Will you pull an Oglemi and just reserve over 9000 GSC NU analyses?
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The Well #66 - Earthworm
- Thread starter Earthworm
- Start date
how hard was it to learn the korean alphabet as an english speaker?
have you heard of the "Big Baller Brand" before?
where did the name earthworm come from? what made you stick with the clefairy avatar?
did you choose your smogon "RoA leader" banner thing? if so why ursaring? a frequent smogoff poster called Pokekids2 might be your biggest fan because of that one...
could you elaborate on your mario kart adventures? were you a speedrunner or a competitor?
favorite excel function?
did you play mtg competitively?
do you know Project Euler?
any opinion on R vs Python for data analysis?
and finally: 15.24 meter long aquatic earthworm (think a kraken but more wormy) vs pirate ship - who would win?
Have a nice day.
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CHINGUYA
what line of education led you to this path? im considering a career change and would love to work with this kind of thing.
Yes, they also happen to be my favourite Pokemon games. They kept to the nature of the original game, introduced a lot of Pokemon with great designs, added a lot of interesting mechanics, expanded the Pokemon world significantly, and had great soundtracks and cities. There is not much to dislike. I unfortunately didn't own Crystal version and was not good enough at the game to make a serious attempt at the Battle Tower at the time I was playing them anyway, but I also appreciate the additions made for the aspiring competitive trainer, which is another reason I also appreciate Emerald version a lot despite not liking the cities, new Pokemon, or music introduced in Advance so much.
It is difficult for me to explain to someone with a new-gen perspective because I am not well-versed in the new generations and therefore may not be able to make an entirely valid comparison. However, in my limited experience watching the new generations, it seems like there are not nearly as many turns where playmaking is a possibility. It seems like in the new generations, there are a lot of moves and strategies that are very stifling and leave virtually no good options available. U-Turn/Volt Switch and other similar moves have wide distribution and it seems to me that they take too much risk out of the equation, even though some forms of counterplay exist. Entry hazards seem too formulaic and without the interesting state of balance that is found in GSC metagames (the main issue in my mind being saturation of viable Stealth Rock and Defog users). Compare this to GSC where there is a valid variety of options with few ways to take the prediction that makes the game enjoyable out of the equation, appropriate distribution of powerful moves, and a very balanced Spikes game where the player is not excessively punished nor rewarded for smart plays that get the hazard setter free turns, the appropriateness of which leads to a much greater variety of strategies being viable, including stall. However, it's fair to say that there are also mechanics that are annoying to deal with, like unfair freeze mechanics and long sleep. Nevertheless, GSC is very obviously not "all stall", and weird mechanics don't matter at all as long as they are understood.
I can also appreciate the balance that can be found in RSE metagames, which is similar although it can be argued that Spikes having three layers is not an improvement and is rather an overly harsh punishment for allowing a spiker free turns.
I don't think my innovations and teams have been picked up much by most people. But I'm sure that my posts and analysis writing has influenced the metagame in various ways. I probably raised awareness about RestTalk Snorlax variants, contributed to what others started with Golem, etc. I want to emphasise that I didn't come up with most of these strategies myself, but simply writing about them probably draws attention to the strategies and gets more people to try them out.
I would rate them UU > Ubers > NU > PU.
UU has a good state of balance and rewards good play and innovation. All kinds of strategies are viable and not overpowered nor overpowering. There is a bit of a learning curve to really get into the metagame though, and not that many people are willing to spend the time to really understand the metagame.
Ubers is quite fun and it's quite possible to be innovative there as well, although sometimes the brute force of exploding Mew/Mewtwo + LK Snorlax can feel like it is too much to deal with and team building can be a bit annoying.
NU is quite balanced and fun, but there is less variety and there are some undesirable elements. The spikes game doesn't have the desirable intricacies because Pineco is a very one-dimensional, swingy Pokemon and using a spinner is a bit of a risk because you could very well not run into a Spiker at all, and the spinners are all flawed in different ways. It can be tricky to assemble an offensive squad that also has the necessary defensive elements to take on the powerful defensive Pokemon like Xatu, Ninetales, and Chinchou. However, there is still sufficient variety and room to innovate in the builder and make plays in the games.
PU predictably has the least variety and can feel like it lacks the depth of the other metagames at times. The spiker is poop which makes the even sparser range of spinners even more of a potential liability. Many threats have very limited options in terms of ways to handle them with any reliability, and there are few alternatives to the strong offensive Pokemon. This leads to a lot of teams looking similar and limited room to innovate. That said, it's still a worthwhile metagame to try out if you like trying out new metagames.
There's also a little-known GSC ZU tier now... The Spiker is metronome Togetic. It's thoroughly underexplored and subject to major changes occasionally. I've enjoyed playing it for novelty but I think the defensive strategies are a bit much with no actual spiker to keep them in check.
I've always enjoyed RSE Ubers. The variety combined with the crazy power somehow leads to an enjoyable balance. I'm scared of Noitu though, he's a monster at the RSE lower tiers.
