Does the IWC have a voice?

[Mr. Artistic guy]

Now I would not have dreamed about making this thread until I read what I did tonight. Now firstly I think it is worth mentionning that 60% or the WWE audience is teenager and above and male, secondly we all know the vast majority of the IWC fits into that bracket as well. So the internet using male adult fans are a very sizeable portion of the WWE audience even now in PG-territory.

The second point I would like to make is that the IWC consists of a great number of experienced knowledgable fans. Never before have the community been more listened to as well, think of twitter responses and Q + A online sessions as well. What I'm trying to say is that the proffessionals are taking far more note of us than they would have say even five years ago due to increased exposure and availability to interact between the two sides, wrestler and on-line fan.

OK, now my final and most important point is that there are very very very few things that the IWC, is pretty much unanimously in agreement upon. Hulk Hogan's lack of knowledge and experience on how to run a wrestling company or that the Miz is a big future superstar, but one of those things is re-introducing a King-of-the-ring style event into the WWE.

Now like I said I wouldn't have dreamed of threading this until this very thing happened, there is a news report of WWE planning to do this exact thing.

So combining these, you have a large portion of your biggest viewing group all saying the same thing, if somebody in the WWE were to scan any forum and happened to see that, then that unanimous answer would be what they would notice. And only if they found a post where the answer was indeed unanimous would they ever consider acting upon what they saw.

My mind may be delving far too deeply into this but is it a blind coincidence, or does the IWC actually have a weak voice on future proceedings?

I know what your gonna say.."BULLS**T, YOUR AN IDIOT".. I'm gonna get hammered, but it really does seem oddly coincidental seen as so many people have been mentionning it lately everywhere.

 

[The 1-2-3 Killam]

This year WWE did start sending out emails to its fans asking if they prefer certain things over others. It seemed like a big step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. I don't know how much actual power the IWC has. With almost every WWE and TNA star now having a Twitter account, the possibilities are definitely getting greater that they're listening to the fans. There's also the WWE Universe online section at WWE.com where people talk all the time. You have people on both extremes like Matt Hardy who lives for internet drama, and John Cena whose every 'tweet' is a direct plug from the WWE higher-ups. It's an interesting age the wrestling world lives in. Again, I really have no idea if the IWC is getting more notice by the WWE, but there's a better chance now than there was before.

 

[dashing]

I'm sure if the internet didn't exist Daniel Bryan wouldn't of been hired again by the WWE. Sure of it. The actual shock and anger across the IWC after he was fired was insane, I'm sure if there wasn't as much of an uproar you wouldn't have seen him in WWE right now.

The Miz however is different, I think that really is more of a case of meritocracy there, love him or hate him he's been a fricken work horse for WWE over the last 18 months doing all sorts of tv spots promoting WWE and really stepping up as a heel.
John Cena has seemingly been hated for years across not all, but a majority of the IWC so the fact he may possibly turn heel now isn't down to the IWC, if it was this would have happened at least a year ago.

One thing I will say though is that the information with injuries (recent examples being HHH and indeed the Undertaker) may purposely be leaked differently to throw the IWC off the scent of when they will return. I am sure the Undertaker will be back by Mania, the Buried Alive match with Kane (which gives him space to take time off) was probably booked months ago, as early as the time of Nexus joining even... I'm sure now they try to keep quiet on wrestlers making a return because it just loses that element of surprise. One recent example was the return of Edge, who according to reports would be lucky to make Wrestlemania...yet he returned at the Royal Rumble...
Anyway I'm all for this happening as it still keeps me excited as a wrestling fan.

Oh so yes, I do think the IWC has a voice, and in the next few years even more so I think as you'll be getting fans who were posting on messageboards/blogging in their teens and through college maybe getting jobs as bookers later on in their careers. You think these guys will just suddenly stop browsing these sites once they get the big jobs? Hell no, if I were a writer it would give me great inspiration and really force me to be critical of what I do. If I were a booker I would be really be trying to find a balance between obviously entertaining the masses yet freaking out the IWC with curveballs and twists in storylines too.

 

[Navi]

@Alex'eddytiger'Waters

If the WWE management ever read some of the threads on any wrestling forum their heads would spin. Almost every thread has about the same difference of opinion's as the amount of posters that post there.

Now I'm sure they keep track of what the fan base says. But let's face it, the WWE is a corporation that's in it to make a profit and if they tried all of what they read on a wrestling site, belt's would be changing hands every second night, and wrestler's who clearly don't deserve it would be getting pushed to the moon.

It would be interesting though to see if any of the members here have a WWE corporate e-mail address. I know of other sites that do so I'm sure it's the same here. Also some of the wrestling columnists register on these sites just to see what the fans are saying. I know that Powerslam's Stately Wayne Manor belongs to one so I'm sure it's possible.

I do agree that the outcry over Bryan Daniel helped him get back into the WWE but that's one in a million shot. Don't know of anything else that has changed the WWE's policy on a storyline or push. Most of what I read here are threads that have been created after the WWE makes a decision.

