RoAPL 3 Team Interview of the Week #7: Viridian Vaporeons
Interview took place after the conclusion of RoAPL 3.
Lutra: For our antepenultimate interview, p2, manager of Viridian Vaporeon joins us. p2, your team were quite close to making playoffs, finishing 5th in the end, what was your highlight of RoAPL 3?
p2: hm I'm not really too sure, I would say that RoAPL3 reminded me of SPL a little in that our team struggled a lot in the earlier weeks and we really just took off in the later weeks, but this time we fell short of playoffs instead of just narrowly clinching it. I enjoyed the whole tour overall really but I don't think there were too many stand out moments.
Lutra: Malekith went undefeated throughout the whole season, were there other players you were impressed by? You seemed to do quite well in ORAS too.
p2: I would say I was impressed most with miltankmilk who despite being a double main quickly picked up BW and adapted to the tier and did pretty well in the weeks he played. 1 True Lycan and Lax also did well whenever they played but there was a fair bit of competition in the ORAS slots so it was a bit of a struggle letting everyone play.
Lutra: Did you get the players you wanted during the auction?
p2: Yeah I was happy with my draft, one player I really tried to get though was choolio, but Foggi insisted on upbidding to 25k for whatever reason. Some others I wouldn't have minded having were Pearl, Level 56 and UD but unfortunately they both went for high prices too. But overall I was happy with the draft and the team.
Lutra: What role did your assistant manager, Ice Tea, play?
p2: Ict didn't really do that much outside of the auction but I wasn't really expecting him to, I just asked him to join as assman for the sake of it really. He was useful in the auction though because he nommed and upbidded on players I don't think I would have upbidded myself, mostly due to not knowing them a whole lot.
Lutra: Vaporeons ending up playing every battle except the activity win for Malekith, did you try to pick active players during the auction?
p2: Yea we mostly just drafted with the hopes that people would get their games done and at least try to have some sort of backup for inactivity. That kind of happened with Jayde when he just didn't play any games and completely bailed pretty much which was annoying for us since we were just trying to upbid him anyway and that clearly backfired, burning us nearly 30k credits for nothing. Luckily we did have plenty of players to play in Jayde's slot so it wasn't too big a deal, but still a pain to deal with regardless.
Lutra: Were there players you think got unlucky and deserved a higher record?
p2: Yea I think Star in particular deserved a better record because he's definitely shown competence at high level ADV as shown by his deep ADV cup run, but things just didn't go his way in this season. Slurmz and Sabella also didn't have the greatest runs but I know they're both more than capable of doing better.
Lutra: Did you teambuild in any tiers for any of your players or give advice?
p2: I mainly helped out in ORAS for prep, I gave teams and suggested ideas for my teams opps. I didn't have so much experience in building in the other gens, but I knew my players had access to teams from others, for example I know Star had teams from Ojama while miltankmilk had teams from McMeghan and Finchinator, so in terms of teambuilding we were solid.
Lutra: How important do you think analyses are in helping develop newer old gen players?
p2: Just for clarity, do you mean analyses as in the Smogdex and such, or other things like in-depth game analyses posted on the forum or yt channels
Lutra: In the smogdex.
p2: I think the smogdex and analyses there are good resources for letting players know what is meta-relevant and what to expect from mons and what they do, but I know many other players agree with me in that they're fairly outdated. I actually read this discussion on the tours discord from the other day and many adv players like UD and Asta were talking about how outdated the sets / spreads are. I do agree that there is a lot of uneccesary stuff on there (Charizard has 6 ADV sets for example..), I can't speak too much for DPP and BW, but I believe they suffer from being slightly outdated too, just to a much smaller degree. They're still useful regardless though
Lutra: Do you see up-to-date analyses being more useful though?
p2: Yes, definitely.
Lutra: Tell us about your history. You seem quite a recent player.
p2: I've always been an avid Pokemon fan especially when I was younger, I kind of took a break from Pokemon in general because I felt I had "grown out of it", but a couple of years later I decided to play BW on cart and I kind of just found myself coming back to the game, I discovered PS in early 2014, around the time of the Genesect ban in XY where I played really casually and never really had a grip of how the game worked properly, obviously I just learned more, read up on articles from smogon and then I signed up in October 2014. Not much happened for a couple of months but I just kept learning and trying to improve myself and then came WCoP 2015, I tried to get onto the team when it was still run by problems, but unfortunately I never made it, so I just kept at it. I would say around this time I also did alright in the first RBY cup, and I discovered pokemonperfect where I kind of built on learning RBY there for a bit. Not much else happened in 2015, I tried to get drafted in SPL7 too but that didn't work out either.
Then 2016 was a fairly quiet year until WCoP rolled around again, this time problems quit and there were fewer motivated players, but I managed to get myself a slot on the team that year, I put myself as a sub because I would either sub in RBY or ORAS depending on whether our RBY prospect could pull through or if some other issue came up. Gingy couldn't play so I subbed myself over him and went 2-0 and finished the 3-0 in that pool. I feel this WCoP (and possibly POCL where i went 5-2 too) really let me break through and establish myself as a player, then came SPL8 and I found myself drafted and through some miracles, ended up winning the tour.
Now I'm kind of just on the grind to keep on top of the SM OU meta and to keep improving, while still dabbling in old gens and building up my experience in these tiers as much as I can.
Lutra: Interesting, you have quite a lot of badges on the forums. Did you work specifically for some or did you just happen to earn them while being interested in making the particular contributions?
p2: You could say I was a bit of a badgewhore earlier but I did come to the realisation that they don't mean much, but that doesn't change the fact that I do actually enjoy what I do on the forum, whether it's simply posting in OU or C&C. I enjoy it a lot and I feel one of the main issues with the forum is the lack of interaction between tour/experienced players and the general community, especially in the current gen but I can understand why the level of interaction is so low.
Lutra: What are your favourite old gen tournaments?
p2: I enjoy everything really, team tours with old gens are probably the best, things like LCPL in particular since I'm a pretty big fan of DPP LC. I'm a fan of the Smogon Classic too since it's a format that requires extensive knowledge across multiple gens if you want to do well, + trophy tours are always great.
Lutra: How long do you see yourself playing competitive Pokémon online?
p2: I honestly don't know, I've been playing for what, 3 years now and I've not shown any signs of burning out interest yet, Pokemon is a game with infinite possibilites and I legitimately enjoy it, despite calling it bad, shitty, etc after seeing games where RNG completely warps the outcome. I think Pokemon is a game I'm going to be playing for a long time unless I just completely burn out but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Lutra: Do you have any specific goals to achieve in Pokémon, like winning a particular tournament?
p2: As with a lot of other people, I would really like to win an individual tournament, and I feel I've hit the point where I can perform at the level required to win one, but my main concern with myself is the lack of consistency. I've never really gotten any good results in individual tours and my status as a player all comes from team tours, but at least I know the main things I've got to work on if I really want to pull it off. Anyway, for individual tours, I would like to make a deep run in the Grand Slam this year because I actually enjoy lower tiers this gen + who doesn't want that teal trophy? If OLT is still around this year, I do plan to try do well in it too, I've been constantly laddering all of this gen and I hope to apply skills I've picked up over the last year and try to actually qualify this year.
Lutra: Thank you very much for your answers. Anything else you want to tell us?
p2: No, I don't think so. Thanks for having me!