. If I do it means either we messed up somewhere or something unforeseen happend. But even then in terms of booking it's better to go with your gut than cold hard numbers (though again, it's not about the numbers but how you read them, they CAN absolutely help)
Well, enough boring preamble about this stat. We can see already that there's some noteworthy deviations. The first thing that strikes me as interesting compared to the first year is that this time more of our champs are actually in there. In fact, it lists some of the champs that didn't make it according to the ELO rating. But also, you can see people who had a hot run at the time. For example, Kayu had a strong run (and I hope she can have another) that was pretty isolated to 2-3 months. As a result of initial poor performance and being more or less in the "mid card" (we use that term loosely here, she put on some bangers that rival main events and was involved in a story that evolved mostly emergently and was really cool, I thought) she never really ranked very high in terms of ELO.
You could read some more from that if you wanted to. It's the kind of stuff I find interesting. But I'm kind of a raw data nerd. One of the most exciting parts of OHPW is checking out the big ol spreadsheet after a month or two of entering matches and stuff.
Here's some miscellaneous numbers regarding to various things for all our matches. They are overall pretty self explanatory. Cool trivia, basically. There's an asterisk next to Cumulative Time because that calculation assumes someone was in a match start to finish even if that was an elimination match and they got eliminated early.
Of course, we have an recurring theme here of people having less matches overall. Which is of course due to us having more wrestlers to book now.
Match rating is the same as always, doesn't really matter but I still like to see who's got the highest ones. Match duration is one that matters a bit more. A long match is not necessarily a good match. but it's true that overall our matches have gotten longer. The only reason Midas 39:04 from last year is higher than this year's longest average is because he was in the two longest matches we had last year, which were that long due to a bug. Finally, I thought our shortest average matches would be a bit shorter. But then again, we do include non-singles matches here and they skew that a bit upwards.
Same as above but only singles matches. Despite the asterisk after Cumulative Time this is actually accurate, as it's only singles matches. I simply forgot to remove the Asterisk.
ASS basically only matches Black's most matches record from last year because she was the Jabroni for so long. Then again, Plumeria was right up there with her. However, she was mostly booked in tag matches and battle royals prior to her Jabroni run. For our longest average matches, I guess, it's worth mentioning that Nero and Mina, who are both on top are there mostly because they had one really long match each that skewed their average match duration upward. Hell, Mina's been in the longest singles match of the year and isn't even booked much in singles matches. So it's pretty impressive she's not higher.
Our next set is a bit random. There's quite a few different stat s all mashed together. On the left you see last year's stats for that section as is, on the right you see this years. The most noteworthy differences is that I showed stats for all the titles instead of sorting them by longest or most defenses and that I elected not to show wins against VACANT. In our first year the VACANT Open Challenge was an institution which I put on hiatus in the second year at around the same time as I phased out the Bunny Title.
The meaning of both getting rid of the Bunny Title and making the VACANT Open Challenge an irregular thing was to give us more freedom when booking. Both these things happened on every episode and were often in the same spot on the card every time. This resulted in a good chunk of our singles matches being built around the Bunny Title which got more and more valuable as time went on and the stakes got higher and higher. So I chose to replace it with an unsanctioned title that could just be on the line whenever the champ happens to be booked. Thankfully, in our lore, there was already such a thing. And since the flow of time was convoluted anyway we could just establish the beginning of the Pokeymanz Title. A dark title that holds some unspecified curse. Anyway, now that I discussed the column that is empty this year in a lengthy paragraph let's just get to the actual numbers, shall we?
Best Bout Machines here means they were nominated for the most highlights. Highlights are mostly nominated by me. So basically these are the wrestlers I'm a mark for. This year you can see that there's a very large number of people sharing the third and second place. But what's clear is that Grace had a very high amount of Highlights to her name, most of them from her Title reign or directly leading up to it.
As for the Title defenses and longest reigns there's not much to say except that last year I actually ranked them while this year I'm just showing the highest value for each title. You can still see that the most defenses in a single reign was the Bunny Title, shared by Black and VACANT with seven defenses each. While the longest reign period was Harmony's Hellweight Reign (which has crossover with last year's) at 146 Days. Then there's also the Grunt's Tag Title reign at 140 Days. Which also came over from last year and includes the week or two I took off. But that just how it be.
