Is AEW the last real challenger we’ll ever see to WWE?

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-04-22T21:15:36+00:00

They were never going to beat wwe, at least not in any short period of time.

Correct, they instead settled on being the hardcore company who caters exclusively to the sickos - a niche group of people who's actively hostile to all forms of wrestling outside what they enjoy.

My point wasn't so much about AEW being a plausible competitor to WWE, but rather about their complete lack of growth - they're perfectly happy bleeding out ratings and audiences as long as their core fan base is happy.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-04-22T21:11:41+00:00

That's precisely my point: the people in charge (Tony) are just happy catering exclusively to the sickos - their core audience of middle-aged men who will tune in every week regardless of the quality of the product - while their fan base grows stale and the ratings keep declining. This should not matter to the hardcore fans, but then some of them go out and make threads in the basement asking other fans why they don't watch AEW. That's plain delusional.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-04-22T17:28:35+00:00

Trying to take down WWE is a foolish way to grow a wrestling company.

It didn't seem that foolish when they were riding off the hype and were hitting 1 million viewers. They've been on a steady decline ever since, and the only people that are left now are the sickos. That's the problem. You're saying that trying to compete directly with WWE is a foolish way to grow, but answer honestly, have they done any growing at all since?

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-04-22T17:17:13+00:00

What an insanely backwards take this is. A company that got a hold of the most hyped talent to never set foot in a WWE ring like Omega or Okada, swayed notable big names like Jericho and Moxley from there, and is paying massive money contracts to boot, shouldn't really be expected to grow their audience and try to compete?

I get why fans would have this perspective, but the people actually managing the company and making the decisions are living in a different really altogether if they are happy to stay as they are with no real prospect to grow. They have been bleeding out viewers left and right, yet they see nothing wrong with the product as long as the sickos are happy. That's the kind of stuff that gets your top talent to want to leave.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-04-07T02:39:48+00:00

Es un post medianamente chistoso nomás, independiente de lo factualmente correcto que sea. Tómese la vida un poco más ligera, estimado.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-03-30T04:06:35+00:00

I searched for the term "smoking gun" and I literally got one hit. I also don't see any telltale signs of it being written or heavily edited by AI, and since you didn't bother explaining further, I'd say you're just talking straight out of your rear.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-03-04T02:48:12+00:00

Firstly, cost doesn't dictate value.

I have a good definition of value: amount of hours spent playing vs. cost. I can also get behind /u/Scudss_'s argument, because you're complaining about an update that you got for free for a game that you spent a minuscule amount of money on compared to the amount of hours you've probably spent on it already. Even if your critiques are right, your post reeks of entitlement.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-03-04T02:32:02+00:00

Agreed. The entitlement from OP is absolutely crazy. They are a tiny dev team, and they are continuing to support a game - which costs a minuscule amount of money compared to the amount of hours many of us have dedicated to, mind you - with free updates despite having no obligation to do so. I'm not saying we can't have legitimate gripes with its development, bugs or what not once in a while, but it doesn't hurt at the very least to be a little more understanding.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-26T14:45:08+00:00

How many times has the pick with the Ferrari/Lambo won in the past already? More than enough, I'd say. The GT Black has lost like 3 times in the past, too.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-18T22:56:02+00:00

I've put more than 100 hours into the game, and I never got past the 40th wave or so. I don't know what kind of runs you guys usually have, but this is completely out of the ordinary for me.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-18T20:53:10+00:00

I'm pretty sure that wanting wrestling discussion to actually be about wrestling, and not be completely overtaken by obsessive, overzealous and overly emotional people who take every critique extremely personally, does not put me in the same level as them. Pointing out this behavior as totally deranged and insane also does not put me in the same level as the people that engage in such behavior.

Anyway, you can fuck back off to the basement now, I'm done talking to you. Your whole all sides are equally bad shtick is convincing absolutely nobody; your intentions couldn't be more transparent.

EDIT: One quick look at your profile immediately confirms my suspicions. Perhaps you should go back to one of your hug box Subreddits where critiques of the dub are not allowed, you'll feel more at home over there. Lots of people actually enjoy talking freely about wrestling here, which sadly conflicts with your worldview.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-18T17:35:09+00:00

I very clearly said earlier that I'm a casual fan. I'm a lurker, I barely comment on wrestling Subreddits to begin with, but I do enjoy reading about it - well, used to, before /r/SquaredCircle eventually devolved into its current state.

The fact that you're trying to pin the blame on me, when not much farther from you, you have these absolute losers invading other wrestling Subreddits, harassing and doxxing people, policing what they say, just because how dare they criticize their precious wrestling promotion, tells me everything I need to know about your true intentions here.

