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!
