Approved by 5gen & S1nn0hC0nfirm3d | Amazing Art by Albatr0ss and butchered by me | Thread formatting stolen from Jett
(Interview Date: 12th and 14th of November, 2021)
Hey friends and welcome to ZU
Ditto used Transform!
Ditto transformed into Shellos!
*sheeeellos*
Hey OBB, how are you doing today?
Pretty good, not doing much rn (apart from having to recover from just losing to the worst zu player ever)
Did you also play Tuthur today? I didn't know, kinda awful to lose twice in the same day though! I'm glad to have you here in player of the week and looking forward to this interview! As usual, do you wanna tell us a bit about yourself outside of Pokémon?
Sure, I'm a farmaceuticals student from Leuven, which is pretty much in the center of Belgium and known for its great universities (and also for having bikes thrown in its rivers ig). Did a year of physics before which was interesting but I didn't have the discipline to keep up with it. Love playing games and listening to music (even if that's the most cliché and uninteresting answer ever). I also technically play the piano but haven't played in months. If you meant personality-wise idk where to begin except to say that I'm obviously very funny (pls laugh at my bad jokes).
That's a lot of great info. Well, let's start with your major then. What made you choose pharmceuticals as your major? Have you always been interested in both fields?
I've always wanted to do something scientific, and the biology of the human body is very interesting to me. When I was younger I wanted to be an astronomer, but I've changed my mind a couple of times since then.
I've always had the same interests as well, but always leaned more into Chemistry. You said you like playing games. Which ones are your favorites?
Mostly Nintendo games, some standouts for me would be Mario Galaxy 1 &2, Three Houses and Majora's Mask. Big fan of Minecraft too, I've played a lot of random stuff though. Recently I've picked up Undertale which I've somehow not done earlier.
So you're more of a single player kind of guy? I also gravitate a lot towards games like that. Do you play any other multiplayer game that isn't Pokemon or Minecraft?
I've dabbled in smash but I suck at it, the borderlands series was fun but other than that can't really think of a lot (I might be missing something though). Does Among Us count? I feel like it doesn't bc everybody's played it (when in doubt, vote out toto btw). I quite like multiplayer games but now that you mention it ig I do gravitate more towards singleplayer. I feel like good singleplayer games are harder to make as opposed to good multiplayer games (since the people ur playing with/against are gonna matter more a lot of the time) which also makes them better in some ways. Anyway I'm not a game critic I could just be talking out of my ass lol.
Yeah, there are just very few multiplayer games out there i really enjoy. Now into music! You said you play the piano so i'm curious! How long have you been playing? Do you consider yourself to be good? What songs do you like to play the most?
That's a lot of questions. I've been playing for about 6 years, I do not consider myself to be good, have mostly played classical music, haven't really had the time to try something else recently. When I was a lot younger I tried to compose but it never amounted to more than a couple of jingles. The 'math' behind 'solfège' is very interesting imo.
That's cool. What other kind of music do you like? Any favorite artists/genres?
Oh I like a bunch of stuff, whenever people ask me this question I find it hard to pinpoint stuff. I like a lot of game music but that's neither here nor there. Can't really say I have favorite artists or genres, my taste tends to shift a lot (mb for being kinda unresponsive). Even something like rap that tries really hard to be bad can be worthwhile (maybe sometimes in theory surely)
No problem, I'm just trying to fish for info. You don't need to have an answer to everything. What do you like to watch? Any favorite movies or TV shows?
Not really into TV shows, I've liked a bunch of series like The Big Bang Theory or Lucifer recently tho. Some series that I'd definitely also recommend are House, Frasier or Black Sails. I don't really watch a lot of series/movies altogether tho so i'm probably not up to date on the "meta".
Good picks. Now let's change the topic a bit. How did you get started on PS/Smogon? How did you end up in ZU of all metagames?
