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Welcome to the Featured Rater project! This is a series of interviews where we ask official Team Raters, new and old, several questions about the RMT forum and their experiences within it. We hope that this offers both entertainment and an insight into their thought processes, which aspiring raters can look to incorporate into their own rates. This project is hosted by IronBullet and myself. Our twelfth interviewee is teal6, a dedicated and respected UU rater and top tier battler!
teal6
im a pretty average guy i think. im 23 years old, big sports fan (particularly soccer and boxing). i enjoy rap music and reading and film as hobbies other than mons. i have a bit of an obsessive personality when i latch onto something, and learn a ton about it / do it nonstop once i do, my current thing im researching into is getting a pilots license, first lesson all bought and paid for.
otherwise pretty normal, i work trading stocks which lets me sit around a computer all day, i guess im pretty interested in finance in general, i used to work at a derivatives exchange (stuff like rates swaps, credit default swaps) and thought that stuff was incredibly interesting. have been dating my gf for like 3.5-4 years now, hang out with friends in my spare time.
How did you come up with your name?
so back in rby (and later gsc) when you made your character they had preset names, and the name of the character was like supposed to be the color of the game (aka in red version your guys name was "red"). i thought that was cool and wanted to pick "white" or "black" when i first registered (this was before the games had come out) but they were taken so i eventually just chose a different color nobody had. the 6 is just because i was born in june.
What is your main tier? Do you rate teams from any other tiers?
i play UU 90% of the time im playing mon, but enjoy NU and Doubles a lot. i will only rate UU teams right now as i do not feel i would give a complete effort in any other tier until i immerse myself more in their respective metagames.
When did you start rating and why?
i started rating probably at the beginning of last summer, sometime around may 2015? i did it at first when i realized i was at a good enough level to acceptably help people, and also i didn't like how a lot of rates were just mon / set changes without a coherent reason why. even if the teams would be better, the user (particularly if they are new, which a lot of RMT posters are) does not understand why it has changed and what makes it more effective. i enjoy explaining the process in detail to the user why i've made the changes, and hope they get a better understanding of pokemon as a whole and the metagame in particular through my rates.
Are there any raters who you looked up to when you started rating?
rey and ib, mostly for their attitudes toward people as a whole.
What do you most enjoy about rating?
it may be a bit selfish, but during rating i probably mostly enjoy gleaning information for myself. i think i became a much better player through beginning to rate teams because i can more accurately understand why certain things don't work. i guess in addition to that, i've been thanked a few times (either via PM or PS message) and that's a really rewarding feeling, when someone has had success and personally attributes that to your help.
Do you follow a process with your rates?
i typically try to find the "thesis" of a team and then think of ways that they can more accurately and successfully fulfill that. for example, a lot of offensive teams have this problem (the "chansey offense" problem) that seems to be psychological to a degree, where they become nervous when building their team about handling something and waste a teamslot on a passive mon in order to feel a little safer in general. usually i'll find issues like that and try to explain not only how to fix it, but how to play with the new mon / team structure and why it'll be successful.
Do you have any words of advice for aspiring raters out there?
try your best, but jump right in! while i do think that the best players make better raters off the bat than less experienced players, i think that rating is an iterative process, and if you suggest something poor in a rate another user will disagree with you. this isn't a bad thing! learning by doing is the best method, and you'll get there really quickly if you actually apply effort to your rates.
Do you like the direction the RMT forum is taking at the moment? If you could change something, what would it be?
absolutely. i think the rater community is great and welcoming. i don't have much i'd change to be honest.
Has your experience with rating teams had an influence on the way you play?
without a doubt it has. it's particularly helped me in long term thinking, which was a major roadblock for me and a lot of newer players. when you build / rate a team effectively, you see how that team is supposed to function over the course of an entire match, not just in specific mon-on-mon situations. the better i got at realizing that for other's teams, the more i was able to formulate (successful) gameplans at the start of matches and execute them.
Seeing as RMT has a large UU community in terms of both raters and RMT posters, are there any projects, besides the current ones, that you think could be run to further integrate and expand it?
i think that the UU PS room still has a bit of ignorance regarding RMT's existence and purpose, and would benefit from posting with us here. i rate almost daily through the PS room from all sorts of users, and build with others usually once a week or so. some outreach to the specific metagame subforums / rooms might help, because i think users shouldn't be afraid to post their team for advice, considering that is the point after all!
Do you think there's any way to encourage more successful UU tour players, and tour players in general, to post their teams, especially with the UU Open having just concluded?
hm, right now i think there is a bit of friendly competition going on with a lot of the UU community already in RMT. it was a proud moment for me to get archived, but i was one step behind christo with that. other teams have been posted (dodmen, NV, spoof, LilOu, etc.) that are definitely good competitively and have advanced the metagame in their own way. i don't think UU in particular needs encouragement because the "UU crowd" is competitive enough that we all want to shine brighter than the rest, even if they are our friends.
Do you have an RMT or a team that you would like to share with us?
i would link to Fortune Favors the Brave, my archived team, but i'm actually a bit unhappy with how the team performs in the Zapdos meta. the following team is pre-Zapdos but still performs really well:
so i made this team when i was in ireland, because i knew i had to play sweep at the end of the week. well i didn't actually make it make it because i didn't have a computer, but it started out as a counterstyle team that would take advantage of an opponent taking advantage of me. i had won the previous two rounds of UU open with double dance cobalion, who has hard stops in the form of doublade and chandelure, which both had really good popularity in the UU metagame at the time anyway so it wasn't like a niche choice (meaning houndoom still takes advantage of this in the current metagame, not just in that specific vs.)
pz is an incredibly difficult to deal with mon, if it's in on almost anything slower that isn't blissey, you're punching a hole or getting a kill. this is important to hit things like florges for serious damage so you can deal with it later with mence / doom provided you've done enough damage.
dd mence is the most threatening mon in the tier and means that the opponent, if they have shard, can't lose mamo / abomasnow until your mence has died, basically.
mamo is your twave switchin, aka your p2 switchin. it helps deal with mons troubling to offense as a whole, specifically in knocking off p2, cress, and cune.
azelf is the best rocker on offense in my opinion, it's so fast and hits so hard and can usually stomach one non SE hit, so it gains a lot of utility in that sense. coverage options are your choice, really, with dgleam being a good option on this team over fire blast actually because you have ways to deal with fire blast targets but fewer options against hydreigon.
doom is a great anti-meta choice at the moment, it's speed tier, bulk (for an offense team) and support options mean that it can actually be useful in a matchup against any archetype of team.
pursuit doublade is because doom has issues with beedrill and maero, pursuiting on the switch out especially with rocks up mean you wear those bad boys down much faster.
Lastly, can you give us an example of a rate that exemplifies your particular style?
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/washed-up-ou-dropouts.3546368/#post-6366571
i like this rate because it really epitomizes what i like to do in RMT. the player was newer, but seemed eager to learn, and posted his team with the intent of fixing it up. when i was new (well, new to gen 6) i went through a lot of the same problems he did and had much of the same process - you can almost sort of tell that he's struggled against each of those mons when laddering and likely thought to add them to a team. i mean look, it's almost a laundry list of "things that are hard to beat if you aren't prepared" from blissey to mega sharpedo. problem is, it makes an incredibly incoherent team with no driving force.
i like this rate in particular because i think i did really well explaining not only how to fix the team, but why it didn't work originally and what changes would give it a clear, cohesive vision, which hopefully helped not just his team but also how he played the game.
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Thanks teal for an awesome interview! Feel free to leave any questions you have for him below. See you all next time
