WWE's Fast Lane main event makes no sense

There's always a danger when you start traversing into critiquing booking decisions of wrestling shows that haven't actually happened yet. No matter how silly something might seem conceptually there's a chance that somewhere in the WWE Connecticut headquarters there's a blackboard covered in brilliant plans (which can be changed) for Fast Lane and Wrestlemania that will blow everyone's mind and make me look like a fool retroactively. 

However, based on track record, what we know about this year's Wrestlemania and what we can safely presume about the plans for it, the main event booked for the upcoming Fast Lane show of Dean Ambrose Vs Brock Lesnar Vs Roman Reigns with the winner challenging Triple H for the WWE Championship at Wrestlemania seems like a straight up bad idea.

Let's get this out of the way; Roman Reigns is winning. You can clutch your Ambrose dreams to your chest all you want...or your Lesnar dreams if you seriously want to see Brock Vs Triple H again for some reason, but it's a safe bet Triple H Vs Roman has been the plan for a while. WWE wanted last year's Wrestlemania to be Reigns' breakout moment, that was derailed by the Royal Rumble 2015 trainwreck, they're not going to sideline him this year to pander to the Ambrose crowd. WWE have been teasing Reigns Vs Triple H since last Spring, it could be argued this feud began the day after Wrestlemania 30! The match is happening and it'll probably be more painless to accept that now rather than mentally masturbating about potential alternatives for the next few weeks.

Right now the presumed Wrestlemania card is Roman Reigns Vs Triple H, Brock Lesnar Vs Bray Wyatt and Dean Ambrose Vs The Inevitable Sidelining of Popular Midcard Talent That Part-Timer Main Eventers Force Upon The Wrestlemania Card Every Year. Think about what would happen if that was shuffled around, if you do Ambrose Vs Triple H then who does that leave for Reigns, the guy who's been pushed as a MEGA star all year so needs a big match? Bray? We've seen it a million times this year. Brock? If that's the case then the triple threat at Fast Lane makes even less sense because why wouldn't you just save it? Undertaker? ARE YOU SERIOUS, that puts Reigns in the worst position imaginable! And even if it was a good idea I doubt they would trust him with Sting after the Rollins match. 

Factoring in the fact The Rock is going to be at Wrestlemania and it doesn't seem like he has any intention of wrestling a match...yea, unless something goes horrifically wrong with WWE's plans in the next few weeks Roman Reigns Vs Triple H is happening (although, if Undertaker is indeed retiring this year it might not necessarily be the main event).

So with that in mind, what's wrong with the triple threat they've booked for Fast Lane? Even with Roman starting to get decent reactions from WWE crowds in recent months there's obviously also a large portion of the fanbase who can't stand the guy and have no interest in seeing him win the WWE Championship again from a 46 year old man at Wrestlemania. Those people are going to be in the corner of Ambrose or Brock, and regardless of who wins this match and how a significant portion of the audience is going to be extremely disappointed with the result of the main event of the Pay-Per-View that only exists to get people excited for Wrestlemania.

The worst thing about WWE booking lately is they keep putting themselves in situations where they can only do one thing (even if it's a "swerve") so everyone both predicts and groans at it when it happens. Regardless of your opinion of it, Sheamus pretty much had to cash in at Survivor Series because there was no other option that wouldn't throw a big wrench in WWE's plan, Triple H HAD to win the Royal Rumble because they put themselves in a situation where they needed the title off Reigns and onto someone he could challenge at Wrestlemania. Following last year's horrendously put together Royal Rumble WWE had to book an awkward face vs face match between Daniel Bryan and Roman Reigns, which of course meant Reigns had to beat the most popular guy in the company going into Wrestlemania 31 which did him no favours with his detractors.

The frustrating thing about the Fast Lane match is there's absolutely no reason for it, it's three guys different parts of the crowd all love and one of them has to get heat by knocking the other two of the Wrestlemania title match. There's no reason why this match couldn't have been Ambrose Vs Reigns Vs Sheamus Vs Rusev with the other League of Nations members screwing Ambrose and giving Reigns some odds (and some HEELS god forbid) to overcome heading into his big match against Triple H. At least that would also give Ambrose something to work with heading into his own Wrestlemania match. Instead, what we're probably going to get is the Wyatt Family beating down Brock Lesnar, and then creative have to decide if they want Reigns to pin a guy who's been beat down by four other guys or beat his friend clean (again). I can't imagine either scenario getting anything other than a tepid reaction...or boos.

The match itself will probably be a ton of fun, maybe Dean Ambrose will get the Intercontinental title taken off him to try and increase the odds of him winning, maybe I'm completely wrong and WWE has some plans for an unconsidered match that somehow involves Ambrose and Reigns. Maybe Ambrose will turn heel with timing that makes much less sense than it would of at Survivor Series! I strongly doubt it though, WWE will go with their original plans, which I presume they have none as far as Ambrose is concerned right now, and they will hope having a cool match on Fast Lane will get fans pumped for Wrestlemania. 

I would advise against getting your hopes up here, but the problem is the existence of this match at all creates possibilities in your mind that WWE don't want you to consider right now. Basically, they've created a match that's only going to cause you to be disappointed that stuff that you know probably won't happen didn't happen, shooting themselves in the foot in the process. 