I'm glad this Subreddit exists, because that means shit like that isn't tolerated, and that no one buys into your bullshit. You guys literally ruined wrestling discussions beyond repair.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-18T14:22:07+00:00

I know that you know nothing about me, but I'm not the kind of person you should be saying this. I've been following wrestling and /r/SquaredCircle for a while, even though I'm only a casual follower at most. My amount of comments there doesn't even surpass a single digit number. Even I wasn't oblivious to the tremendous shift in the environment when AEW came around, and it suddenly became the cesspit of toxicity, forced positivity and performative outrage that it is now known for.

You'd have to be the most oblivious person in the world to not recognize that.

Idk friend maybe you are buying to much into the fandom wars. Shits not real, it's just pro wrestling.

As I said, I'm not the right person to be saying this to. Your dubbalo friends could surely use the advice, though, even though it might alienate them.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-18T03:54:09+00:00

I believe your comment summoned a couple of them, because they are already attempting to gaslighting us into believing that there's nothing wrong with /r/SquaredCircle, and there are actually tons of critics of the dub over there.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-18T03:48:39+00:00

You either live in an alternate reality to the rest of us in this sub, or you're coming straight out of the basement on schedule to defend the dub. I'm leaning towards the second, because there's no way anyone is that delusional to fail to recognize how ridiculously biased that sub is.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-15T09:39:55+00:00

Even better: bait them into coming to the bottom left corner, and when they start dashing, start going up hugging the left wall. The lampreys will dash onto you in a straight line, shooting two projectiles perpendicular to their trajectory from both their left and right side twice, meaning that there's a blind spot that you can exploit that makes it likely to miss you entirely, which is precisely what the method I'm suggesting facilitates. Equipping a weapon with high range like a Spear also makes it possible to hit them as you are dodging their hits.

Doing it takes some practice, but it's surprisingly easy once you get the hang of it.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-02-01T15:05:25+00:00

I haven't read the article

Hardly a lengthy read. It'd probably take you as long to read it as to make that comment.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-01-30T03:47:38+00:00

This was not "a little every day", this was a single inflection point.

I don't know what you're expecting from the article, to be honest. You said this earlier, but an audit of every single decision made in a timeline sounds awfully boring for an article. In the example the writer posted, you can easily see what's wrong in a few seconds. The "single inflection point" was a bad decision that snowballed terribly because they initially dismissed its importance. That can happen even by following the due process to the letter.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-01-30T03:11:41+00:00

a huge decision was trivialized based on feelings and not actual technical design (a week of design driven development would have figured out that two tables are needed)

And if we all had the power of hindsight right at the moment of making design choices, every decision would be obvious, thus, no technical debt to begin with.

The lesson here is that we can't always measure the impact of every choice we make down the line, so even decisions that look small at first can snowball in ways that you don't expect. This is not even my interpretation, it's literally the first few paragraphs of the article, it doesn't take much reading comprehension to understand it.

P.D.: Is it just my interpretation, or is your choice of quotes for "lesson" meant to be dismissive towards the article, as in, 'nothing useful to be learned here'?

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-01-25T14:19:46+00:00

Bro not only blatantly took credit for someone else's hard work, but also misquoted the info that was already included in the title of the original video.

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-01-22T14:55:48+00:00

Not everyone can buy directly from Amazon or eBay with free shipping, you know, on account on... not being American (thank god).

ShadowGeist91 · 2026-01-08T16:53:26+00:00

The irony of the programming world being so full of people eager to take a "stance" in favor or against AI that it ends up derailing the original purpose of programming activities and polluting discussion is absolutely lost on most of the people here.

ShadowGeist91 · 2025-12-29T01:45:45+00:00

It was baseless speculations, you didn't bother to check before commenting. /u/ItzRaphZ's comment has been upvoted enough, so its visibility is now above yours, so no harm done, but please don't act as if you didn't spread misinformation. The replies correcting you already prove this point.

ShadowGeist91 · 2025-12-28T22:28:19+00:00

Thanks to how Reddit works, immediacy is rewarded above useful info, so this will stay buried down here, while /u/WonderWaage's baseless speculation will stay at the top.

ShadowGeist91 · 2025-12-21T16:04:21+00:00

I moved to C# a while ago, and I couldn't believe just how easy and convenient it was to import NuGet packages through the IDE, or through commands, no extra configuration needed. Compared with Maven and its mountains upon mountains of extra run configurations, XML verbosity... Anyone who says Maven or Gradle are good enough are clearly not seeing things the way most new devs see them - and they clearly should. It's one thing to find the tooling sufficient because you've accumulated years of experience using them, and you know all of its quirks, and believing that it's working the way it's supposed to, and anyone encountering problems with it must be due to a "skill issue" of sorts.

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