RavishingRickRudo

Thursday, June 23, 2005 TOKYO, Japan – The bout order has been announced for PRIDE FIGHTING’S next event, CRITICAL COUNTDOWN 2005. FIGHTCARD: (Shown in order from first to last) Sergei Kharitonov (Russia) vs. Pedro Rizzo (Brazil) Mauricio “Shogun” Rua (Brazil) vs. Antonio Rogerio Nogueira (Brazil) * Igor Vovchanchyn (Ukraine) vs. Alistair Overeem (Holland) * Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic (Croatia) vs. Ibragim Magomedov (Russia) Makoto Takimoto (Japan) vs. Kiyoshi Tamura (Japan) Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (Brazil) vs. Pawel Nastula (Poland) Kazushi Sakuraba (Japan) vs. Ricardo Arona (Brazil) * Wanderlei Silva (Brazil) vs. Kazuhiro Nakamura (Japan) * * Tournament Match (Participants and Matches Subject to Change) PRIDE FIGHTING’S 2005 Middleweight Grand Prix Tournament spans three events … TOTAL ELIMINATION (opening round), CRITICAL COUNTDOWN (Second Round) and FINAL CONFLICT (Semi-Finals and Finals). The date for FINAL CONFLICT will be announced soon. CRITICAL COUNTDOWN 2005 premieres on North American pay per view via iNDEMAND, DIRECTV, DISH NETWORK, UrbanXtra, TVN1, VU!, and Viewer’s Choice Canada on July 1st at 10:00pm EST, 7:00pm PST (including a countdown show at 9:30pm EST, 6:30pm PST). For additional replay times, please contact your pay per view provider.

I, clearly, escaped my kidnappers. The WWE can't be doing too bad since Vince keeps on keepin on with the dividends that puts six figures in his bank account atop his multi-level salary.

By "Golden" you mean, like, "Golden Showers" right?

$5-10 bucks a month, or $45-100 a year (25 bucks a quarter), paid membership to an official WWE messageboard. The key selling feature would be actual WWE wrestler participation on-line - doing QnA, responding to posts, making their own posts, etc. Other features include a fantasy booking section where you can get feedback from the WWE writing staff and maybe even have your angles used on-air (since it's a private website, the WWE owns all the content provided and can have legal agreements that say so); have a "post of the week" show up on RAW, Smackdown, or the B-shows; web-content (matches, audio, pictures, etc) that can be accessed "free" (aside from the membership charge). I don't know how successful it would be (since they have abandoned the paid Fantasy League, it had to be because it wasn't getting enough participation) but I imagine they could make some good money off of it. A "free" message board offers too many problems, traffic and admin/mod stuff being the big 2. A paid MB would effectively solve that.

The last WWE event I went to (Jan05) they had this 5 minute long announcement going over all the copyright stuff. It was hilarious. This dark music came on and a deep announcers voice started to speak. Everyone thought the show was starting, and then we realized it was crap and we ignored it. Errrr, I mean... Vince McMahon allows you to watch his show with your own damn eyes and let's you keep the MEMORIES of his shows; you can't give him the respect of not keeping those memories in your head and have to take PHOTOS?! You're lucky the good people at the WWE don't sue you for STEALING those trademark and copyrighted moments with your eyes, ears and brain!

Preach it Sister Chick! Guess what? The WWE PAID Metallica to use "Enter Sandman" at the ECW PPV. *They* RESPECT the artistic contributions of others by compensating them justly. Just because it's 2005 and the internet is the wild west of digitial debauchery where there supposedly are no rules and pirates purge the net with stolen songs doesn't mean good-ole fashioned licensing is dead. The fine folks at titan towers can go to sleep at night because they do the right thing, while YOU "fans" lie awake atop your inflatable dollies (cuz you can't get a REAL woman to sleep with you) and wonder why you feel so dirty.

