Will This Controversial Decision Ruin Minecraft Speedrunning?

hello you absolute Legends what is the spirit of speedrunning this is a question that seems to lie at the very heart of an ongoing debate that is currently raging in the Minecraft speedrunning community on the 9th of December one of the most controversial decisions I've ever seen was made by the Minecraft speedrunning moderators allowing the use of external tools and calculators to be used during a speedrun to perform actions that were previously done by the runners themselves effectively turning every run into a tool assisted speedrun since the dawn of time one of the most crucial skills in Minecraft speedr running has been locating the stronghold the stronghold houses the end portal giving access to the final fight with the Ender Dragon and the quote unquote end of the game the location of each stronghold is randomly generated and the speedrunner must be able to quickly and efficiently pinpoint its position over the years speedr Runners have become much more Adept at at this skill developing various techniques and strategies that attempt to find the stronghold in the lowest amount of time at the top level it's a skill that required excellent spatial awareness and a good understanding of some basic mathematical Concepts like trigonometry but now this ancient skill is a thing of the past with the click of a button speedrunners can find out exactly where the stronghold is by using external programs and calculators gone are the days where you needed to actually use your brain it's so much easier just to let a computer do the work for you if this sounds ridiculous to you you're not alone many of the best Minecraft players are Furious that this kind of tool is now allowed in competition some of them just flat out refuse to use them even though it puts them at a massive disadvantage in this video we will take a trip down memory lane and learn about how Minecraft speedrunners over the years struggled to find the stronghold as best they could but by the end you'll have a good understanding about why many of the more experienced Runners find the removal of this art form to be a detriment to the game we will also explore the uprising of these external calculators and find out how on Earth they ultimately became acceptable I will also share my opinion at the end and it will be interesting to see if you agree or disagree with my conclusion I really hope you enjoy now Legends today we are truly blessed we have a very special and prestigious sponsor it's the type of sponsor that only comes around every 1 maybe 2 billion years I'm talking of course about the greatest mobile game ever made raid Shadow Legends raid is a fantasy style RPG that now has over 600 champions for you to collect I've been playing raid for over 2 years and I can honestly say it's come a very long way since its Beginnings the game is now chalk full of various campaigns Arenas and bosses speaking of which RAID just released its newest boss Hydra and this thing is insane it has six 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however runs can still generally be split into four parts and for some clarification we are discussing the random seed glitchless category which is by far the most popular first is the Overworld in which we spawn where Runners typically collect enough wood and iron to create a bucket in tools this will both prepare them for and also allow them to enter the nether the nether is the second part of the run where a fortress is located to farm blaze rods on version 1.16 which is the fastest you can use pigin bartering is also performed in the nether to attain ender pearls the third section is the return to the Overworld where players locate and travel to the stronghold on earlier versions this is also where they attain ender pearls either through farming Endermen or trading with villagers the final part of the run is the end where players square off against the Ender Dragon it's the third section that we will focus on today which sees the runner locate and reach the stronghold finding the stronghold is a relatively simple process when thrown eyes of endo will float up into the air towards the direction of the stronghold throwing one eye will give us information about the direction but will tell us nothing about the distance therefore we must throw more than one eye and use some form of triangulation in order to pinpoint it exact location the more eyes we throw the more accurate we can be we don't want to throw too many eyes though as throwing eyes comes with numerous drawbacks the most obvious cost to throwing an eye is the time it takes for the eye to hover into the air and then fall allowing us to pick it back up ender pearls and rods the ingredients we need to make Eyes of Ender are extremely rare so we absolutely need to recollect any eyes we can the second drawback arises from the fact that each time we throw an eye there is a 20% chance of it breaking and being destroyed therefore the more eyes we throw the higher the chances of us losing one or more eyes this means we need to collect more pearls and rods in order to compensate for this or risk losing the Run entirely by not having enough Eyes of Ender to fill in the end portal so throwing the minimum amount of eyes required is both faster and less risky ultimately we want to throw as few as possible for many years the techniques speedr Runners would use to triangulate were rather primitive ey throws seemed to be more based on feel than anything else there didn't appear to be much structure or set logic but there didn't need to be either times were relatively slow so there was a lot of leeway a perfect example of why triangulation is so important is a very famous speedrun performed by Illumina in February of 20120 it was a time of 23 minutes and 53 seconds and when it was achieved it was a new world record but the crazy thing about this run is that alumina lost over 2 minutes because he failed to triangulate the strongholds position after collecting pearls he threw one eye which showed him the direction he then spent over a minute running in that direction and he even stated during the run that he assumed the stronghold was far the I I I hate to be pessimistic I think the for Fortress is far or the strongholds far I do think it's far like I'm just I know it sounds pessimistic but it's what I think however after throwing another eye he realized it was back the way he came and ultimately the stronghold ended up being directly underneath