Once you've gone through the basics, and made our way out of the performance center and onto the NXT TV broadcast, your progress is based on your social media fanbase. Your job, just like any current WWE Superstar, is to entertain the fans, and as you well know, winning all of your matches and entertaining people are not always the same thing.
Over a long enough period of time, winning every match might be enough to get you over, but even a loss can be great for your career, because each match you compete in is rated on things like move variety, memorable moments, back-and-forth momentum swings, and overall drama. So, you're good enough at the game's mechanics to squash John Cena in two minutes flat using the same move over and over? That's nice. My 15-minute long loss where we both kicked out of multiple finishers at the 2.9999 count is the match fans want to see though, so expect me to land on a PPV card well before you.
Even if you're putting on 5-star matches on the regular, your experience is going to be different depending on the decisions you make in-ring and out. Storylines, rivalries, and alliances aren't really “random,” but they are dynamic based on how much of a heel or face you are, how over you are with the fans, and how previous storylines have worked out for you. Did you give Daniel Bryan props on Twitter? Did you smash Roman Reigns into an exposed turnbuckle? These kinds of things can result in a different path in an ever-branching system of events. There is no fail state, and there's no restarting a match if it isn't going the way you want it to. You live with every decision, and I wouldn't have it any other way.