How did you find eWrestling?

When I think about back when I first discovered fantasy wrestling, I can't remember the exact origin of how I first was introduced to it. I believe I may have been linked in a pro wrestling chat room on AIM. I'm not sure. It's been a long time.

I do vividly remember the very first eFed I ever joined was called the Triangle Wrestling Alliance.

I was in high school. Me and my friends were all huge wrestling fans. We discovered the thing that ended up being eWrestling together.

The TWA was the first fed for a group of four or five of us. While three would go on and not really play the game, a couple of us would just become enthralled with what we were discovering.

It wasn't long after we joined the TWA that we started to join other eFeds. Quite a few of them were based on real wrestlers with real pic bases. I believe at one point my friend Matt handled Ric Flair and, if I remember correctly, had Ric Flair die of a heart attack after taking a woman to Space Mountain, only to come back and continue wrestling.

I was probably about four to six months in whenever I decided I wanted to run my own eFed.

I couldn't tell you what the name of the very first eFed I ran was. I don't remember. I don't remember much at all from back then, but I know it didn't last long. It was a mix of real wrestlers and made-up wrestlers, and we used a free service, probably something like Geocities or similar.

Eventually, I would go on to create the United Toughness Alliance, a play on the University of Texas, which was the nearby school to where I was.

Fun side note, the very first actual domain name that I owned, UTAwrestling.com, for the UTA, is now owned by the University of Texas, or at least the last time I checked.

The UTA would go through so many changes in the early days, not only of where I hosted it, what the URL was, when shows were, and people I brought on. It was craziness. I still have some of the original handlers who hang around the Discord today who, every time I do a new site design for the site that is existing today at WrestleUTA.com, point out that they remember a time when there would be a new site every week, even sometimes two or three times a week.

It was the early days of eWrestling. There were new scripts and software coming out. CGI was a big thing, followed soon after by PHP. I believe it was fantasy wrestling and MySpace that really taught me how to code, which would come in handy later in life whenever I jumped into the corporate IT world.

But that's another story for another time.

I look at eWrestling today, and I wonder, truly, how do people find the hobby that we call fantasy wrestling? How do they discover the writing aspect of pro wrestling online?

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you could find professionally ran fantasy wrestling sites. You had places like the IWO, the FWLnet, the FWO. All of these places were actual legitimate sites that you could find advertisements for on major websites, in magazines, and other places.

But I don't see that today. I barely see eFeds that affiliate with other feds, much less advertise in different areas. There's no more Million Dollar Website place where you could buy advertisement space at a dollar a pixel that would be taking up quite a few pixels with eWrestling-related ads. There's no more people pumping money into it to get their ads to play on Google Ads or Yahoo Ads.

So how do people find eWrestling today?

That's one of the questions that, as I grow eWPlace, I hope to learn.

I know that places like X allow people to interact with not only fantasy wrestling handlers, but also people who are not in the hobby. I can assume that quite a few people find it from social media sites such as X or Facebook, but how many really come in through that way?

There's no more Top 100 Feds top list, which maybe that's an idea I should ponder about, but who really would use it anyways? 🤔

There's no more resource sites out there. I mean, yeah, we have eWPlace, that's great. There's Fantasy-Wrestling.net, a German forum site, which is similar to a resource site, but it's really more just a community. And there's a ton of different Discord communities, such as the eFed Hub and places like that.

But there was a time when there was always no less than 10 to 15 different resource sites, news sites, and sites with staff that were continuously posting new content and interviews and getting the inside scoop on your favorite eFeds.

It's an interesting state that the hobby's in today.

I have a friend, Justin, who's been in the hobby just as long as me, if not longer. Maybe he came in about the same time. Who knows? But when I told him I was starting eWPlace up, he was like, "There's still other eFeds?"

And yeah, there are.

A lot of people like to say that there's not many eFeds anymore, not as many as there were back in the early days. I don't think that's completely right. I was one of those people who used to say that, but as I dig deeper into things these days, I see that there's more different types of eFeds than there used to be.

There's the social media eFeds, there's the forum feds, there's the website feds. I've seen feds that run Twitch off of video games.

I think that the mediums have expanded where, in the old days, you could find a whole bunch of the same type of fed in one place. Now it's just spread out.

And that is exactly why I'm asking you this question today. That's exactly why I want to know: how did you find eWrestling?

I should really set up a comment system on these articles, but to be honest with you, I've done this quite a few times, and throughout the years, comments on physical articles have become less and less. Most of the comments are on social media platforms, Discord, and stuff like that.

So I hope that I will hear from some of you who do take the time to read this.

Where did you find eWrestling? How did it come about? How long have you been in the game?

I don't want to know this because it's going to benefit me in terms of how I am doing things at eWPlace. I just legitimately want to know. It's a curious thing, and I'm curious by nature.

And the more I do this with eWPlace, the more I'm learning about the state of the hobby today and the interesting places that it's come since I first got into it.

How many more people out there have been doing this for a long time like me? How many of you are still new?

The new ones, I want to hear from even more than the old-timers.

I really want to know, what do you think of fantasy wrestling? What's your true opinion on this crazy, kooky, pro wrestling-themed, writing, video game-playing, simulation-based, sometimes AI-based hobby that we do?

And I want to ask everyone equally, what have you done today to promote the hobby to someone new? What have you done today to introduce someone to fantasy wrestling to help build the future of what we do as a collaborative nature?

All it takes is sharing one article, one eFed, one roleplay, one result of a show to someone who's a wrestling fan, likes writing, and needs something to do to introduce someone to fantasy wrestling.

If you haven't done that today, I challenge you. Go out there and do it. Go out there and share something fantasy wrestling-related to someone new and see if we can recruit new people.

As always, I appreciate anyone who takes the time. It means a lot to me.

I'm gonna take the feedback that I recently received and try to use AI less in terms of polishing the things that I put together. So if this comes across odd or written weird, I'm sorry. I'm not a professional writer. All I am is a guy who loves wrestling and wants to write stuff for you.

Thanks.

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