THE thing that has reallY botHered me this whole time about these fAns is that they are VEry selfish and KID-like. they do Not undersAnd the realities of running a Prestigious multinational corPEration that is really just Doing the best job they can. it is sad that Most pEople Are too bliND to see thAt. REally. I'd like to FORCE them all INto titan towers and Get theM to thank vincE for all The gOod he has done over The Years. PEople, wake up!! THIS is the greatest Company eveR!! Also, triPle h rules. he loves the business.

That's because this is a wrestling forum. If you post a picture of Benoit on a PRIDE forum, I'm sure many of them wouldn't know who he is. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Do you know how many PRIDE forums there are? Like TWO. MAYBE. There are way more wrestling fan boards and sites. It's not even close. The WWE has to put up with all of that... so much money being stolen by greedy, so-called, "fans".

And, you know what? We're lucky the WWE has the decency to not put up a message board of their own, so we can talk about the WWE freely and without charge here at TSM. They do so much for us, it's ridiculous. They allow us to talk about them, to discuss SPOILERS and PPV's (!!!) which both takes money out of their pockets. How many people here follow the PPV threads rather than doing their duty as wrestling fans and making the purchase themselves? And let's face it, this board is mighty negative about the WWE product most of the time which certainly doesn't help their image and goodwill with fans (and yet they still allow it even though they could CRUSH this board and all of it's 14 year old pimple-faced, no-girl-kissin, basement dwellers). WWE wrestlers go overseas to IRAQ, risk their lives in that very country, to entertain the troops who fucking give you the freedom you have today and instead of appreciating it by not saying anything bad about the WWE, you use it to bash them. Sometimes I wonder why the WWE and its wrestlers even risk their lives in Iraq when the people they come home to don't give a shit.

There's a line. And this line divides a company that has exposure and is currently exposed with a company that isn't exposed. For example.... You called it "kickboxing". It is not. It is PRIDE fighting, aka Mixed Martial Arts. The fighter in question is Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. Had this been a picture of Chris Benoit, the mistake would never have occured because the WWE is past the line of exposure while PRIDE is, clearly, not. Right now, you -and perhaps many others reading this- have just been exposed to PRIDE through my advertisement, while a Chris Benoit picture wouldn't have really done anything other than provide a nice visual. Who knows, perhaps someone seeing my avatar and sig would become interested in Shogun and PRIDE and buy their next PPV (July 1st, more advertising). That's money in their pockets that wouldn't have been there had I not provided (free) advertisement. Meanwhile, no one would have bought any Benoit or WWE product as a result of an image I got from a (free) website. Now, imagine there were no free Benoit pics on-line, as the WWE would like it; then the demand for Benoit pics would vastly increase since the supply would be decreased (the most basic economic principle) and more people would be willing to pay for pictures, which would be money in the WWE's pockets. Now, on this basis of reasoning, the more (free) pics out there, the less money in the WWE pockets. In one instance (my advertising) the company would gain from the exposure, and in the other they would lose. That's the difference.

This is advertising for them.

Consider the numbers. Benoit gets paid, maybe, $200,000 a year as a downside. PPV's, House Shows, Merch, Licensing... bump it up to $400,000 (WM offers a nice raise). Now take away travel expenses (let's say $300 a week for hotels, 500 for car rentals -assuming he splits the fees with other wrestlers- and 1200 for misc., that's about $2000 a week for about 50 weeks a year. That's $100,000 gone. Then there's his house and home expenses, and his family and a certain standard of living they are accustomed to. NOT TO MENTION that the guys career won't go past 40. Which means about 20 more years left (let's assume the avg. lifespan of a prof wrestler is 60) with a lot less income. Now, let's say there are 100,000 Chris Benoit fans out there (or 10,000 hardcore fans that have 10 images of him on their computer). It looks like the avg. price of a WWE photo is about 3 bucks. That's $300,000!!! PER YEAR! That's 1.5 million dollars after just 5 years! That is money that could be used for Benoits retirement fund, or to put his kids through college and give them the education he could never have because he wanted to be a wrestler so bad -he wanted to entertain YOU the selfish bitch-fan- that he started RISKING HIS LIFE IN THAT RING at a way-too-early age. You can't even pay three fucking dollars after all he has done for US... you don't have any respect for his sacrifice you fucking THIEF; jesus christ why don't you just rob a bank or steal from an old lady... oh wait, I forgot, you spend all your time in your parents basement stealing from a fine, upstanding company like the WWE - who only want to protect YOU from shoddy, sub-par, images/video/audio and only want to give YOU the best possible product because they believe their fans deserve the best - and then bash them when they have the GALL to ask for some compensation in return for their wrestlers hard efforts in that ring.

