The recent ninth MCSR Ranked Playoffs concluded a season that saw MCSR Ranked reaching new highs, with the first ever Ranked sub-six time, several new elo records, and one of the most watched Minecraft speedrunning events of all time. We sat down with hackingnoises and OliverMCSR to talk about the season and what’s to come next.
“It is still a really nice feeling to be able to reach the highest highs,” two-time playoffs champion hackingnoises, or Hax, tells us. His win in Season Nine of MCSR Ranked Playoffs marks his second consecutive win. “The first one meant so much just because I hadn’t won for so long – so to finally get it was so rewarding. But the second one, it’s kind of an epilogue – almost like I got the win and that’s what I was hunting for so, so long, and at this point I’m just playing for fun.”
Over the last year the Minecraft speedrunning community, and particularly MCSR Ranked, has grown exponentially. About six months ago Ranked would have on average 300 people playing at a time, but they recently hit 3,000 concurrent players and have only been growing. In Season Eight of Playoffs they pulled around 13,000 viewers across platforms and co-streams, which was blown out of the water by a peak of over 65,000 people who were watching on the day of the grand finals.
Ludwig, a popular variety streamer who recently started speedrunning Minecraft, brought a lot of attention to the event. His co-stream brought in more than half of the viewership, alongside a lot of people who were not previously part of the community. However, even the main streams of the tournament were bringing in record numbers.
“Minecraft is such a well-known game, and I think it’s cool to see a game pushed to its limits, to see all the tech, to see how fast people can get,” Hax says, explaining why he thinks MCSR has grown so much recently. “With other speed games it’s very mechanical – all of the skill is just practicing a few tricks – but with Minecraft it’s a lot more decision-making oriented where each seed is different. I think that variance makes it new and fun to learn.”
As the event grows in popularity, the Ranked team is making some changes to be able to keep up. This season during the last chance qualifiers for the tournament, the Ranked team announced they were creating a new Twitch channel to officially stream MCSR Ranked events. It is a move away from hosting the tournament on Feinberg’s channel, which they have done for several years now. “Ranked has just grown so much recently that it’s kind of outgrown everyone that’s involved – like Ranked is way bigger than I have or ever will be,” Oliver, the co-owner of MCSR Ranked, tells us. “We’re trying to match the industry norm and be our own brand.”
“The popularity exploding has been amazing to see,” Oliver continues, “but also has been a little bit of a wake-up call to put more effort into making sure that the entire product is accessible to those new players and watchers.” This is why the Ranked team completely overhauled the media segments and interviews for this season of Playoffs.
New content segments were introduced to help entertain the audience and create stronger connections between competitors and viewers. They filled the intermissions with high quality videos including a short gameshow, hosted by President Poundcake, and created introductory interviews with the new competitors who viewers may not have otherwise known. The quality for these videos was a step up from past seasons and really shows how much effort the production team is putting in.
One big part of helping Ranked grow is ensuring that Playoffs are fun, accessible to watch, and easy to get into. Little moments where the competitors’ personalities shine through draw people in and give them someone to root for. “Me and Doogile had an agreement where if we got a toolsmith in the grand finals, we both agreed to not loot it,” Hax says, referencing an infamous seed in the grand finals of Season Five where neither he nor his opponent Doogile were able to identify an essential structure. “I was really hoping to have a toolsmith on that seed, but unfortunately there wasn’t.”
The media segments also give viewers a chance to see who the runners are outside of their mechanics and high level gameplay. “We wanted to add personality to the matches,” Oliver explains. “When it’s an event that’s completely online with no facecams, it feels pretty impersonal because you’re not actually able to interact with the players or know what they’re feeling or see their facial expressions. It’s really important to have someone to root for, so adding that piece of personality, either before or after the match, I think it just adds so much.”
Oliver explains how in the early days of Ranked, interviews were few and far between. “In the past we would only kind of do an interview if the player had time for it or wanted to do it.” Previously it was more common for competitors to keep their faces and voices private, which meant many of them opted out of interviews. “Now we have a new system where we have everyone gather on one day and do most of the content segments at once.”
Oliver and Redlime, the other co-owner, are working on bringing a tutorial mode to MCSR Ranked, to help new players get the hang of the game. “It’s still very early in development, but it would be something along the lines of a tutorial mode in a game like Overwatch or Valorant, where they have built-in tutorial modes that explain how to play the game,” Oliver tells us.
There are many resources for learning how to speedrun Minecraft, including Couriway’s Metafy guide, dozens of instructional videos, and a community of people willing to coach. However, a tutorial mode introduces something new and makes it easier for people to learn certain techniques. “Casual Mode I think is really good for learning to play in terms of actually getting in reps and trying it out yourself,” Oliver says, “but having a mode that would actually teach you how to route a bastion and highlight where the gold blocks are, instead of having to watch a video, having something that actually walks you through learning the strategy would be really cool.”
There have been a few in-person MCSR events, most notably the Lewis Fulham Invitational which took place a few months ago and drew in hundreds of people from all over the world. On the final day of Playoffs, the Ranked team announced that they too would host a live LAN event – this one in April. “I love IRL events,” Oliver explains. “That’s always been my goal with running Ranked – to get to this point where we could do more in-person events. Having something be in person feels so much more real. You can feel the energy of the audience.”
Currently the exact date and location of the Ranked LAN event have not been made public, but more information about the event will be coming out soon on the Ranked Discord server.
“We want to always have Playoffs be a consistent thing that happens online, because I know there are players that want to compete in Playoffs but can’t travel or don’t want to show their face,” Oliver says, addressing rumours that Playoffs might be hosted in person. “Our goal with Playoffs is to always have that be the most accessible tournament possible. If you are good enough at the game, you will be able to play.”
That said, the LAN tournament in April isn’t planned to be just a one-time event, and Oliver hopes it will become a staple of the Ranked scene. “Between the different seasons, we’re going to do more in-person events. This LAN event that was just announced will be a separate thing from Playoffs, but will still be an official Ranked event and hopefully be tied into that ecosystem.”
Oliver is excited to see Ranked continue to grow and become a more mainstream esport. “We have to keep on driving because I really think MCSR has a bright future. I don’t want to waste that for my own sake. I don’t want to have any regrets about not doing something that I think would’ve been cool, but also because there’s a bunch of runners who are moving into doing content professionally.”
A lot of runners who previously did not have a public online presence are starting to stream their runs or post on YouTube. Top runners like Lowkey and EDCR have both started streaming more frequently, and are able to draw in hundreds of viewers even when not using a microphone. Players like Hax and Infume have also seen a lot of growth in their streaming careers recently due to Ranked.
“I want to be able to do right by them by giving them the biggest stage we can and hyping them up the most,” Oliver says. “It’s not just about doing these cool events to promote the brand – we also want to support the people that are supporting us.”
For more coverage on MCSR news, check out our speedrunning category here.
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