I got started on PS about 18 months ago. The unis going on lockdown meant I was gonna be spending a lot more time online. The idea of instantly building your own teams seemed fun so I was like 'why not?'. I didn't really have a particular tier in mind at that time, one of my first teams was like 5 nfe's and a Greedent lol. Since I liked using eviolite mons I was drawn to NFE and played it a bunch, quickly establishing myself as one of the new bad players. Since NFE doesn't have tier shifts I wanted to try something else as well and I noticed that ZU had a lot of NFE mons too, as well as reading a post about the most recent bans (which at the time was elecvally). I tried it out because it appealed to me (pyuk was broken back then btw I swear) and it just kinda stuck. I eventually got voiced and became a less bad player along the way, even getting a win vs some random washed player in my first zupl game (because somehow Swoobat was legal I'm still salty about that).
Yeah, you definitely improved a lot since you joined the community. Glad you stuck around for that long! Rotom just recently escaped the banhammer in the suspect and you voted "Do not ban". What are your thoughts on the current metagame and why did you vote that way in the suspect?
I've seen a lot of criticism about the current metagame but I actually quite like it and I think there's a lot of room for creativity. At the very least I personally am having fun building in it. About rotom, I think it is beyond a shadow of a doubt the best and most flexible mon in the meta not to mention being extremely punishing when combined with general good play. It was definitely a good choice for a suspect (unlike say alcremie which isn't/wasn't even close to broken) but each set still has clear flaws. Scarf is weak and abusable, specs is a bit too slow, np can't pivot and all defog/wisp etc sets don't have the bulk to switch into a lot of hits they want to like rhydon edge or a-slash knock. Something that i feel is often overlooked when discussing rotom is that bad predictions made by the rotom player can just as easily skew the game out of your favor. (scarf sballing into a thievul, volting on a fisk, wisping a tales/dash for example) Despite that I still think there is a lot of potential in builds that focus on overwhelming grounds (in which rotom would obviously play a key part) like say subtox mane + specs rotom + np skunk to play around the ground tax that builds usally require (feels almost as heavy as the grass tax sometimes). These kinds of builds could be considered overwhelming in the future but that's mostly theorymonning and rn rotom feels doable to play around. And since I felt there was enough reasonable doubt considering its potential brokenness I decided to vote dnb.
That's an interesting take in the meta that i partially agree with. I just think Rotom is way too low risk/high reward to be balanced in this metagame personally. Considering you're our shadow tier leader, if you could choose the next suspect for SS ZU, what would it be? Could be a retest too
Idt anything currently in the metagame is worthy of a suspect test, ig Thievul would be the closest but that mon has massive trouble switching into anything (also sawk is bad just use god shroom). While I would support a retest of anything not named turtonator (I've seen people suggesting a turt retest and I could go on for hours about why I think their arguments are flawed) out of sheer 'practice > theory' principle, something I've got my eye on is Magmortar. While we did lose some checks to it, Centiskorch made it so much more broken since checking both of them was really difficult w/o using altaria, as opposed to now where checking all fires (including mag) is easier in the builder. Some meta shifts like the rise of dash would also make its life harder, most notably giving it a painful sands vs focus 4mss. I also heavily agree with tuthur on the grassy seed matter, twas such a hasty ban and idt people are/were using enough dark types in general which have a good mu vs gterrain teams (at least the gseed spam ones for which gseed was banned anyway). Adaptation was/is definitely possible even if it would still be a powerful mu fish. So Magmortar and Grassy Seed would be my top two candidates for a retest but I'm down for trying out anything that's not turt (bc once again that mon is not even close to fair and it would balance centi causing a loop and all its check get chipped and gallade helped a lot with it but that's gone now and (insert more rambling)).
That's alright, I think Thievul has potential of being problematic in the future. Do you have a team you'd like to share with us?
oooh that's tough, I love talking about how a team works, it'll be hard choosing one.
v1:
v2:
(small)v3:
Oh, thanks for the multiple versions! That should be nice to give players a view on how your building process works. We are starting to wrap this up so, is there anything you want to say? Anyone you want to shout out?
Shoutouts are never not a trap since there's always someone you forget. The ZU community in general is very cool and if I started doing shoutouts I wouldn't end since there's genuinely a lot of people who've been more than good to me. (I didn't get to make a 20 page monologue about why shiinotic is great tho but such is life amirite?)
Well, Shiinotic is at least ranked, unlike Palpitoad. Thanks for the shoutouts and for letting me interview you and i hope you enjoyed being in Player of the Week!
I did, and ty for being such a patient interviewer!
Feel free to ask to OranBerryBlissey10 any questions you want!
