In this weekly column, I will comment on the past week's goings-on in WOW, and whatever else it occurs to me to discuss :-) I also hope that a big part of the column will be printing and responding to your e-mails. So please send them in (the address is thatthing35@yahoo.com)!
This week, I've again written a column that discusses general WOW issues. For commentary focusing on last week's WOW episode, you can just look at this recap of the updates I posted to the various character pages. (I actually did not see the episode, so this is off recaps. WOW was on this week an hour earlier in my area than normal, airing at 1 AM instead of 2. I don't know if this is a permanent change or not. Although I'm sure it would be a better time slot from WOW's perspective, I'm not sure if it is better for me since it's annoying to have to curtail my weekend activities early to watch the program. Anyway, point is that since I didn't know of the time change, I missed the show. Obviously, next week I will be tuned in at 1 just in case!)
2/11/01: WOW = "Website o' Wackness"?
As befits an entertainment enterprise debuting in the 21st century, WOW is trying hard to establish an Internet presence. David McLane constantly exhorts fans to "LOG INTO WOWE.COM!!!!" at times when he really should be announcing the match. If you follow McLane's advice, the first thing you will notice is that there is not a whole lot there to see. WOW-Fan.com has it all over the official site in terms of content. As far as what actually is there...well, it hasn't always made WOW look too terrific. Let me try to confuse what I mean.
The swimsuit competition mess began as soon as the swimsuit pics were posted.
The pics were almost too small to be made out; certainly, they were not taken
from up close enough to show off the beautiful WOW ladies well. The lighting
was also bad. Fans and wrestlers alike complained. New, better pics were promptly
put up. (Did they have them all along? If so, why didn't they use them in the
first place?) But even after the decent pics went up, three announced swimsuit
competitors -- Jade, Roxy Powers,
and Patti Pizzazz -- still did not have any pics. Furthermore,
someone who hadn't been announced as a competitor, and in fact had no
known connection to WOW, did have pics! The mysterious "Sharon Bruneau"
stayed on the site for about a day before her pics got taken back down. In addition
to the fact that no one knew who she was or why she was there, WOWmegafan
points out very humorously that her pics look like photomanipulations. We
still to this day do not know who Sharon is, why her pics were ever on the site,
or why her real name was used.
Anyway, once they took Sharon down and got some decent pics of the others up, WOW started allowing people to vote in the contest. This was despite the fact that the rules (as seen by every voter before they cast their vote) stated that voting would not begin until the day of the PPV, Feb. 4. It was also despite the fact that there were still no images of Jade, Roxy, and Patti, nor could you vote for them.
Well, all those shenanigans certainly made the WOW web team, and by extension WOW itself, look amateurish...but I doubt many potential fans were lost as a result. The big PR gaffe came when Feb. 4 actually rolled around. Naturally, PPV watchers were exhorted to go online and vote in the contest. Whoops! The site promptly went down, and no one could vote for two days. How many prospective new fans were turned off when their first attempt to really "get into" the world of WOW was met with a "page cannot be displayed" message? WOW certainly should have expected this traffic and been prepared. (By the way, the site has sporadically gone down ever since.) When the site finally more or less recovered, we saw some more arbitrary decisions. First of all, you could finally vote for Jade and Roxy Powers...but there were still no pics of them. Not exactly a fair fight. (As for Patti, Lord knows what happened to her. You can't even vote for her.) More importantly...the voting had been reset! Thousands of votes just got tossed out the window. I realize that the rules still said Feb. 4, but once you do accept the early votes and post a daily tally, aren't you implying that the votes will actually count??
So, to sum up, they screwed up the contestant list, they screwed up the pics, and they screwed up the voting. Something that was supposed to be "interactive", and thus make fans feel closer to the organization, has made WOW look a lot more bad than good. (The voting is still going on, by the way. Smart money says it just gets cut off with no warning one day when they get bored of it.) Ironically, the only thing working in WOW's favor on this whole "fan voting" thing is that anyone with any sense knows that the "panel of judges from the fields of Sports and Entertainment", and not the Internet voters, will be the one picking the winner anyway.
The "shop zone" is another area in which WOW has not delivered its best ... literally. Many who have ordered merchandise from it (including myself) are still waiting for their orders, well after the 7-10 days shipping time advertised. Furthermore, those who have tried to find out the status of their order have reported that they have gotten no response! I'm sure we would understand the delay if we were given an explanation. But when you can't even get in touch with the people who took your credit card number, it's hard to feel good about the transaction. WOW must be aware of the vast amount of money that can be made by merchandising. They must make it a top priority to get people their stuff and become a trusted seller. In fact, I don't think it's exaggerating to say that the future of the business depends on it. If their only revenues are advertising on TV shows that often air during the wee hours and paid admissions to one or two shows a month, I don't see how they could possibly make a profit. They need that merchandising money, big-time.
Finally, let's talk about the WOW message board. First of all, it is mislabeled on the home page as a "chat room", which of course implies to most of us that it would be live chat, which it isn't. I myself didn't click on it at first because I am not a big fan of live chat. Once you do go in there, you will find a message board that is rather difficult to get around. In each forum, you can only see about 15 threads at a time, so if a forum gets a lot of new posts, the old ones get buried very quickly. Messages never get marked as read, so there is no way to tell what you have read and what you haven't. (You can use the "mark all read" column in the "more..." section, but how many will know to do that?) Anonymous posting is allowed, and this decision hasn't worked out to say the least, as the vast majority of anonymous posters insult WOW and/or the wrestlers. There are sections for wrestlers who have changed identities ("Patti Pep") and wrestlers who don't exist (the notorious "Temp"), and there are no sections for wrestlers who do exist (Randi Rah Rah, Mystery & Misery, Law & Order, Vendetta.) Articulate posts that both praise and criticize WOW have been censored...and then again, foulmouthed posts that say little besides "you suck" have been allowed to stay. The moderators refuse to make themselves public, so we can only wonder what exactly they do that apparently takes priority over making the board easier to use, keeping it up to date, and making it pleasant for the users.
And yet, the WOW wrestlers have made this badly managed message board into something uniquely worthwhile. Almost every wrestler checks into their forum at least occasionally. A good dozen or so -- Jade, Lotus, Riot, Jacklyn Hyde, Charlie Davidson, Jane Blond, Hammerin' Heather Steele, Disciplinarian, Slam Dunk, Terri Gold, Poison among them -- make an effort to answer every fan that posts to them. Every fan! How many sports figures can say that??? The wrestlers are knocking themselves out and doing a superb public relations job on behalf of their organization. The WOW web team should seek to live up to their standard.
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(e-mail: thatthing35@yahoo.com)