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Time for a bit of a throwback with our next interview, A long time member of the community and overall deadly force, Transco!

View the other interviews from this series:

• Interview #1: Frikinin
• Interview #2: OliveOily
• Interview #3: Readek
• Interview #4: TheDripCollector
• Interview #5: Transco (you are here)
• Interview #6: Fireicey
• Interview #7: hok0ri

Who are you?

Online, My name is Viktor Eriksson and I am from a small town called Skelleftea in Sweden. Online in Discord/roa and many other games I go by the name Transco.

When did you first join the community?

I found Rivals of Aether randomly on steam. At the time I was practicing/competing in Smash 64, and learning the basics of melee. the pixel style, how smooth it was and the short Q time got me hooked.

I felt that my earlier platform fighter experience translated quite well also. After some weeks of online play I looked it up on reddit and found out that tournaments were being held through an app called “Discord”.

I downloaded Discord and joined the community, entering my first tournament around October 2015.

What has been your best/favourite moment with Rivals?

I think being a part of the community throughout the years, meeting up at locals and making friends along the way (the cheesy answer but also true).

How would you describe your playstyle in Rivals?

I have not been the lab type of player, studying replays or anything like that. Learning by doing has been my general way to go. In Rivals I was rewarded for having a more read based / aggresive type of playstyle which made it all so much fun.

What are you looking forward to most in Rivals 2?

I love platform fighters in general, and taking the good parts of Rivals and adding some Melee mechanics onto looks promising, I will of course play it but I am not sure if I will be competing, depends how hooked I get.

Any closing statements?

Still and always will be grateful for the time with the community and Rivals of Aether. Altho I am retired now and stacked with life (becoming a dad) I can’t wait to play with you all in Rivals of Aether 2.

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

I couldn’t do these interviews without including the rising star of our community, RCS Season 8 Champion: TheDripCollector!

View the other interviews from this series:

• Interview #1: Frikinin
• Interview #2: OliveOily
• Interview #3: Readek
• Interview #4: TheDripCollector (you are here)
• Interview #5: Transco
• Interview #6: Fireicey
• Interview #7: hok0ri

Who are you?

Online, I’m known as TheDripCollector, but my real name is Julian.
I’m a Dutch kid who joined this community fairly late but managed to grind to the position of current 2nd in the region in the span of two seasons.

When did you first join the community?

I bought the game around early 2020 because I wanted to try out workshop characters, though that was just with friends and I didn’t join the community during this time.
I revisited the game during august 2021 because Ultimate wasn’t fun for me anymore and I wanted to try a platform fighter with better competitive gameplay, but I got discouraged and didn’t play for more than one week. I really wanted to play Ranno after seeing Chengi’s Rocket Frog, but I couldn’t get a good feel for hitfalling and didn’t feel like anyone in the cast actually clicked with me. I joined some RoA Discord servers when this was happening, but I quickly left those.
Then, when the workshop 4 came out in February 2022, I decided to try playing the game again to see if I enjoyed playing any of the new characters.
I ended up really liking Olympia when I was new (because she was overtuned) and that kept me around long enough to develop a better feel for the engine and branch out to other characters.

What has been your best/favourite moment with Rivals?

A little after I got banned from EURAS, I entered a bracket featuring three PR’d players, Bleb. Hukon and Lucy.
During this time, I was trying very hard to get better. I had some doubts about ever making it past mid-level, and my ban helped a lot with my confidence.
Regardless, my mentality was not good at this point, I had little confidence in myself as a player and tied my results heavily to my skill level due to inexperience.
Back then, taking even a game off any of those players felt impossible to me. I was also still very nervous about entering brackets.
Still, I wanted to get better so I entered. I expected to go 0-2, but I then beat Hukon in winners game 5. After I won that set, I also beat Bleb game 4. Finally, I 3-0’d him in the runback. My friends were popping off for me while this was all going on, and it was the most happy I’ve felt with winning a bracket to this day. Double eliminating Fireicey during one of the weeklies was a close second, but overall, I’m still happier with the former bracket win, and I’ve always considered it an important bracket in my progress as a player.

How would you describe your playstyle in Rivals?

