The Let's Play Archive

WWE 2K18

by IGgy IGsen, The LPFWA Universe

Part 9: Some stats and figures from the first two months of this run.

I'm sorry but due to having watched actual fake wrestling I will not be able to finish the video game fake wrestling show LPFWA this week without sacrificing basically all the free time I have. Instead it'll happen next week. And I just don't wanna stress myself out over something that's supposed to be fun.

I realize I don't owe anyone an apology but there's a lot of stuff that goes into making an episode. There's booking the matches and scenes, writing the scenes, creating some assets that are still needed, recording matches and scenes, editing it all together, picking music for the matches, drinking a cup of coffee while it all encodes, ponder the nightmare that is audio every time and not being happy with it every time. There's a lot of work that is one-time only as such the first episode took me about 100 hours to make (The last LP I did before this LPFWA probably didn't clock in at that much for all episodes combined), while later ones are somewhere between 7 and 15 hours of work every week.

But since there won't be a show this week let's actually give you some numbers just for fun. A lot of these numbers you can find in the spreadsheet linked in the op. I have a different more involved version of that sheet myself. The reason I'm not sharing a lot of the data on it in the version you get is because I don't want people to obsess over stuff like win/loss ratios for their characters, how many scenes they are in or why they haven't been in many matches yet. But overall it's not much of a secret and you could figure out a lot of the numbers just using the spreadsheet provided.

Matches:
So far we've had 63 matches across eight shows. This includes Backstage Brawls, which aren't usually on the card and LPFWA vs. The Universe which isn't technically canon. Out of those 46 ended by pinfall
52 of those have been Singles matches, that's 83% of all matches.
While it'd be cool to have more tag matches (we only had 7 tag team matches so far) we don't quite have the roster for that because, as silly as LPFWA can be, we can't simply pair everybody up for no reason whatsoever but I'm trying to think of excuses to do so if only for a limited time. (There's several ideas for tournaments, tag and singles that I'd like to follow through on at some point).
Another problem with tag matches is that they last much longer than a singles match, but that's besides the point.

Scenes:
We've had 26 scenes so far. That's 3.25 Scenes per episodeo on average. The most we had in one episode is 4, the fewest 2. I didn't actually record numbers for this kind of stuff for the previous LPFWAs, but due to the scenes (despite additional steps in the process) being easier to make now we have more scenes per show. Despite being restricted to a 2D plane and not really having much (or anything) in terms of animation right now there's more freedom in the creation of scenes than previosly.

WWE 2k14's story creator had a character limit of about 160 characters per text box and only a maximum of 12 text boxes per scene. We were also restricted to a few canned situations, some of which, admittedly, were pretty great. But since a lot of scenes just involved a number of people talking it was always a chore to find an animation with at least as many people as you want to include (you could remove participants) that also had the fitting demeanor. There were a lot of scenes with pointing and yelling but few with people talking normally, and then they might not talk to each other but into a camera or whatever and it made things hard. With Renpy we have a more reasonable restriction in characters per text box, we can use as many text boxes as we like, and if I want more people to take part in the conversation I just insert their sprite into the scene, if their sprite doesn't suit the tone I can just use a different one (WWE 2k18 let's you give people a variety of poses for preview in character creation, these poses are used for the in-game match-up screens normally but I use them for the story bits)

The tl;dr, of course, is: Despite it being technically more work, creating the scenes with Renpy is much smoother than using the story creator.

Wrestlers:
The total number of Wrestlers submitted is 50 (34m, 16f). I Already made 35 (24m, 11f) so far.
The number of total submissions is a bit inflated, though, because some people submitted multiple characters (The most one person submitted is 4) and I'll only start working on those once all the first-timers are finished and I'm not quite there yet. I've only rejected one character so far and that's because someone submitted 2006 SALP meme DONGS as a character and it was supposed to resemble a penis so I went "Nope."

A wrestler takes about 1-2 hours to make in-game, and for the scenes and match-up screens I also need to screencap them in a variety of poses and cut them out in an image editor which takes some extra time depending on how many poses we're talking.
This is after me already taking some shortcuts, such as using preset movesets and altering some key moves (finishers and taunts first and foremost, I then add some other normal moves I want them to have, change their skills a bit etc.)

The strongest wrestler right now (based on victories, weighing decisive ones higher, meaning everything but DQ and count-out) is Palpatine. That bastard.
He's been in 6 matches and won 5 of them. 4 of those were singles matches, of which he won 3. Although this does not consider the fact that he's usually accompanied by Kylo and Face. It also doesn't consider that a tree has a similar win percentage (80% vs Palpy's 83.33%) but won all 4 of his singles matches.

In the women's division Hell-Ena Valerie Easton, Tolvie and Samus are more or less tied with win %s between 70 and 75 %. This isn't that big of a difference due to the number of matches still being in the single digits for everyone. Although Hell-Ena has the most matches in the Women's division (and in fact the most matches period) with 7. While she did lose twice she lost twice ot the same person.

Championships:
Some might say we have too many titles but I think they are all different enough.
The LPFWA title is only defended at PPVs and as such only had two defenses so far. But apparently I picked the right guy to hold it randomly because both defenses were successful.

Most of the other titles are defended once between PPVs as well as on PPVs, meaning they have more defenses. This techincally means they are more prestigious than our Major LPFWA Title, but let's just pretend the LPFWA Championship has had a long and storied history and is not just a plastic merch version of the original LPFWA title which was stolen.

Anyway, due to the nature of the Bunny Championship :3 (it being defended at every show) it has the most defenses, surprising no one. The longest reigning champion is Palpatine with 28 Days so far. At this point the belt has always gone on as the third match of the card, but this isn't so much a deliberate decision as it's me being lazy. At this point the belt is probably worth more and should be higher up the card, by conventional booking logic.

Our longest title reign so far lasted 49 days when the oRa 66 held the Co-Commentary Titles, although they "only" defended it successfully twice in that time. Once due to a double count-out.

The shortest title reign was Tolvie, who lost the Pokeymanz title about five minutes after she won it.

There's also a title that has never been competed for, the LPFWA Women's Championship. The reason for that is that I plan on introducing it as soon as we have 16 active wrestlers in the women's division and we can have us a little tournament to crown the first ever LPFWA Women's Champion. Whether it will be treated more as a trophy or a Championship like the LPFWA Title is something I haven't decided yet.

Whew, that was a lot of stuff. But I hope one or two people cared.