Hey Guys, AntVenom here... It's been a long
time now. Some of you may be looking for an explanation, but honestly I would imagine that
most of you are just happy to see me again, and I'm really thankful for that. The story that
I want to tell you today is also a metaphor for how my mental state has been evolving throughout
this extended down-time. So let's get right into it. I am tired of being bad at Minecraft. I know
how to play the game, and I can play it well... but not at a competitive level. I may have won
the first Minecraft Battle Royale in history, but that was at a time when hardly anybody
knew what they were doing in this game. Back when simply strafing a circle around the enemy
meant they could barely touch you. These days, the competition is absolutely fierce. Every single
detail of Minecraft's combat system is known, understood, and exploited by any player who dares
to aspire in obtaining the coveted s-tier rank of public opinion. And for a few months now,
I've wanted to catch up. Maybe not S-tier, but B-tier? A-tier? I've had some motivation
to practice here and there, but I've honestly not put in the hours required for either of us to
believe that I'm taking this seriously. However, a few months ago, I had the idea of tackling
a challenge that I knew I was capable of conquering. That I knew I could pour hours of
my time into in order to achieve perfection. And that challenge was go to fast. I wanted to
get to the top of the Ace Race leaderboard on the Minecraft Championship Practice server. The
only thing standing in my way was a time set by one of the best players Ace Race has ever
seen. Seapeekay. But first, some context. Minecraft Championships is an event that happens
about once a month or so where 40 creators across 10 teams are tested against a random arrangement
of 9 different mini-games. Some of these games are PVP, some are collaborative, but a few of them put
your skills to the test against the game itself, and nobody else. And you know what, I am a sucker
for game-types that can be described that way, with Ace Race being one of my favorites.
Every participant that gets invited to MCC gains access to a private Minecraft server
where other contestants can practice in a few different game-modes, Ace Race being
one of them. The premise of Ace Race is pretty simple. In this context, it's a three lap
race that involves the use of riptide tridents, elytras, and a bunch of tight movement. It's
not a difficult map to complete or anything, but when the top time on the
leaderboard is over 2 seconds ahead of 2nd place... including the likes
of jojosolos, FireBreathMan, Illumina, and other S-tier players, you know that this
is a game-type that's been highly optimized. Getting started in April of 2023, my personal
best was a 2:26.45, which any decently skilled player could get in a day or so. The time
to beat was a 2:20.30 by Seapeekay. Again, he's over two seconds ahead here. What could
Seapeekay be doing that set him apart on this course? One word, precision. On a course this
short, and this fundamentally simple, every single 10th of a second matters. Every corner cut,
every jump, every angle of every trick needs to be perfect. If I were going to contend with the
record, I would have to know everything that Seapeekay had already learned, and I would have
to do it better and faster than him. Thankfully, the course as it's set up does tells you how
good or bad you're doing on any given section, as noted by the word "Split", and here are 10
"splits" per lap. If I wanted to beat Seapeekay, I would have to match or beat every single
one of his splits. And that... that was gonna take some time. Some practice.
Some grinding. And so, I got to work. On April 27th, my personal best had fallen to a
2:21.90. Still about two seconds to go. Despite the 30 to 40 hours up to this point that I had put
into grinding this time down, it really felt like 2:20 could be out of reach for me. That was until
the very next day, when I would land a time of 2:20.45. Ughh, this was a close one. Less than a
blink of an eye away from taking down Seapeekay's time. This run wasn't perfect, but it certainly
felt like it at the time. I mean seriously I had just smashed my personal best by a second and a
half, and the run felt like it had no mistakes whatsoever. Little did I know that I actually had
managed to lose a second and a half across the entire race when comparing to my current personal
best. Yeah. You knew this was coming. On May 8th, I managed to not only beat Seapeekay's time,
but I also managed to shatter my initial goal, and I landed a 2:19.75. I had done it. The thing
is... Seapeekay beat me right back with a 2:19.69. Nice. Which means I really needed to nail the
god run if I were going to hang onto 1st place. I didn't just want to take back first place. I
wanted to keep it. In case you hadn't it realized yet, I took this challenge personally.
And on May 22nd, I achieved this run. Here it is, the final time. I've also added
the splits for my other three runs so you can get an idea of how much time I actually saved
when comparing split to split. As I progress through the course, the primary choke points that
took me the most amount of time to overcome were as follows. The train section, split 4, which can
easily lose you a third of a second if you trip on the iron bar that you have to jump over. The 2nd
choke point is the water-fall section, split 6 and 7 combined. And the third choke point is really
everything after the ice path section, which is split 9 and 10. Pay attention as best as you can
to this one. I have to activate the trident twice, allowing for me to aim at the back wall, setting
up for a perfect launch out of the water, only allowing for a short jump, getting me into
flight with a lot of height and a lot of speed, allowing for me to complete the lap as fast as
possible. It's important that I begin laps 2 and 3 still in flight, as that's way faster than
landing any sooner than I actually did. This corner jump was also no joke to do consistently.
Okay, coming up is the biggest time-loss of the run. If you blink you'll miss it. I hit
the ceiling when exiting the water-fall, which in real-time doesn't look all that bad,
but it lost me over a quarter of a second. Make enough mistakes like that, and you're talking
about seconds of timeloss. The only reason I'm still happy with this run despite the mistake is
due to how optimal split 10 was on every single lap, which can easily lose a bunch of time when
it really feels like it shouldn't. Having done the math after the fact, I could probably save another
half a second or more off of this run, but I'm not gonna go for it unless somebody beats this time.
From here, let's just enjoy the rest of the run. 2:18.74. Over one full second ahead of the goal
time that I started this whole endeavor with. This story truly was a metaphor for how my mental
state has been evolving over the past year or so. I used to be excited to explore so many aspects
of this game, and then my interests died off. And then they stayed that way for an exceedingly
long time, until recently when I began to find new motivation and reasons to enjoy this game again.
Both the game of Minecraft, and the game of life. I'm not quite ready to discuss the life
aspect just yet, but let's just that I'm confident that the next two video releases will
be out in July. So keep an eye out for those. Over the past little while I've poured a
lot of time into Parkour Warrior on the MCCi multiplayer server, but as far as
getting better at the game is concerned, I still have a long way to go. Next up
I plan on training a whole lot of PVP, because I'm tired of being bad at Minecraft.
I hope you all are willing to join me on the journey. I hope you all enjoyed, my name
is AntVenom, and thanks for watching.
