Seth Rollins says we don’t know what we want again

What do you call Ambrose trying for weeks to pitch ideas for his match with Brock at WM32 only to be turned down at every turn by Brock, Hunter, and Vince? Ambrose, like so many other performers, became complacent only after years of their ideas being shot down and being forced to follow a script written by people with the mental capacity of a 10 year old.

Austin wouldn’t be able to come out in 2020 and cut an “Austin 3:16” promo today and you seem to ignore this fact. Performers in the WWE today are forced into a creative box where they either go with Vince’s program or they’re jobbed out and taken off TV for daring to get over.

Punk left due to years of being forced to play second fiddle to the machines hand picked stars. Ambrose for the same reasons. Guys like Rusev, Ryder, Neville, and Cody left because Vince got upset that they dared to try and get over on their own and pushed them down the card for it. And these are only a few examples.

Fans want coherent stories and interesting characters. They don’t want to watch a show where the script was written literally 5 minutes before the show started. They don’t want a “chosen one” forced down their throats. Let the fans pick their heros like they once did with Austin and Rock. It’s not that hard to see why the WWE is loosing fans in droves, but sure, keep blaming the paying customers for aparently not accepting this crap being spoon fed to them.

Vince calls them contractors yet treats them as employees. If they are truely contractors they should have input on their characters and performances. Guys in the 80s and 90s did. They sadly don’t today. Performers become complacent because there is no givewith the WWE.

See you claiming Dean was half assing it is totally opinionated. The guy worked more matches than any WWE performer from 2014-2017. Is it his fault he couldn’t pull a halfway decent match out of Dolph friggin Ziggler at SummerSlam when he was the WWE Champ and should have been paired with Cena or AJ? Shinsuke, Bobby Roode, and Rollins couldn’t pull a friggin decent match out of him either.

And I blame the WWE for pushing this “indy style” that is so prevalent today. It’s all the do in NXT. One watch of the Ambrose/HHH Roadblock match will show he was one of the few guys today that still try to tell a story in the ring (something Mr. Rollins sorely lacks yet again would rather attack fans than look at the company and himself).

Its not him taking a ping pong ball out of Reys eye socket.

I can tell you that much.

To be fair wrestling fans are ing stupid. My nana didn't complain about the writing while watching the young and the restless. Wrestling promotions need to stop letting fan opinion halt their plans to an extent. 

But why wouldn’t he? Those are his friends, his family even at this point. Vince put him on top, put Becky on top, made him a millionaire, and he continues to work for the most financially successful wrestling company in the world. He’s not going to take the fan side. Even if he thinks something is bad, he sat under the Triple H and John Cena learning tree. He’s going to put the company who employs him over our petty opinions, primarily because he has no control over said opinions.

There is no perfect execution. Someone will hate him for the exact reasons someone else loves him. It’s useless trying to appease people that will never all be happy. All he can do is be himself, for better or worse. How that affects each person as a fan is on them. As long as he continues to entertain me on tv, I couldn’t care any less what he says on Twitter, sans being outright racist or crossing that kind of line.

The thing is that “increase the quality of the product” is a very simple phrase to throw out, as though there’s a definitive answer to it. But if you take a hundred normal fans, a hundred lapsed fans, a hundred non-fans and a hundred “Cesaro should be world champion, Cena sux” fans, you’re going to get literally thousands upon thousands of suggestions to increase the quality of the product, and they’re going to contradict each other even within each group, let alone across the board.

On this forum alone, we have people contradicting themselves about whether they want long-term planning or whimsical week to week total rewrites — and that’s just a microcosm of the discourse across forums, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and so on. So there is no way there’s ever going to be a consensus on what that increased quality actually consists of. Longer matches, shorter matches, more promos, less promos, make new stars, don’t push anybody strongly, don’t bury anybody, no 50/50 booking, more titles, less titles, stronger brand split, end the brand split, higher production value, lower production value, more sleaze, less sleaze, more guys who look like they could win a fight, more guys who do flips, babyfaces should act more like babyfaces, babyfaces should act less like babyfaces, etc etc.

The formula, in theory, is “What we want” = “increased quality of the product.” But there is no singular “we” in the first part of the formula, and the second part is so vague and broad that Rollins is correct by default. “We” don’t know what “we” want because there is no universal “we” with a fixed want list.

My job and my background is in taking feedback (complaints/suggestions) and research and using that to make actual operational changes to improve the quality of a service or product. The idea of doing that on the scale of general WWE TV quality is fascinating to me, because even the scoping of such a project is almost unfathomable, let alone the execution of it. But one of the most useless/counterproductive contributing factors to improvement is persistent/ vexatious/ serial complainers, for several reasons. They actually impede productive outcomes, and most big companies have a policy in place to deal with these kinds of customers.

Rollins himself and how he deals with it is an interesting case because his relationship with serial WWE complainers is unique amongst top guys. For around a decade, he was championed by the complainers. Cena, Reigns and Batista only ever experienced that championing briefly, if at all. They were never the second part in the “stop pushing [top guy], push [indie workrate guy] instead” trope. But Seth was that guy - he had that fervent support for so long, and that same group turned on him when he got to the top. He was the first one to have been in both parts of the equation.

“You either die buried or you live long enough to be shoved down their throats.” - Wayne Gretzky

what is good art, what isn't, and what's down to subjectivity? that's really the question here

there's never been a 'perfect' product - no wrestling product that had every type of fan satisfied, and I think you're right that the gargantuan level of wwe makes the task of such a product ominous to say the least.

these issues go far beyond what just fans are wanting. wrestlers new and old are quick to gripe with the lack of organic development within wwe and the forced promos and rigid scripts.

corporate wrestling is really where we run into those problems. if I have a young group of basketball players and need to find them a coach, I'm going to find a good former basketball player - not a dude who wrote for MTV. and that's really where the problems began.

this has been echoed time and time again by ex bookers, ex wwe wrestlers, and others that were within the business.

nxt is ran like a pro wrestling company. AEW, NWA, MLW. pro wrestling companies. raw and smackdown are something very bizarre and have been for a very long time.

we need people who were in the pro wrestling business to run pro wrestling. not writers that come up with bs ideas that lead nowhere. it's all been done, just modernize it and do it right again. NXT shows it's more than possible, and I imagine the NXT product will be essentially what raw is within 5 years or a few more years at most.

with Rollins, I feel that it was a case of hoping that if 'their guy' wins, it would fix the wwe product from the top down. wishful thinking. I used to dislike Cena for similar reasons, but now I realize he was the reflection of the company's trajectory and not the trajectory itself.

Daniel Bryan's support also slowed down A LOT as soon as he started defending WWE, Reigns, etc.

if we use these creative minds, we need to filter them. the classic russo narrative is he had 100 ideas and 10 of them would be good, which mcmahon would pick out. in terms of wrestling's history, there have been companies more successful in some ways than wwe and some less. traditionally you had people who understood pro wrestling booking pro wrestling. so we didn't lose basic fundamentals like letting guys talk and express themselves, protecting their characters, and knowing how to gauge the fans to deliver an exciting product. the truth lies between what the fans are wanting and what those who were in the business say it is currently lacking.

even the wwwf was known for having goofier and less quality wrestling in the heyday, so i'm not expecting them to get rid of their near Memphis or Tennessee level of sports entertainment approach. but we all took too many doses of Cena through the 2000s/2010s and it's left us numb to an indifferent product. we need some creative zest introduced. personally, i've found drew mcyntire exactly what i've been looking for in this way and with his feuds, so it's not all complaints. keith lee is great too. the talent is great, we just need better creative.