The People of Rivals of Aether: Europe – Readek

This article is part of a community-made interview series featuring some of the top players and volunteers behind the grassroots European scene.

Hello again! for the third interview we have the one and only head of production, Readek!

View the other interviews from this series:

Who are you?

I’m your favorite Rivals of Aether production guy! I’m the one behind almost all EU RCS streams, as well as the one behind the production of some other big events from both EU and NA!

I’m also the creator of many popular tools for the RoA community, like the Stream Tool, the Recolorer, and the Replay Reader!

And I’m also the current owner of the RoA EU discord server, an active community hosting non-stop weekly tournaments and events for thousands of players.

And of course, while not active anymore, I’m also a Maypul/Ori player that got serious about playing competitively some years ago, even reaching EU’s PR a couple of times.

When did you first join the community?

I first saw Rivals of Aether for the first time around when Maypul got announced in Early Access. Back then I thought Maypul was the game’s main character! I gathered a bit of info about the game on the Steam page, but while the idea of having Smash on PC was an interesting one, since I knew next to nothing about the game and no one I knew was playing it, I just closed the tab.

But it came back! Just before the game got its 1.0 release, the popular youtuber Alpharad released a video about the game that got pretty popular. And while I didn’t see it, my friends did, and told me about this game that looked like a competitive Smash game, on PC! So the stars aligned, and I bought the game, quickly maining Maypul and joining the Spanish community, which back then was pretty active with weekly tournaments. And with the next EU RCS season, I ended up joining the EU community as well.

After getting some good placements, I progressively started playing less and less in favor of focusing more on the production of tournament streams and the developing of the different tools I made for the community.

My final year as an active player was Season 7, where I played 2v2 almost exclusively. I enjoy it way more than singles! I ran many doubles tournaments for a while, until the numbers made it difficult to continue hosting them.

Right now, I very rarely play the game. I guess I’m on cooldown until Rivals 2 drops!

What has been your best/favourite moment with Rivals?

Hard to say! I think the one moment that stuck with me was back in EU RCS S6 finals, at Grand Finals. I rushed a Grand Finals intro that very same day and prayed that nothing would break (because many things could!), but in the end everything went perfectly, the commentators did an amazing job, and we got to show one of the most hype Grand Finals intro transitions in RoA’s production history! A perfect end for the season.

How would you describe your playstyle in Rivals?

In one word? Messy. Ok let me explain. I’ve always liked fast characters in fighting games, so of course I gravitated towards Maypul when I first began. Then Ori was released and mained that one too. That’s right, for the entirety of my RoA competitive careeer, I dual-mained the 2 characters, which to be fair, are pretty similar!

Now, I said my playstyle was messy because while I took the game somewhat seriously, I was never a player who ever booted training mode, let alone practice combos on my own. Everything I got was field experience, and I lacked the theory. This resulted in intuition taking the lead, and while making good decisions on a fight carried me forwards, constantly dropping combos or miss-inputing commands held me back. People didn’t call me SDek for nothing!

What are you looking forward to most in Rivals 2?

As a production guy, my wish is clear. A proper e-spectator mode! This would make the tournament experience way more hype, as nowadays everyone knows the end result before Grand Finals even began. This would also make other formats like crew battles way more fun to stream. It’s always been really hard to stream those with RoA 1!

As a player, however, my wish is also clear. Proper 2v2 mode! RoA’s doubles matches are insanely held back by netcode, the fact that network has to be perfect for the gamemode to be enjoyable made it really difficult for anyone to take the format seriously, and as the self-proclaimed number one fan of RoA’s 2v2 matches, being able to play teams online would make me really happy.

Any closing statements?

I never expected this game to be such a big part of my life back when I bought it. This community has been amazing, I’ve met so many cool people on here, and I’ve personally grown in many ways thanks to all of you!

I’m sure many things will change with the release of the next game, but I’m ready for that. I’m optimistic about it, and when that happens, I’ll be there!

Join me Wednesday as we continue The People of Rivals of Aether: Europe!