Finally, the Workhorses are the people we booked the most per episode since the start of the year or their debut (whichever is later). You can see that even the most booked character this year, Isabel Ibarra, at 0.5 times per episode (which, of course, means every second episode on average.) You'll notice that the values for that column are overall lower than last year. That's mainly because we're juggling a larger Roster now, trying to squeeze more people in the same amount of time. Together with the aforementioned decrease in Tag and Battle Royals this means that people get booked less on average. However, when they get booked it means more as they'll more often get a singles match than previously.
I'm gonna also make a wild guess and say that aside from his debut you'll probably remember Pig Destroyer's individual Matches less than the runner up, Danny V5, because of how I booked them both. While Pig Destroyer was booked more he also lost more. But even if he didn't there's a chance that I would have "pushed" Danny over Pig Destroyer. A Push here meaning more giving them big opportunities than actually booking them to win, of which Danny got several, whether they were title matches or matches with a narrative that benefited him. The reason for this is mainly that Pig Destroyer is one of my own OCs and while I'm absolutely not averse to booking them strong or prominently (see Black and VACANT, but the latter shouldn't count to be honest) I still want to avoid having my own people be on top. So I kinda judge them more harshly. Although, I doubt people would mind as long as it's good and makes sense.
There's something I have to explain about last year's two longest matches. And that's that they were the victim of a modpack bug that prevented pinfalls from actually eliminating people from a Battle Royal. That's why these matches happened so close together to each other. It becomes even more clear how obscenely long they were if you compare them with our longest from this year. Both rumbles, matches that are expected to take long.
Meanwhile, I think it's remarkable that the other two longest matches of 2020 are both singles matches. Mina vs. Black, the longer of the two, drove me mad. I felt that it kind of got repetitive after a while. Now, truth be told that's true for every singles match that goes this long, it's a matter of how you package it. I was simply not prepared to weave a good narrative for that one. Going by our stats both Black and Mina have had shorter than average matches at the time. As for the other match, Pantha vs. Harmony, that's straight up a MOTY contender. I got very excited during it. Of course, it technically suffers from the same Problems as Mina vs. Black but this was a Main Event between two highly regarded wrestlers which made it way easier to get into it. In any case, Mina vs. Black, Nero vs. Suzan and Pantha vs. Harmony along with episodes in general getting longer is what got me thinking of how to make episodes shorter, which I explained earlier.
Well, last year we sure had some more exaggerated squashes mostly featuring Black (who I rebalanced considerably as a result) as well as one weird freak match that ended super fast. As far as I recall I set it to short in the booking mod. But all that does is lower health, spirit and stamina to about a third. It shouldn't normally finish a match that fast. but RNG does weird things sometimes.
Well, this year you can see that there's essentially no repeat offenders. Apollo vs. Suzan ended so quick due to a critical. Skullistair vs. The Husks was a Handicap match so it was clear it wouldn't go long (I was still rooting for Skullistair, and I'm sure they will one day get their revenge.) then we got Suman vs. Dash, another match where a quick finish was expected and finally, Steve Dirt and VACANT went at it in a VACANT Open Challenge. Remember that lasting over ten minutes is a bit of an achievement here. I guess the main reason there aren't any shorter matches this year is because we didn't have any weird freak occurrences or me accidentally making a character too strong.
There's honestly not much to say here. Just stats for episodes. It just goes to confirm that the average match length has risen even more. Even the episode with the fourth longest average match duration has the exact same average duration as last year's first place. On the other hand, our episode with the shortest average match duration falls a few seconds short of last year's fourth place.
And then the deal with match ratings as always is that they don't really matter. But the main reason they are higher is because of the longer matches. As four our Most matches / EP stat, I guess all that I can say is that a regular weekly episode has 7 matches, ordinarily, with PPVs having 9. With some episodes having more (but never less than 7, so far.)
Now for something a little different. You might remember this from last year:
We finished with "Anus at record low" but if you continued following Angus this year he actually managed to recover. Let's have a look at that right now...
