Interview with kokoloko

yes hi hello, outside the land of smogon i'm known as dave. i went to university for two years and received an associates in business, then attempted to go for a masters in economics but i quickly realized i detested economics, which led me to drop out of school to pursue what i truly love to do: cooking.

i am currently working as a lead cook at a restaurant in maplewood, nj, and plan to further that career as much as i can.

also i'm guatemalan, but look straight-up white.

pretty much anything. it's a rotating menu so it could be italian one day and mediterranean the next. i've learned so much over the past couple of years that i could pretty much cook up whatever you asked me to right now, lol.

nah, i'm not into reality tv at all. 90% of the shit you see on those shows is purely for the sake of the show. i refuse to believe the kids on masterchef junior are that fucking amazing, but if they actually are that good, then i'm not quite at that level yet, lol.

lol yeah, i've considered changing it before but i think i'm way past the point of name-recognition where it would be acceptable to change it. anyway, it's actually a nickname my older cousin called me when i was about, idk, 8? it means "crazy head" in spanish. it's not spelled with k's, though.

kind of a long story. i first found smogon on a beautiful summer day in 2009 when i was bored and looking up old pastimes. i decided to join and lurked for quite a while before making a post, and as many people do, it was an RMT. the team wasn't so great, but i realized after playing on shoddy for a while that the game was kind of fun, so i kept playing it.

then one day, i was on a laddering binge and got hazed something like 12 or 13 games in a row, and in my blind rage, i decided to uninstall shoddy and migrate to pokémon online as it was getting its start-up. i spent a good year and a half there—i was the uu tier leader there too, btw—but eventually problems between me and coyotte508 led to my return to smogon alongside a bunch of people whom you probably recognize nowadays: crashinboombang, django, ginku, and a few others.

when i migrated back to smogon from PO, i started laddering a lot on the server and coming on IRC. there just so happened to be some open spots in the uu council at the time so jabba gave me one. a few weeks later, snunch, who was the council leader at the time, decided to quit, and since i was the most dedicated, jabba gave me the spot.

over time, he kind of faded into the background and i pretty much led the tier by myself, so he just passed the title on to me. :]

yeah, i don't have any problems with the way pokémon showdown runs at all. i do miss the sense that you get from being part of a smaller community, though. but in terms of simulator prowess, i think PS outclasses PO.

not sure tbh, i kinda just like it lol. i think it has a lot to do with the fact that uu is kind of the most skill-intensive tier by nature. OU is a shitstorm because everyone fucking plays it and 99% of people are just bad, RU has middle-child syndrome because good players will either gravitate towards NU if they like lower tiers or stick with OU/UU, and NU attracts all the people who play the lowest tier just for the sake of being the lowest tier. not that they're inherently bad, but like i said, 99% of people are bad. OU has better players but they're never dedicated and there is no sense of community at all. so i guess it's because there is a nice balance between community and skill in the tier.

hmm, at the moment, we're voting to see which of the drops will get sent to BL, but once that ends we'll resume testing as planned. there are quite a few pokémon yet to be tested, so my estimate is that we'll be testing for at least three or four more months. the last few tests should be pretty short because they will be obviously BL for the most part, so that saves some time.

once the test-everything-once phase ends, i plan to move onto testing everything a second time, but this time we'll do so in groups and perhaps with some system that allows non-council members to vote. the idea is to triple check the results and make sure we didn't make any mistakes, so i'll do as many tests and editions to the system as i need to in order to accomplish this.

hm this one's tricky because the new drops are all extremely prominent threats. i guess i'll answer twice. pre-june drops, hydreigon, mega houndoom, mega absol, honchkrow, victini, and mienshao would be my top threats. post-june drops, volcarona, mega alakazam, and lucario easily take the cake. however, funnily enough, only megazam is universally seen as broken.

in regard to playstyles, a lot of people think stall is the most prominent style in the tier, especially now that bliss has dropped. but i stand by this being bullshit, because stall still has way too much trouble dealing with shit like swords dance heracross, mienshao, cb victini, sableye, mew, suicune... i could keep going. every playstyle is equally viable imo. when you can pull off shit like what i did in my RMT—Empire—you know anything is possible in the tier.

hmmm, i gotta say skirt steak. i'm a steak lover in general but skirt steak is fucking incredible when cooked correctly.

lol i'm kind of an oddball in the sense that i don't play any video games other than pokémon.

suicune because its design is fucking beautiful. seriously its so goddamn majestic, lol.

lmao that. yeah, i don't know. i was pretty sure chaos was going to implement it as an emote when it was at its height, but now that it has died down, i don't see it happening. not that i would feel strongly about it either way :]

my pleasure, adios!