u/TheInternetHeel

Good morning everyone. Hope you're all doing well. I wanted to introduce myself and share my super villain origin story (😄)

I am in my late 40s and grew up in Alabama. I grew up in foster care and groups for 99% of my childhood. These group homes forced us boys to go to church every Sunday, with the churches we attended being fundamentalist, primitive southern Baptist churches. The Satanic panic? Oh we heard that EVERY DAY.

Now, I've always been naturally skeptical, but religious indoctrination is definitely a thing, and coupled with the desire to fit in, they had a 14-year old me convinced I was "called" to be a preacher. I memorized scripture, learned every detail of the stories. I prepared my own services, complete with 2 hour sermons. There was a problem with my sermons though. They were focused on love, understanding and accepting differences, community service, empathy...you know...all the things that Christianity is *supposed* to be. They certainly let me know I had too much, and I quote, "hippie messages".

Fast forward to 2001. 9/11 happens and I immediately join the military. Years pass after multiple deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan, and I start pursuing a college degree (online obviously), with a focus on history, specifically Bronze and Iron Age History. It is during this time that I begin to see the apparent cracks in the historical accuracy of these stories. At this point, I'm trying to reconcile Christian teachings with education (and logic). For example...how were dinosaurs real if the bible is true? I had devised the story within my head that because God's time was infinitely longer than ours the 5 days that preceeded human creation could have been millions or billions of years. I was so excited. I figured out how unite my Christian upbringing with scientific and historical facts. I immediately went to the Chaplain to share. It was shot down immediately.

Fast forward to a deployment in 2012. One of my fellow soldiers left the COP we were based out out of around 4 AM and massacred almost an entire village in Afghanistan. For whatever reason, this really shook me. I essentially had a mini mental break. Every wound, every explosion, every bullet whizzing past, every dead body I had seen...all came flooding into my brain. People who both believed in the same god killing each other. Then it hit me. He's not there. Never has been. Can't be. And if he is, he's either powerless or just indifferent.

Either way, I was done wasting my time worrying. That and the complete lack of evidence for the deity of Abrahamic mythology and the character of Jesus, I checked out.

This is where I find myself today. Now completely divorced from religion and constantly pissed at the overbearing religious folks (that I used to be).

Amyway...nice to meet all of you.

So let's hear everyone's predictions for what gets revealed during today's live stream. I know that they're focusing on MK II first, and obviously they already have the ninja mold set, so I'm thinking Smoke. I also forsee them announcing Jax and either Kahn or Kintaro, but I wouldn't rule out Shang Tsung or Kung Lao.

That being said, I'm really excited for the eventual 92 MK waves, but I'm really hoping for a 95 MK movie wave as well (if Todd can get the licensing)

I just bought it in the PS Store for like 8 bucks to play for the first time in 20 years, and it dawned to me that they need to remake this game. Or at least set RDR3 in a Revolver-adjacent time frame. Even if they didn't want to revisit Red Harlow himself, take us back to Bear Mountain at the minimum. Plus the 1870s would be a great setting because you could incorporate stories about the relatively immediate aftermath of the Civil War. In RDR2 it's been roughly 35 years since the end of the war, so if you set it closer to 1870, you get a more surreal experience dealing with it.

Obviously there are a litany of recurring issues with the mode, but then it hit me about one of the biggest problems it has is something missing that you see in other sports titles.

*Retirements*

If I play NBA2K or Madden or MLB The Show, year 1 of a franchise doesn't look the same as year 25. Rosters change, players retire, and new stars emerge (with or without your intervention).

Universe Mode could benefit from this. Older wrestlers actually retire and CPU generated wrestlers and storylines fill in those gaps.

If you're to replicate that now, you have to do the tedious job of removing and adding wrestlers in, which is fine, but it would be nice if the Mode played a little more true to life and had a more organic flow to it. I've played through Universe Mode and left the default roster in, and year 30 and Roman Reigns is still either holding or vying for the title and taking ridiculous bumps, despite being 70 years old (in-game) at that point.

I'm a fan of hyper-realism, so the injury system could use a tweaking as well. I know we've all had ridiculously long matches with no DQ just to see how terribly we could injure our opponent, only for it say they suffered a minor injury and would be out for a bit (and then appear the following night).

I know some will disagree, but those are overhauls to the mode I'd like to see. Maybe have an adjustable current age and retirement age slider for each wrestler in the game to use in Universe. Perhaps after a wrestler retires, they show up as a manager or a GM. I did that manually with Hogan as I brought him in as a Bischoff-type who managed a new iteration of the nWo.