But hey! WWE screwed all this stuff up during the build of the last two Wrestlemanias as well and they turned out alright, so who even cares.

 

I CHECKED and I can confirm Words With Friends is a real game

Words With Friends is a Facebook game where the words aren't that important and you don’t have to play it with friends. It’s like Scrabble only with better level design and the option to wait 9 hours to take your next turn without annoying anyone. Some people will try to claim it doesn't count as a real videogame because their mum likes it, a statement that immediately confirms their mum is cooler than they are, because Words With Friends is the real deal.

Most people seem to have a similar experience when they play the game for the first time, usually because they just got their 15^th invitation and playing the game is easier the figuring out how to mute specific notifications on Facebook. They love to go in hard, proving they have read at least a book in their life, busting out a couple of six letter words across mostly blank tiles for a groovy 12 points. After a few games of getting crushed people either get incredibly salty, blaming their failure on the other players luck for being able to make better moves through luck of the draw, or they smarten up and realise the game isn't really about words at all.

I'm not sure you even need to be able to understand English to be good at this game. The benefits of technology and unlimited time to take your turn allows you plug in dozens of random combinations in advantageous situations until you find one that’s allowed. This game is not a perpetual anagram solver for literary nerds, it is a hardcore strategy game where controlling space on the board is absolutely essential. You could play “PAGING” branching off of your opponents “TONGS” for a hot 14 points, but if that “P” stretches into the top row you’re giving them a free shot at hitting a triple word score tile and losing out in the long run.

Not that you’re never awarded for the extra syllables, stretching out of the grid with a longer word to get an unchallenged triple word score tile is a great way to get a surprise advantage, a word’s value is also doubled whenever you use all seven of your letters at once. Eventually the luck of the draw is going to catch up to you though and your tiles will be replaced with letters that you have very limited options for. It creates a really interesting push/pull dynamic where you’re trying to maximise the value of your own words while limiting the options of your opponent. For example, “V” is a strong tile to have as it’s worth 5 points, but it’s also impossible to make any two letter words out of it, so playing it in a row or column that’s one space away from the edge of the board can render that space unusable. Timing this well can score you big points with zero risk of your opponent retaliating by sneaking a word in across one of the triple word score tiles.

There’s a lot of those kinds of mind games going on when you know you’re playing against someone who knows what they’re doing. When you’re left with an idle “D” on the word five spaces away from a double word score tile it taunts you, forcing you to smash every tile combination possible into the board praying that one of them works.

“Sorry! DALATE is not a valid Words With Friends word”

Well when you put it like that I feel bad for even bringing it up, but it did have the basic structure of vowels and consonants that a lot of words have so it was worth a punt. Although now that I've been playing this game for a few weeks I’m starting to appreciate the sheer amount of letter combinations that the English language doesn't acknowledge.

It is kind of bizarre that a game that deals entirely in letters feels completely disjointed from language. In Words With Friends the alphabet does not represent any form of communication, they are instead trading cards with predetermined values based on their ease of use. Pretty much everything in this game comes down to maths. You’re either figuring out the optimal use of your tiles this round, or the probability of your opponent being able to capitalise on a certain situation based on the space and the amount of tiles left in the bag. Most horrifically of all, there’s an incentive to use up all your tiles as fast as possible since the value of any you have left at the end will be deducted from your score and added to your opponents.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Words With Friends is comparable to poker, a game where you can always win regardless of what hand you’re dealt, since there are some luck based elements to it (there’s often not much you can do if you’re given a “Z” right at the end of the game for example), but it is shockingly well balanced. It’s not Scrabble as much as it’s Scrabble Championship Edition, as the design of the board, tile values and the quantities of each tile in the bag have all been adjusted for a much more interesting game where nailing the high scoring words is much more of a contest. This is a Zynga game after all, creators and distributors of the most powerful Microsoft Excel spreadsheets in the world, so it’s not surprising their numbers would be ironclad to keep those Words With Friends moves constantly rolling through your Facebook ticker. If you happen to be reading this and under the age of 18 and you’re one of those kids who constantly complains about having to do maths in school because it won’t ever be useful in real life, well good luck chump but you just bullied yourself out of billions of dollars of lunch money.

Say what you want about Zynga, but there’s some guts in taking the alphabet and attempting to balance it for competitive play. It’s remarkable how much is going on under the hood of Words With Friends, it could be mastered and played in tournaments, but instead it’s presented as something you're not supposed to really pay any attention to. You get a prompt on your phone or at work telling when it’s your turn, you poke at the screen for a couple of minutes deciding your move, and then you proceed to not engage with it for a couple more hours. This is when games are labelled (and usually demonised) as being “casual”, but in this case there’s very little difference in the game design, the deciding factor is in how it’s monetised via its integration with social media.

Not that any of that matters anyway, the “casual vs hardcore” argument is little more than the videogame equivalent of a “No Girlz Allowed” treehouse sign. Here’s all you need to know, Words With Friends takes the building blocks of our language and reimagines them as a finite resource where extorting the maximum value out of them is its core mechanic. Personally, I can’t think of anything more videogamey than that.