I try to take away my opponent’s stage control through good usage of my movement, pressuring them into the corner and delaying my timings to bait out attacks I can then punish. Wrastor can’t trade very well with his opponent, so I like to throw out a shorthop slipstream into jab to minimize the chance of a limb getting hit. If slipstream is already out in neutral, I mostly look for openings off down tilt. My punish game is a mix of reacting and DI reads, the latter being done through conditioning or abusing the unreactable hitpause on Wrastor’s moves to cover the DI my opponent is most likely to do. During combos, I’m always looking to at least push my opponent offstage, so I can alternate between going offstage to take away resources or staying onstage to delay timings to hit my opponent offstage again. I use a lot of tricks to help myself recover better, namely that some of his aerials make him rise, double jump protection and hitfalling tornado.

What are you looking forward to most in Rivals 2?

There are two things that I’m really looking forward to in Rivals 2, those being the new characters that are being added and the potential of maintaining a bigger playerbase than the first game could achieve. The returning characters from RoA have obviously been changed, either directly or indirectly through the differences in the engine, and felt off because I couldn’t adjust to their new feel during the little time I was able to test Rivals 2. There’s a good chance I’ll be playing one of the newcomers so I have a clean slate with no version of the character’s feel in RoA in my mind. If I end up having the same passion for Rivals 2 as for RoA, I’d love sharing it with more people entering the scene.

Any closing statements?

RoA has become my favorite game of all time during my time spent playing it and improving at it, and it’s what introduced me to competition as well.
It’s too soon for me to say if I’ll like the sequel enough to try my hand at grinding it when it releases, but I’m sure I’ll stay in the community and play it a lot.
Also, for the people who are in my Discord server, Furizz, Gyatty Skibithree (yes, that’s its real name), you’re all awesome.

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

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

View the other interviews from this series:

• Interview #1: Frikinin
• Interview #2: OliveOily
• Interview #3: Readek (you are here)
• Interview #4: TheDripCollector
• Interview #5: Transco
• Interview #6: Fireicey
• Interview #7: hok0ri

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!

Welcome back, today I’m here with the interview of one of our best competitors, TO and old community leader, OliveOily!

View the other interviews from this series:

• Interview #1: Frikinin
• Interview #2: OliveOily (you are here)
• Interview #3: Readek
• Interview #4: TheDripCollector
• Interview #5: Transco
• Interview #6: Fireicey
• Interview #7: hok0ri

Who are you?

I’m OliveOily! A Dutch top Wrastor player. I’ve been a TO, I’ve been our community leader, and I’ve been just a competitor. I used to TO a lot, including my own local series and the official online RCS events.

These days I mostly just play at offline events, never want to miss a chance to meet up with the community.

When did you first join the community?

I first joined the community back in early 2017 though it took me a while to actually get invested and become a consistently present member of the community. I remember I first played the game just before Etalus was added.

What has been your best/favourite moment with Rivals?

It’s hard to pinpoint a single favourite moment. Winning Albion, or getting top 8 at Genesis are the first that come to mind. It’s not so much single moments that makes my time with Rivals so great. It’s the people I met through it. Most my friends, and most importantly my girlfriend are people I only got to get this close with because of Rivals events.

How would you describe your playstyle in Rivals?

Back when I was ranked the highest I ever was, and when there were the most events for me to travel out to, I tried to always strike second. Stay back, move a lot, and see if you can whiff punish everything with a quick down tilt. After the lockdown paused all locals I came back a bit more aggressive, but I want to go back to that playstyle.

What are you looking forward to most in Rivals 2?

What I’m looking forward to most in Rivals 2 is seeing new characters come to life. I’ve always been one of those people that go on and on about the scraps of lore the Rivals universe has. Seeing more of that come to life and become “real” will be great. I’m really hoping to see more story mode characters get to be in the game. Loxodont, Mayreed, that sort of thing.

Any closing statements?

I’d like to tell everyone to attend an international tournament if you can. Before lockdown we were getting players from so many different places coming together to make a big event. Ever since offline events had to take a break we’ve not seen one of those events happen again. A last one for Rivals 1 would be amazing.

