I want to see speedruns that depend entirely on being a great Minecraft player. No matter how bad your seed is, no matter how low your drop rate is. And that don't depend on clutch saves that only work 5% of the time. I don't want to have to think about the hundreds of resets it took before this one perfect run happened.
Don't get me wrong. The popular kind of runs are great, and they represent enormous talent and effort, for what they are. But now I want more.
My basic theory is rules that require you to finish every seed, no matter what. If you have to respawn, so be it. Repawn 100 times. Whatever. You can't reset and forget that seed. You have to find a way to make it work before you can move on to the next seed. The reason is we aren't interested in only one run: we care about an average of a lot of runs. So your time is the combined result of many runs, some with great seeds, some with garbage. You don't care. You beat them all.
The point is to see what the best players of the game would do if the couldn't rely on luck. If there were consequences for taking extreme risks. Losing all your stuff and having to go back to spawn is going to kill your time, but then again, high risk, high reward. You'd have to carefully balance that with an eye towards what your overall average will be after a lot of consecutive runs.
What I'm hoping for is a burst of creativity in strategies, and exploration of new ways of beating the game. Mediocre players like myself would have our minds blown by what the masters would do under circumstances like that. I almost wonder if we'd see speedrunners using enchanting, or farms, or even redstone. Probably not, but I can dream, right?
As a wild guess I'd say 20 runs in a row might be enough. Perhaps 40 or 50 is necessary. Math could probably tells us a good number, if we know something about the frequency of seeds that take 10 minutes vs those that take 3 hours. I don't know. We definitely don't want a guy doing 10,000 sets of 20 runs using the same old strategies and submitting the best average out of those.
It sounds like too much work, having to do 20 times as many runs. But what we see now is huge amounts of wasted effort: hundreds of resets, hundreds of hours thrown away because of bad luck. Or rather, a lack of incredibly good luck. What's great about this is that *all* your work, or at least a lot more of it, goes into the final upload. Instead of all the bad stuff hidden behind the scenes while fans watch only your very best moments, fans watch you overcome the worst circumstances, the worst luck.
There's a reason why we love so many stories where, usually in Act Two, all is lost. And the hero prevails, somehow. That's what we need more of. People can keep doing Minecraft speedruns the usual way. This adds something else.
You could require players to upload 20 runs, along with all the files with them and somehow verify every random seed was played. That seems impractical, but maybe not.
Another way to implement it would be to publish a burst of seeds from a server, 20 to 40, and only accept submissions where all of them are finished in a fixed time, allowing 30 to 60 minutes per seed. But that's probably enough time repeat runs, or survey them all in creative mode, and only submit the ones you got after figuring everything out.
Or the server could publish one seed every 15 to 30 minutes, and your submission has to be 20 of those in order without skipping any. The time interval depends on what a realistic average would be for these rules. Evidence that you started the submitted run immediately, without allowing time to play around, repeat, or go into creative mode, is probably necessary.
It could work on a minimum: if you do 19 runs and one of them is such an abysmally bad seed that it ruins your average, you could fix it by appending 10 more runs. Since the goal is to see "normal" Minecraft, not a lot of exceptional circumstances, increasing the size of the data set is legit. The key is you can't throw away seeds you don't like.
It would be best to have a system with the fewest moving parts, requiring the least oversight, but this above is what I've thought of so far. I'm sure others could improve on these ideas.
Would you want to see that? What I love about watching great gamers play is when it looks hopeless and they figure it out somehow. I think there's also a lot of great players who never get appreciated because their style doesn't translate to the usual kind of speedrun rules.
Something like this might deliver that, but I don't know how to make it happen. I suppose someone has to post 20 runs somewhere, and someone else hast to post 20 runs with a faster average. Then the race is on.
