From: Rad Link 5 | #009
By the way, I have been meaning to ask someone who isn't terrible at TEW like I am this question for a while now: How do you constantly put your main eventers against each other and have a winner without the loser suffering overness-wise? Better yet, how do you not just book by the numbers and not always just hand the wins to the worker with higher overness? Whenever I have someone with lower overness beat someone with higher overness, it causes such a big overness penalty to the loser that it ends up just not being worth it, so I end up with really formulaic cards with no upsets ever, and it bores me.
Anyway the best way I've found to have main eventers lose to lower guys and still maintain their overness is to just use them in a lot of angles. Unless you're playing in an angleless fed realize that angles will benefit everyone involved in them overnesswise as long as the angles play to the strengths. Basically the idea is to feel free to take your guys at like A over down a peg unless you're building them for a big event-- like if you're working to a big Orton/Henry match, you can afford to knock Cena down a bit to elevate an upper midcarder, then build him back up through interviews/good matches before he is the focus of your brand again. This is harder to do with high over guys that don't have high interview stats (or wrestling stats if you've got good guys to work with them) to build themselves back up though. As long as you don't do stuff like have John Cena lose to Santino at random the overness hit should be recoverable (these matches don't gain you much for the winner, either).
Momentum also helps, here. A dude a bit lower in the card with A momentum won't hurt Cena as much by beating him I don't think.
Also don't underestimate the benefit of just having an open match that's good and having your lower guy lose. You will actually gain overness from losses if you book good matches/feuds.
I don't like Tom's solution of "keep strong" though-- in my experience it always tanks the match rating more than it's worth. You save the losing guy some overness but I think it gives the winner less overness too so it's like "why bother." Just have the higher over guy win if you can't hack giving him a bit of an over hit.
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I tried to have a fierce rivalry with SuperNiceDog, but he made me look worse than a GameFAQs Contest!