But... they don't get any money from the fan photos. Who cares if the fan actually paid for a ticket, *I* didn't pay for the ticket and I can STEAL WWE's images and use them however I please for FREE. That picture of Chris Benoit doing a flying headbut? I could use that as my wallpaper and Chris Benoit won't get a damn cent, even though he is RISKING HIS LIFE in the ring for our entertainment. Meanwhile, if I were to buy a Chris Benoit wallpaper from WWE.com, the money will go to the people who bleed, sweat, and risk their lives in the ring... don't you think they deserve it?

Simply put, whether it's technically "legal" or not, the WWE legal team can easily put the pressure on and make you go bankrupt by tying you up in court. But, if you're loaded and have the WWF's lawyers, I will gladly support you RRR: Was amazed people were so angry at the WWF for suing the WWE for copyright and trademark infringement when the WWE was 100x's worse and it was to their own fans.

*giddy*

You guys are looking at it all wrong. The WWE only wants the best for its fans. They don't want poor quality video, audio, or pictures floating around the internet because their fans deserve a high quality product. And if high quality comes at a cost, why not? We'd be supporting the wrestlers who sweat, bleed, tear muscles and break bones in the ring so we can get the unique blend of sports and entertainment that only the WWE provides.

I don't put much thought into the light thing, only because if I did I wouldn't get any sleep at night.

I can't believe I'm going to say this about a Sci-fi Convention, but... ...that's hot. (TONY TODD~!!)

Memory isn't the issue, it's conditioning. Fans have been conditioned to see Jericho as bridesmaid and not a bride.

Cept if they continually get buried for 5 straight years. Then they're fucked. RRR: Thinking the notion of 5 years is lost on some people.

Got the UFC 46 show. Watched Franca vs. Thomson (close to a FOTY for me, if the last round hadn't really dragged), GSP vs. Karo was a tad disappointing but still good.

Expand on how the ECW PPV was a good step in listening to the WWE audience.

Pay attention, ok? 1)It was sarcasm. It was a well-known fact that Hogans run was bad for business. Not to mention it went against the very point HTQ (and I to a lesser extent) were arguing. 2) "Hulk Hogan was near 50 when he was the most over guy on the show, the fans loved to see him, but it was clear that the fans didn't necessarily pay to see his PPV's as champ or tune into the television shows with him as champ. So, in that case, the fans wanted to see him but they didn't want to see him as the top guy. "

Yeah, they're retarded, BUT, if they _did_ do what I say, then it would show they already "got it", because a continual commitment to improvement (through customer feedback..oh god, I'm sounding like my Quality teacher) is something that they'd -in the current stupor- would never do. They do shit like hiring "consultants" and then doing a 2 week survey, and then ignore everything (including the consultants giving up because the show is such a mess) because their initial investment was so low that they could afford to ignore it. If they did a 6 month survey, or a year-long survey, or a ever-evolving survey, then they'd be committing lots of time and money towards something that they would _have to_ use. It would be the Mark Henry/Big Show of market research . It's great how the only discussion we can have is on the degree of how stupid the WWE brass are.

It's not just about a "big market research survey" because they did that before, it's about a constant survey. It's about continual feedback. The WWE doesn't do that. They have feedback on their website, and they already dismiss the internet fans' opinions already so what does it matter? What I'm talking about means a change in perspective, which I know is unlikely, but if they started to take the approach of kaizen (oooh RRR bustin it out), then going their own way wouldn't even be an option. Did I say "unlikely"? I meant impossible.