First let me point out the different layout. I thought it would be neat to be able to compare is overall run and thiy year more easily. In the column labeled "From EP 49" we can see his performance for this year only (because, y'know, Episode 49 was the first of this year) while right next to it in "From EP 1" you can see his overall performance. The first line contains is Win/Loss/Draw record wit the second featuring his Win Percentage. Essentially, every time this year's Win Percentage is lower than is overall one, that means he's done more poorly than on average in that timeframe. If it's higher though, that means he's doing better. This way you can see just about when Angus started rising again (part of that might be muddied due to him not being booked much early on in the year but math is math.) Which would be between EP 68 and 72. And shortly after that he got back the Tru Bru which coincides with him starting to do even better. Truth be told, since he has two versions of the move (one from the front and a ripcord version from the back) he now has one more match-ender which made him slightly more powerful overall.
It's been pointed out that Angus' Story mirrors that of Grace, which is why he was the perfect one to beat her for the title. And while I'd argue Grace never really fell do the depths of Angus, I never really looked at the numbers... let's do just that.
Okay, first of all, I was wrong. Grace, mathematically speaking, has done way worse than Angus. It's just instead of whining about it she took it with some dignity. Maybe she knew her time would come. By now we all know that 2020 was essentially the year of Grace. She held our highest title for a long part of the year but how she even attained that honor was a crazy burst. The best part is, I didn't actually change anything about Grace. Like, nothing. Until she started doing better then I added a bunch of moves but those most likely didn't make a difference. I guess the most interesting part is that one of her most devastating moves would not be The Saving Grace (a reverse implant DDT) but a Modified Single Leg Boston Crab (aka "That Move Grace Keeps Winning With", we call it that because she keeps winning with it). It's a move previously better known as Cocademon's Finisher, the Carbonated Footprint. Grace is the only Hellweight Champion who's had non-title matches in addition to her scheduled title defenses. I understand that it's unconventional to not book the champ for appearances outside of their defenses but I prefer to do it that way myself. This is partially due to the fact that without booking winners and losers it can be hard to work with.
Anyway, yeah, 2020 was the year of Grace. From an overall 27.27 Win Percentage to an overall 53.49 %. But a much more impressive 80.95 % for the year.
Finally, to close this off, let's talk the young devils for a short bit. Because a thing that I never mentioned about them is that I gave them transitional attires to kind of make me think and visualize what they did on excursion. I showed them for Tara due to her time travel gimmick but we won't see the other attires on screen. So let's look at them all.
The first attire of course, is always the Young Devil one.
Sexton's first excursion attire has im just wearing street clothes. I wanted the implication of that to be that he had some trouble finding an identity at first and was a bit awkward. Canonically, while using that he was in LPFWA, which in then left transitioned to is second excursion attire and kind of went through a devolution. Going to the backyards and garbage feds. Then he came back as we know him now, with actual gear. With how I wrote him so far the idea is that he's basically the same relatively humble dude but much more comfortable with himself.
For Tara the idea was that she is a huge Kushida fan but she didn't know Back to the Future existed until someone mentioned that to her. She started dressing up as Marty McFly as her first excursion attire. Freddie mentioned in a brief scene a while back that she went to Japan. She didn't simply leave from there, though. She traveled through time and into a world where she got robot arms for whatever reason. Finally, she comes back. She now says fuck more often and her finisher is called "Fuck Time and Fuck You Too"
Finally we got Hank (formerly) His first excursion attire was him in LPFWA where he tried to emulate his favorite wrestler Freddie hope. And this makes Sexton the only one who didn't try to be like someone else, initially. Anyway, Hank soon left LPFWA, maybe even before Sexton and wasn't heard from again until his OHPW re-emergence. Of course, if you look at his second excursion attire there's a very strong possibility that that was because he was hiding his identity by wearing under a mask. It also bears mentioning that where the two other Young Devils picked up moves and mannerisms from people they faced before their departure Hank (or Not Your God, as they are called now) cast all that away. And the parts where he didn't are deliberate because they suit his new style. Though we haven't seen him wrestle yet.
Well, and here we are. That was our second year of this stupid thing that I do for fun and now I wrote close the 22.000 characters for in this write-up alone. I hope your remaining 2020 will be good. Whether you're one of those christmas-y or holiday-ish people or actually cool, do what you enjoy. I'm not a pro but I have it on good authority that as far as years go 2020 was pretty bad so 2021 will probably better. We'll be back with more OHPW in 2021. Seeya then.