where he was when he threw the very first eye a popular technique ancient players used to use was to draw a line using blocks along the ground they would then deviate from this line and throw an eye where the new line intersected with the line they had drawn would be where the stronghold was located an important thing to note about these ancient runs is that the players did not use the f3d buug screen before 2020 Minecraft was primarily run by the Japanese who were much more traditional in the way they played they didn't use F3 at all and played on the hardcore difficulty setting when Minecraft speedr running became popular in the west people cared far less about imposing such restrictions and debug screen became the most important tool in one's Arsenal the transition from no F3 to F3 is incredibly important as the debug screen provides the player with extremely useful information such as the precise angle they are facing and their exact position in the past players could only triangulate by using vague spatial awareness and a general feel of where eyes were pointing now with concrete numbers they could begin to use math in mid 2020 the popularity of Minecraft speedr running skyrocketed and we saw an army of new players join the competition this increase in overall brain power resulted in an explosion of new triangulation strategies triangulation became especially important with the release of 1.16 in this newly released version of Minecraft bastions made their first appearance which allowed players to barter for ender pearls but pearls weren't the only useful things piglins offered the player obsidian was also critical after 1.9 the location of the strongholds moved much further away from Spawn now the closest a stronghold could ever be was 1,280 M from origin this made travel time a massive concern the fastest way to travel is inside the nether where each meter equates to eight in the Overworld the only issue is that to re-enter the Overworld you'll need at least 10 obsidian to build a new portal luckily we can get enough through pigin bars while waiting for pearls so once we have rods and pearls and have traveled far enough we can build a portal and get back to the Overworld this is called Blind travel it has that name because Runners have no idea where the stronghold is so they are effectively guessing and hoping that when they return to the Overworld it is close by in practice it could be anywhere from 2,000 blocks away to literally under your feet and this is why triangulation became so important if you do appear above a stronghold you'll want to know immediately or risk making the same mistake Illumina did and end up running in the wrong direction one of the earliest versions of triangulation was the 50 block method the first eyes thrown and the angle is carefully checked the player then moves 50 blocks to the side and throws another eye using trigonometry you can then calculate how far the stronghold is away based on how much the angle changed the greater the angle change the closer the stronghold is the math is too difficult to do on the fly but some players memorized certain values so they could get an approximate distance a much easier version that didn't require any complex math was created a short while later this was the 17.5 block method it's essentially the same as the 50 block method but plays would measure 17.5 blocks to the side by doing four Sprint jumps the 17.5 block distance is used to make calculation easier the formula is simple you divide 1,000 by the angle change to get the distance so if the angle changes by 5° the stronghold is 200 blocks away if the angle changes by 0.5 the stronghold is 2,000 blocks away even more methods were eventually developed but they all followed the same principle throw an eye move a certain distance to the side throw another and use the angle change to work out the distance the the more accurately you aimed your cursor and moved the correct distance to the side the more accurate your distance check will be knowing exactly how far away the stronghold is allows you to throw fewer eyes which as we mentioned earlier is both less risky and faster but it also opens the door to other strategies and the most notable is called calculated travel sometimes when trading for ender pearls in bastions you can get particularly lucky when it comes to obsidian trades plus you may even find a large amount of obsidian in the various chests this means that on some runs you end up with 20 or more obsidian which allows you to build two Nether Portals we can take advantage of this by building the first portal while we are farming blaze rods while waiting for blazes to spawn we quickly enter the Overworld and perform our triangulation this tells us the direction and distance to the stronghold we then head back into The Nether and finish farming rods now that we know where the stronghold is we can travel to the corresponding location inside the Nether and build the second portal where the stronghold should be calculated travel takes a ton of skill to do well not only does your triangulation have to be good but you then have to figure out which coordinates the stronghold would be located at given the distance and direction from where you are you then need to convert those coordinates to match up with where they would correlate to inside the nether when you start getting into the more advanced triangulation strategies your precision and quick thinking ability become much more important triangulation was a skill that could be improved and if trained would give players an advantage over others but now we can kiss this skill goodbye on the 9th of December the Minecraft moderators made the decision to allow external tools so that we don't need to think at all all we need to do is feed a program the information and it will tell us exactly where the stronghold is tools for finding the stronghold have been around for many years in 2014 stronghold finder.com was launched which gave players an easy way to use triangulation without needing to do the math themselves all you would need to do is input your coordinates into the direction the IE pointed to for two throws and it would tell you the coordinates of the stronghold naturally tools like this weren't used in speeduns the older speedrunners considered this to be cheating and besides they didn't use f 3 so it was impossible anyway but with the new wave of speedrunners in 2020 came more modern perspectives the old stronghold finding tools were primitive and slow you