Most changes to the tournament structure that I have supported in the past are now being implemented. The state of things is pretty good now in my opinion in terms of official tournaments. The one thing I'd like to see more of, as might be predictable from my previous answers, is tournaments focused on clever innovation and team building in alternative formats (i.e. what unofficial tournaments were like before). It's admittedly tricky to achieve this now, since most tournament players are going to be busy all year-round with the seemingly endless tournaments in all sections of the site.
It's a bit of a pipe dream, but it would be cool if everything could be plugged into a single points system. That would be one way to potentially plug those kinds of alternative formats in, provided that others see the value in deviating from the standard tiers.
Outreach is another area Smogon kind of lacks in, but given that we aren't officially sanctioned by Nintendo, I don't know how this could be improved on beyond maybe expanding into YouTube and social media more. We have an excellent team of people promoting stuff on social media now, and YouTube would be a lot of work, though.
Yep, I've been a few times. South Korea and Japan are both pretty amazing places, though I particularly like South Korea for its food, entertainment, culture, and language. They are quite technologically and socially efficient places, owing to fierce competition, their people demanding high standards of service and behaviour, and the people being more than ready to complain about any perceived defect. This also shows in the quality of their food. If you go to South Korea, you can probably benefit from a familiarity with the cuisine and planning where you will eat, and if you want to eat somewhere popular, arrive a long time in advance. Unfortunately I have heard their work culture is generally pretty bad. It is understandable that some of their people find Korean society to be stifling and look at Western society's stereotypes with envy.
Se7en, it has great acting, a fantastic build up and mystery, and then a brutal psychological ending.
Why was 6 afraid of 7?
GSC NU seems pretty stable. Hopefully we can generate some discussion about it after GSC PL. If the NU community approves of the tier I could see it getting more popular and possibly considered for NUPL again.
As for GSC PU, I have no idea what will happen with it. I guess there are two major things that could change, which is the tier list itself (i.e. whether anything gets banned) and its inclusion in PU tournaments. I have no idea how likely the latter one is and the former depends on how the community feels.
No, we have a great team working together to write and check the GSC NU analyses, and we have soft limits on how many we can reserve at once. I feel like creating a mountain of work to do is counterproductive psychologically.
I actually think it's unnecessary. The tournaments we have already seem to produce plenty of great matches, and we now have a fantastic replay viewing system and the ability to link to live matches, so there's no need to manufacture a spectacle, the system already does it for us.
Shakehand. Though sometimes if I am not playing seriously or I am playing against much weaker opposition, I try to play left-handed or with penhold.hi. you don't know me, but i'd like you to know that two of my most salient pokemon memories are 1: getting insanely lucky after you outplayed me and winning a ROA tour night because of it, and 2: not paying attention to what the tournament in ROA was (it was gsc+gen4) and being very confused when i got swept by your icebeam mamoswine in gen 2
on to the questions
It's not hard to learn the alphabet. The language is the hard part.
I have heard of it, though I had no idea what it actually was until I googled it a few seconds ago.
It was just another ladder alt I came up with on Shoddy Battle. I was pretty much just trying to come up with a name that I would not be identifiable by and picked the first thing that came to mind. I had other names prior to that.
I have had many avatars over the years and was known for some of them, like an isketch drawing of Ampharos. But I think when I returned to the forums a few years ago, I decided to scrap my avatar and the default avatar was Clefairy, which I was more than fine with. Then the defaults changed for everyone and I got Hariyama or something, but I wanted the Clefairy so I changed it to the Clefairy gif again.
There is an injoke/meme in the GSC community about Ursaring and its lack of viability in any tier due to being one of the worst UUBL Pokemon in an inflated UUBL (when compared to the sizes of UUBLs in DPP onwards). I have an alt that I occasionally play randbats in RoA tour night with that has Ursaring in it. I have also been quoted as saying how useless it is. Then Lavos beat me with a Hyper Beam Ursaring in SPL which further cemented Ursaring's meme status. I therefore thought it would be a fitting choice for my banner.
I was heavily involved in the MKDS online community. If you asked some of the top MKDS players at the time, they would probably have known me and raced me on WiFi. I also submitted time trial scores to the players' page and was in charge of updating people's submissions and checking their proof. I think the best ranking I achieved on the players' page was #16 in the world for non-PRB and #1 in Australia. I also had many thousands of WiFi races. I have fallen a long way since then though, and I am no longer anywhere near those rankings.
Probably something basic like COUNTIF or SUMIFS.
Not beyond attending a couple of Friday night things and going to the new set release events. I did terribly in those though, I was very much just a casual high school player.
I have heard of it but I wouldn't say I know it.
I have fairly limited experience with both unfortunately (though I have used them both). So I'm not able to comment much. I have found Python pretty fun when I have used it but haven't used it extensively enough to form this kind of opinion.
Seems to me like a pirate ship would be fairly ill-equipped to combat a huge aquatic earthworm unless it exposed itself in the air.
My background is in computer science. Seems like computer science is really useful if you want to work in this area, as well as statistics and some mathematics. What are you currently doing?
