Has someone ever influenced your promo style?

In E-Feds you end up competing against tons and tons of people that all of their own unique way of promoing, and there's of course times where the way they promo or what they say makes you kind of revise the way you do things. There's also situations where perhaps the way someone promoed as a monster type of character influenced you to do something of your own. Really anything like that.

Back in 2009-2011 it were Vincent Van Vengeance and Deadman 4 Life. I tried to learn the vocabulary and words from them. The Dragon's and Candle's advices in 2011 were (still are) very valuables to me and changed my perspective in promos, lol.

Actually, the advice that Dragon gave to me was "You have to make people care about you, your opponents, and your matches. If you threat your opponents as nobodies then what's the point of beating "nobodies"? You'll gain nothing".

Hence why Nobi is always so respectful in promos when he's not involved in feuds, lol.

Nowadays....it's as many people as possible, lol.

A lot of people. When I first started I was in a fed that had like a 300 word limit. We literally could've done promos on twitter and had room for a title and show date if twitter were a thing back then. The first time I saw a long promo I literally went "oh, we can do these longer?".

I don't think I had ever seen a fully dialogue promo without the trappings of scenery descriptions until IEW. That kind of blew my mind. I tried to go that route a little more with the Professional just to throw the scent off, but it's a hard promo padding crutch to abandon.

LEGION's very talented and turbulent women's division gave me hope in ditching the unattainable ghost of intergender matches with some of my female characters by actually presenting a field of talent that just made me work as hard as I did against male characters. I don't think I got as in the number with promo analytics before then either. Those women were talented and vicious when it came to zeroing in on a mistake. It might be why I proofread more these days too (not enough, but more than I used to.)

There were also a bunch of guys I sharpened my writing against prior to running into what I think of as the Yahoo!Answers crew. They probably quit doing this stuff over a decade ago, but I always give a shout out to Jack Depp, Heavy Metal Hero Art Mclellan, and Evan Bodom. They were probably the first three guys in e-fedding to ever push me and inspire me. I'd like to think we're the reason word and promo limits exist in e-fedding now because we used to blow up the boards going back and forth against one another on weekends like the high school losers we were back then.

Damn I'm old.

Then there are always the guys who clearly have a vision that run unique e-feds like Brian, TheBottomLine, and everyone behind the scenes here and in OWA. It really does help shape a character when the stakes and setting are dynamic and well defined. Lore is important in e-fedding. You just can't set up a message board without a vision and expect people to be inspired to write for you. Tony changed with the scenery everywhere he went based on whatever role suited the fed and his character progression within it, and Pizza Boy's starting to follow suit. Without that kind of vision driving things and painting pictures, there's no room to connect point a to point b with a character.