starlight !

Discourse about the MCSR ranked team and playoffs is so funny to me because wow what a startling demonstration of lack of self-awareness! How is it so difficult to understand that this community is absolutely nothing. Like genuine nobodies. There are no multi-billion business daddies handholding its development and stepping in when things get out of hand, there is no well-established playerbase that will stick with it when times get hard. This is a passion project that until a few months ago ran purely on sunshine rainbows and the power of friendship. Can we be serious for a second.

I am not a coder myself so I will not comment on the difficulties with making and maintaining the mod itself, but just looking at how the official Minecraft updates are should give an indication as to the effort it takes to make changes without breaking anything. More importantly is the issue of game-balancing. How much do we modify from vanilla? How will changing seed filters impact competitive play? What do we standarise, what do we remove, what do we do with RNG? The thing is, top runners can complain all they want but THEY ARE NOT THE PEOPLE MOST QUALIFIED TO ANSWER. How much change is too much change? Will people get put off by it and stop playing? Would we lose what makes Minecraft unique? What's the healthiest for the scene in the long run? Yeah these are questions companies hire some very very smart professionally-trained people to analyse and try to predict. The ranked team is TWO GUYS who have to juggle a playbase that balloooned in size, management of events, and who also need to you know eat and sleep. Would you prefer it if different things are tried out season to season? Do you think most people would? If anything turns out to be bad and the ranked team get inevitably trashed for their short-sightedness, would you stand up and share the blame? Be. Serious.

'Why doesn't the ranked team expand then?' Oh, you mean the ranked team who until very recently is reliant on ONE GUY DONATING MONEY to even have a prize pool for their most significant event? That ranked team? 'Oh but MCSR is so popular now-' it's popular because Ludwig aka Big Streamer brought attention to it. The very definition of an unstable playerbase. Yeah man, let's definitely employ a bunch of people and then when the hype wears off we will pay them with air and lint. Oh wait, nevermind, employing people requirs registration of a company and legal documents and a whole bunch of complications. Should we exploit the free labour of volunteers instead? Never gone badly for a Minecraft project, nope!

The biggest strength of MCSR is its community. It attracts viewers, mediate play (why not go for 1-eye? well it's in bad taste), and is the entire reason ranked exist in the first place, from Oliver and Redlime's passion, to Feinberg's financial support. It literally ran on the power of friendship. This is not a corporate thing.

So, 'the Ranked team shouldn't be immune to criticism' is true. What is also true is that people are giving criticism in completely the wrong way. With another Esport, you can be loud and toxic and exaggerate and call something trash because that's how you let a multibillion company know that you are serious, so hopefully they will panic and try to save reputation. The Ranked team physically does not have the capacity to respond in the same way. The only thing people achieve by spewing hate and negativity is sour the opinion of the layperson. If you say that Ranked sucks and should die, it will actually die.

Simpler times

hitbox

biblically accurate version under cut

Lowkey-esque Players: Lowkey, Steez, NHB Defined by mechanical excellence, but more notably a lack of hesitation when decision-making. Will go for the risky / unconventional / variance plays. Well-known for incredible top speeds in linear seeds, but the lack of hesitation often give them the advantage in messy and unclear situations as well.

Micro-Technical Players: Silverr, Doogile, Beefsalad The goal is to always make the correct play based on currently available information. This means being good mechanically to pull off strategies, knowing a lot of really micro time-saves on scale of in-game ticks, but also active thinking & constant adaptation. Testing & analysis outside of practice games.

Mechanical Players: Hackingnoises, Blazemind, Nahan, HDMICables, Aquacorde Probably the most broad category, but players defined by their excellence within individual splits, eg. bastion routing, dealing with blaze spawner, end fights. Flashy plays common but not necessary. The more linear the seed, the more these players are at an advantage

All-Rounder Players: Infume, EDCR Players who might not stand out mechanically, but achieve consistent fast times across the seed thanks to decision-making and being aware of their win-con (eg. when to high-roll).

RSG-Influenced Player: Skycrab Possesses the lack of hesitation characteristic of Lowkey-esque but with some minute differences in the timing & content of pre-crafts compared to top ranked runners. Preference for high-roll plays (eg. going for stray blazes, not breaking treasure spawner, terrain decisions) without necessarily high risk (eg. go with no food). Buff on BT seeds.

All Advancement-Influenced Player: Feinberg Playstyle that is overall quite similar to the all-rounder, with some affinity to some weird-looking plays (eg. long pearl-hang to second spawner) which might very well just be Feinberg's own tourney experience showing. Buff to inventory management. Debuff to zero cycle (/j).