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

Hello everyone, I am hok0ri and as part of this RCS season, I have had the opportunity to interview a few of the European community members, from those who have been here for a long while and cemented their place to members that have joined us more recently. I gave the following members the same questions, and it was really nice to hear their answers and see what they think of their time in RoAEU.

View the other interviews from this series:

• Interview #1: Frikinin (you are here)
• Interview #2: OliveOily
• Interview #3: Readek
• Interview #4: TheDripCollector
• Interview #5: Transco
• Interview #6: Fireicey
• Interview #7: hok0ri

For our first interview we have the king of good mornings and wonderful TO, Frikinin.

Who are you?

Good morning! ❤️

My name’s Frik, 24, single. I’m from Badalona, Catalonia. Though I’ve been playing rivals since before Absa and Etalus even came out, I’m mostly known for my contributions as a TO and as a moderator in the european and spanish communities.

I am *very* aware of most mistakes I’ve realised I’ve made, but people seem to be very thankful of my job here, so maybe it’s just me being too self-aware. At the end of the day, I just want everyone to have fun playing this good old *furry trash smash*.

When did you first join the community?

As I said, I got the game a long time ago, though I didn’t join the community until about early 2017. For the most part I was just in the small spanish community, and on some rare occasion, I’d go to EUcord to have some small chat or enter a Supernova or RCS.

Then, early in 2018, following the failed Nova League, Readek and I tried to follow up with Rivalry. It was a bit of a mess, but we managed to actually finish it! This effort got me closer to the EU community, but what finally drew me in full was attending Traction 4 later that year. I might be a pretty antisocial dude, but meeting so many people in real life kinda is a life-changing experience.

What has been your best/favourite moment with Rivals?

Well, it has to be either Traction 4 or 5.

4 got me to take the step to fully enter the community. Even if I felt lost, I felt incredibly welcomed by Oily, Slime, Mayoi, and… basically everyone. I wouldn’t still be here if it wasn’t for that weekend.

5 was fun. Incredibly fun. It turns out that not being socially awkward makes you enjoy gaming more! Readek was also in charge of stream production™, and I spent a lot of time next to him helping him run that hell, subbing for him when his time to play came, and even come up with some ideas on the spot *(Remember that clip of Fireicey popping off from the end of that year’s PR? That was me!)*. It turns out that being involved with the production of a thing makes you enjoy it a lot!

How would you describe your playstyle in Rivals?

Have you ever heard about epicondylitis? Tennis elbow? It means there’s an inflammation in your elbow’s tendons that makes your whole arm hurt badly. There’s also a chance for it to be chronic.

I haven’t really played much Rivals since mid-2020. Me getting diagnosed with epicondylitis happened to coincide with Oily stepping down as the RCS TO, which is a neat coincidence, and the reason I took the “job”.

My playstyle as a TO is to try to maximise everyone’s fun. I guess that’s what everyone who’s doing this as volunteer work is doing, but I like to add a bit of empathy to every DQ related to bad connections, thank everyone who joins for their time, and generally try to create a good mood in chat in the middle of an ocean of @pings for sets and salty 0-2’ers.

If the powers that be force me to talk about my actual playstyle, I think the best description is “intentional stupidity”. By that I mean, I’m aware I suck. My best placing is a 6th (wasn’t better because I had to leave) at EURAS, many moons ago; and I haven’t really put much effort into labbing or grinding. At some point I guess I just decided the funniest approach would be to embrace sucking so much, and fishing for stuff that shouldn’t work. A random fstrong in neutral sounds as such a bad idea that many players around my level don’t consider it “an option their opponent will use”. But it works! Sometimes! Usually only once in the set! And I get to have a laugh, which is the most important part of the game!

What are you looking forward to most in Rivals 2?

Not much, I guess? There’s a chance that not being able to play has gotten me a bit disinterested in how Rivals 2 will come out. I’ll say, though, that it looks great! If I can let the TO inside me speak, I’m just hoping the new rollback saves us a lot of trouble and DQ’s!

Any closing statements?

Someone will have to fact-check me on this, but I’m probably the only “player” in here who has never PR’d, so it’s an honor to be here typing these words! I’m glad me being here running a discord or some brackets has brought joy to a few hundred people.

Oh, and take care of your body: Remember to sit upright and keep a comfortable position at all times!

Good morning! ❤

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