needed to manually input the data to get a result in late 2020 however more sophisticated tools were created with these new tools all you needed to do was press F3 + C to copy the information from the debug screen and the program would read the information from your clipboard so so you didn't need to manually import anything you just needed to throw the eyes aim your cursor press F3 and C together and the tool would give you the coordinates of the stronghold one of the more popular tools was called Throw Pro and after several of the top players begin using it in runs the community started to take notice the response from the community was extremely negative and after a vote in early January 2021 the use of calculators was officially banned at the the time it seemed like people were generally against the use of external tools but as the months went by people started trying to find creative ways to circumvent the rule of no calculators the main way to do this was to use spreadsheets that were already full of information technically you're not using a calculator if all of the calculations were already done and you're just looking up the answers in practice they worked exactly the same as the calculators that were banned you threw the eyes pressed F3 and c and a program would scour the spreadsheet for the pre-calculated answer these spreadsheets were huge containing many gigabytes of information as they needed to account for every possible position you threw the eyes from the only difference between these tables and a calculator is that the calculation was done before the speedrun instead of during it the power of calculators can't be overstated and their use goes far beyond triangulation in fact you don't need triangular ulation at all when you throw an eye it always points to the center of a chunk therefore if you get an accurate measurement you can know where the stronghold is with a single eye by drawing a line where it points and seeing where it intersects exactly with a chunks Center it is impossible to do this without using external tools whether that be a calculator or a spreadsheet the mechanism is in my opinion irrelevant as they serve the exact same function this didn't stop people from beginning to use these spreadsheets however and the players that used them claimed they were legal eventually a new poll was conducted to see if people wanted to unband the use of calculators as it seemed like this rule was now ineffective with so many people using spreadsheets and shockingly the majority of people voted to allow calculators effectively making Minecraft speed running a tool assisted speedrun by default I honestly don't understand understand how a decision like this could be made I think sometimes people get caught up with trying to arbitrarily lower their time or beat others that they forget what the point of a competition is ideally the goal of a ranking system is to differentiate players based on their skill levels where the greater the skill the higher the rank obviously Minecraft has a ton of luck involved but I don't understand how removing a component of the run that revolves around skill makes things any better not only does this defeat the purpose of speedr running in my opinion but it opens the doors to other tools as well we are already starting to see people construct tools that help tell us where the stronghold is without even needing to throw any eyes at all this can be done through identifying certain features like buried treasure nether portal orientation and others we can input certain information into a program and it will tell us where the stronghold is likely to be and the types of calculations it performs could never be done by a human one one of the biggest arguments that was used in favor of unbanning external calculators was the fact that it's difficult to police them another was the fact that some streamers were getting help from their chat anyway I personally find the idea of getting help from other people during a speedrun to be offensive and is something that should be banned I also don't think that something should be allowed just because it's difficult to detect I don't think that's ever a good reason this decision is even more surprising after how well they handled the issue with pausing earlier in the year I made a video about the growing issue of players abusing the pause function in order to make decisions because pausing stopped the timer when it became a concern the moderators took steps to punish pause abuse by enforcing rules and now pausing is no longer a problem at all and Minecraft speedruns have become much better to watch because of these rules in the 1992 film A League of Their Own there is a fantastic quote by the character played by Tom Hanks where he States in reference to baseball it's supposed to be hard if it wasn't hard everyone would do it the hard is what makes it great when you make things easier you take a piece of the magic away and it loses Prestige people care less because watching someone do something that anyone can do isn't interesting while speedr running can be made easier through new strategies or new discoveries it should never be made easier by letting someone or something do the work for you I could never ever get behind a decision to allow any external tools whether that be a calculator a program a spreadsheet or anything else in my opinion a competitive speedrun should be between a player and the game and nothing else if you want to use programs call it what it is a tool assisted speedrun on the 19th of April the speedrunner Bren Tilda became the first person to beat Minecraft in the random seed glitchless category in under 10 minutes his time of 9 minutes and 30 6 seconds is incredibly still the world record today this was a massive achievement but at the time I had no interest in covering it because the Run was full of pause abuse it was terrible to watch and I didn't want to promote it with the introduction of external tools I feel the same way it makes me care far less about Minecraft speedruns and if tools are used to create a new world record the chances of me shining any kind of Spotlight on it is essentially zero let me know what you think in the comments do you think tools should be allowed and if so why thank you so much for watching you Legends I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Karl Jobst

Views: 678,624

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Id: 0pilGprdpKo

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 26 2021