Scuffed% is a for-fun tournament and is the spiritual successor to a Most% event where someone had to look up how to make a portal mid-match.
A wave of excitement is sweeping the Minecraft speedrunning community with an all new event targeted for the amateur player. Unlike traditional tournaments dominated by veteran players and ultra-optimized strategies, Scuffed% was designed by organisers TessaDoesThings and Fivesets to give amateur All Advancement speedrunners a chance to compete amongst their peers.
Scuffed% takes inspiration from an event called Dedsafío, which is an advancements-based speedrunning event that took place over the course of several months, in which the players earned points for collecting advancements. Scuffed% takes this concept and redesigns it, curating the point system to better fit the time limitations. For this event, players will play out a seed for two hours, collecting advancements and points along the way.
A lot of the scoring was ‘“freehanded” by Five, who was described as having an “encyclopedic knowledge of an AA run” by Tessa. The scoring system was built from their knowledge of how long things would take in an AA run. “Essentially, the most valuable advancement, ‘How Did We Get Here?’ is worth 225 points, and there’s a bunch of really small early game advancements that are worth two points,” Five tells us. “Everything is kind of weighted according to that.”
The event is incredibly community oriented, the scoring system being worked on by not only the organisers, but also by the players and commentators as well. “We handed the scoring over to our commentators, many of whom are great AA or Most% players,” Five tells us. “To get more perspectives from people who speedrun more or play Minecraft more, or even people who are playing and can offer insight from the players perspective, was really important to us. We offered it up for peer review, which has gotten us some pretty balanced scoring overall.”
“Shockingly, the AA players have put a lot of thought into figuring out what parts of the run take up the most time and therefore, should be balanced accordingly,” Tessa jokingly adds.
What makes this so exciting for players is not just the incredible thought and effort that the duo put into the event, but also the thought they will put into their own gameplay.
“We wanted it to be feasible, points-wise, for competitors to just pick a line to learn,” Tessa says. “So if on every seed, they just wanted to learn how to do the ‘Adventuring Time’ advancement, or to do ‘How Did We Get Here?’ or to focus on bees, we wanted it to be rewarding to chain together certain advancements. We scored to encourage, especially new competitors, to do that. I’m just really interested to see how your prior experience with the game contributes to what line you take. Basically, how you apply what you already know to think through problems.”
The event was created with the average player in mind, with the ultimate goal to have fun. “There isn’t any prize – the event is for the love of the game,” Five states. “The event is for the community, by the community, and that’s the whole point.”
Scuffed% will take place this Saturday, 27th September, at 12pm BST / 7am EDT, and be livestreamed on Tessa’s Twitch.
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