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Welcome to the Featured Rater project! This is a series of interviews where we ask 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 Analytic, IronBullet and myself. Our twenty second interviewee is mil, RMT's newest moderator who has put in a ton of hard work and effort into the forum!mil
Tell us a little bit about your life outside Smogon.
At the moment I'm studying computer science in Germany. I'm at the end of the bachelor now, only need to finish the thesis. I think I'll continue to study and specialize in embedded systems. In a few years I plan to work in an international IT company (or maybe found an own one), which has its seats in Asian countries like China and Japan. In my free time I like to do exercises, train fighting sports, mainly wrestling (and boxing which I started recently). My goal is to have learned the basics in several fighting sports before I'm 30, on the list are Muai Thai, Wing Tsun and some more. (My goal before 40 btw is being a millionaire lol, let's see). Then there are languages I really enjoy studying, mainly Chinese and Japanese. It's really fun to learn them and I hope I can find use for it in the future.
What is your main tier? Do you rate teams from any other tiers?
Only Oras Ou. I got to know about PS during end of XY and started playing with ridiculous teams, then in ORAS I started to get active on smogon too.
When did you start rating and why?
First I helped people in the RMT room, under several alts like shui3, shui4,... I rated a lot of teams through pm, maybe 100 in total. The reason for that was to improve my teambuilding skills and to gain subs for my YouTube channel, but later I didn't care about youtube anymore and it just felt good to help people, while having teams and team ideas to work with. I'd say the RMT room has an unlimited source of team ideas with its hundreds of pastebins per day. At the same time I learned the basics from AM first, he pointed me in the right direction, showing me most important things. Then we moved on to battling regularly, testing the teams. Then I thought having and RMT badge would be cool and I was sure I had the necessary skills to get it. There were nice people in RMT and I liked them, so I kept rating and got to know many new people.
Are there any raters who you looked up to when you started rating?
I can't really say I looked at a few single people. When I started working for the badge I read the rates of celes, Nedor, to compare, who both were trying to get the badge at that time too. So there was some sort of competition going on, which helped us improve and push ourselves. Then I tried to read all of the official team raters rates at that time, to really get the "TR flow" in all aspects of my rating. Later after getting the badge, people who I looked up to were Reymedy and IB. Rey gave me the final polish team building and battle skill wise I'd say and IB is a great role model.
What do you most enjoy about rating?
what I enjoy most about rating is the fact that you have to go deep into the teams strategy, simulating the game in your brain turn per turn, feeling the momentum of the team while doing everything to make the wincons of the team win. Of course there's helping people with their team, but if I'm honest at that point I'm a bit selfish, I also rate for personal gain, because with every rate I feel like I improve my teambuilding skills, nevertheless its nice if it helps other people too.
Do you follow a process with your rates?
Like in the answer above, I try to find the teams strategy and make it win more effectively, while covering the most important threats in OU. In the end I reflect on my changes and their pros and cons. I gather everything I have in mind in headwords. From there I try to structure my thoughts and put them in a way so that when others read it they can follow or even learn from it.
Do you have any words of advice for aspiring raters out there?
Just watch a lot of replays of high quality matches, read as many rates from team raters as possible, build as much as you can and most importantly:
Get yourself a mentor (or more) and listen to their advice carefully, even save their words to be able to read it again, that will speed things up a lot.
Do you like the direction the RMT forum is taking at the moment? If you could change something, what would it be?
I like the direction right now, I feel like we have more communication with people who want to participate in RMT now. Making it even more lively and also a fun place for people to hang out and do stuff is the direction I want to see it going. It's mainly about having fun on this website isn't it?
As RMT's newest moderator, do you think there's any way in which we could enforce the basic RMT rules so that more people would follow them?
Minimum post lengths for RMTs, so we don't have to lock and delete as mods.
A big disclaimer before a user starts a threat in RMT pointing out the rules, with a 60 seconds or so time limit so you forced to look at the rules to be able to start writing the post.
Apart from the current activities going on in RMT, do you have any projects in mind that could potentially be run in the forum?
Maybe I/we have something in mind, but I won't tell rignt now till the idea is planned out n_n
Other project spoiler: Rating League 2.0 ?
Do you have an RMT or a team you could share with us?
This team has Pursuit M-Scizor as support, coupled with Band Terrakion and Manaphy as breakers to exploit trapping psychic types. Choice Scarf Landorus works as a late game cleaner and grab momentum. Amoonguss and Heatran work well together and cover a lot in the meta. xray used it in wcop here.
Lastly, can you give us an example of a rate that exemplifies your particular style?
I really like this one. I think I did a good job improving the teams offensive and defensive capabilities while dealing with most of OU defensively. Using sprites pleases the eyes and that way I can structure better and talk about each change seperately.
Btw the Rating League tread is full of solid examples of rates so I recommend taking a look at it.
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Thanks for taking the time to do this man! Feel free to leave any questions you'd like to ask mil below.