 

[Dragon]

They do, but it's nowhere even remotely close to as loud and significant as they think it is. It's very small.

I 100% agree.....sometimes I sit back and laugh at how much some of these posters THINK they know about the state of pro wrestling today........they have a voice just like any other fan base but it is small.....everyone is entitled to their opinion just don't start preaching it as gospel........Vince and Dixie probably take into account all aspects of the business but at the end of the day it is about $ as it should be........this is their livlihood and business. The IWC should understand that before going all bat shit crazy on the forums if Daniel Bryan loses a match or if Hogan decides to wrestle one.

Maybe the rest of the fanbase ($) doesn't want to see the same things u do.

 

[healyz84]

You're delving way too deep into this. The IWC, while having somewhat of a voice, is at the same time a thorn in the side of the wwe in general. We are a bunch of smarcks, who's quest for knowledge and insightful guessing off wwe finishes and storylines have sucked out a lot of the surprise in the wwe (the other 50% of the sucking out of the surprise is due to the writers rehashing old ideas, but I degress).

Anyway, the wwe, while keeping a watchful eye on the iwc, does not necessarily take them into account as idea makers. For instance, you bring up the point about the king of the ring. I really hope that you didn't make a post recently about hoping to see this rehashed, it now happening, and now your going to take credit. Dude, this topic has been brought up year after year on this forum. In fact, 2 and a half years ago I brought up a topic similar to this, and got a lot of positive feedback, but the wwe did nothing about it. So here is what i am saying then. If the wwe truly did listen, this king of the ring would not be on raw but on a ppv. Also, it would not be the king of the ring, as this idea is old, but a new format of a tournament to peak interest.

In closing, its not so much that the wwe listens. It is the fact that the wwe realizes that raw ratings are dropping, so they need things to hang to in the hopes of boosting ratings. For instance, 3 hour raws typically boost ratings because there is always that feeling of uncertainty about the show. Second, tournaments are big sellers for the wwe, but do too many of them, and they lose their cliche. Hence why the king of the ring, while before a big time event, suddenly became and after thought in the 2000s. Suffice to say, this tournament in its current form returns every 2-3 years on television so to peak others interests.

This is all the wwe is doing, don't look any further then this.

 

[Calderownz]

Sure, to a certain extent. Daniel Bryan is a good example of that. Also, WWE often times tries to swerve the IWC due to the fact that it enjoys playing the asshole card. So, in some ways, it certainly does.

However, I'd never let the Internet world write my programming. They have no clear vision and there are way too many voices. It's best to just hope that in the long run, you're giving the majority of fans what they want. Entertaining television.

 

[Rayne]

I can give it to you on pretty good authority that the writing staff views the IWC as a joke for their own amusement. The only thing the WWE really worries about is storyline leaks. Beyond that, it's mostly humor about a group of people who claim to know so much about the industry from watching it for so long, but get taken by the same tactics, time and time again.

The IWC tends to vastly overestimate their importance to wrestling companies, as do fans in general. There's a reason wrestling fans are called "marks"; it's an old con artist/carnival term for "sucker".

 

[Mr. Artistic guy]

Precisely once again why I would have said exactly the same thing as many of you have done here becuase the amount of conflicts and differentiating opinions you could find in a single thread would put israel and palestine to shame.

It was merely the fact that it is the concensus of everybody that this was a good idea. so smebody somewhere may have got through to someone with a bit of pull and it could have snowballed within management.

I'm not for a second suggesting that WWE creative and bookers spend their days scanning through wrestling posts, I'm only saying when something is so clear as crystal that it unites the IWC in one voice, this is likely to be noticed. And as for daniel bryan, I'm pretty sure that john cena was very unhappy with the way that daniel bryan was fired and that guy has got more pull than a homeless person on your duvet, I think that the IWC was a smaller part of that than people suspect. Although it is possible that WWE noticed the "cult following" he had even within their own audience, there was always a good number of people cheering for him because they knew who he was, but still IWC to daniel bryan, only a small part of the reason I believe.

 

[Jack-Hammer]

Does the IWC have a voice when it comes to the WWE? Not really because the IWC is about as fractured as a group as anything can be. The IWC consists of fans that will defend the WWE or TNA no matter what, it has fans that continually rag on either company no matter what they do, you have some that really don't have the first clue about wrestling, you have some that are quite knowledgable and intelligent, you have some that claim to be "real wrestling fans" and dog anything that doesn't fit into their mold, you have some that believe wrestling can only be entertaining when guys are flipping around all over the place, some endorse this guy, some endorse that guy and so on and so forth.

If the IWC was actually one cohesive collection of fans, it might be a different story. As it is, for the most part, we're just fans griping on what we like and what we don't. Some ideas you'll hear sound quite good, at least on the surface, but that's no guarantee that 5 million other people are going to think the same thing.