I’m going to be quite honest right now. I’m really frustrated with the speedrunning community. I just want to point that I love the community, but sometimes they do things that really really confuse me, and this is one of those days. 

A lot of this frustration starts with the whole Minecraft debacle that happened months ago with AGDQ. Let’s players submit a mine craft “speedrun” to AGDQ, it gets accepted, people are mad, and the runners don’t show any signs of improving the run. AGDQ decides to rightly drop it from the marathon, and all is saved in the world of speedrunning, or so I thought. 

Flash forward to past AGDQ. We have another lets player join the community, this time in the completely opposite way. Seth Bling, most known for playing minecraft as well, decides speedrunning seems really awesome and gets involved. He starts running SMW and goes about it the right way. Talks to other runners, asks for help, starts doing runs, PRACTICES, and tries to get involved with the community as a whole.  He starts shifting his focus to something that was discovered 6 months ago by another runner, and was done on emulator. A lot of people don’t take him seriously, and just shrug it off thinking it prob won’t happen. The dude puts hours into figuring out a setup, and actually figures it out and pulls it off. He’s super pumped about it, does a commentary run, where he actually GIVES CREDIT to the people that found the things before him, and the media picks up on it and it gets a ton of coverage.

You would think that the speedrunning community in general would be pretty pumped that one, their game is getting a lot of promotion via news outlets (even though a lot of the attention is on Seth Bling right now, in the long run, speedrunning at all getting attention will benefit a lot of people), and two, you had someone who is insanely popular outside of speedrunning, join the community and do it the right way. But what happens? People start complaining about it, and start saying a lot of useless shit about Seth Bling, because the people that watch his stream are saying things that make it seem like the rest of the SMW community is not important. 
Now while I’ve never personally talked to Seth Bling before, before joining the community, all I’ve heard were positive things about the guy. Seemed like a stand-up guy from my point of view. I’ve heard that maybe he talked about his awesome YouTube life, and focused on it a bit more than he prob should have when he went to AGDQ. I get that it can be annoying, but I also heard he went out of his way to cover a guys Parking Ticket, when he didn’t have to. If the biggest problem the dude has is he talks about his YouTube Subs more than he should, that’s the least of my worries. 

My main issue right now is how the negative reaction to him getting a WR, and a “console WR” are really going to start hurting the community in the long run if this continues to happen if “popular” YouTubers  or streamers join the community. Let’s face it, I’m pretty sure that the dude made plenty more money playing minecraft then he ever thought he’d make speedrunning. Money wasn’t the main reason the guy joined the community. He joined it because he thought it was cool, and seemed like something he’d enjoy streaming. I don’t think he ever thought that to himself “gee, if I can get the SMW any% WR, It’ll viral all over the internet, and people will talk about me on radio stations, news sites, and yahoo.” I don’t think anyone thought that would happen. But it did, and along with that awesome publicity comes the fact that like any other news story that is usually covered, a lot of people don’t get the credit they deserve, and sometimes, the news doesn’t get the whole story straight. But here’s the issue, people are putting the blame on Seth Bling and blaming him like he brought this to the community on purpose. The dude just wanted to speedrun SMW.

What’s the real issue, is when I see well known and long time speedrunners openly attack the guy like he’s a super villain that’s killing the community and bringing in a bunch of people that will make it worse. When I see runners openly root for people to dethrone Seth Bling because he doesn’t deserve the credit that other “long time”  runners have worked years for to get, it makes me sick. I see a lot of name calling, high school like drama happening  over a f’ing video game. This isn’t world hunger, no one is dying, and people aren’t getting hurt. A dude simply got excited about a run he worked hard for, and uploaded it to his very popular YouTube page, like pretty much every other runner does, with the exception of the whole very popular part.  And this isn’t just Seth Bling. This has been a trend for the past few years that people within the community have been doing for a long time. Like Speedrunning is their secret hobby, and no one else deserves to do anything with it outside of the rules that people have made. That attitude is whats going to hurt speedrunning in the long run. It won’t kill it, but it’s definitely going to push people away that were otherwise interested. As someone whose been in the community for 3+ years, it’s really starting to push me away. 

I was always told that don’t care about popularity when it comes to speedrunning. Play your game, have fun, and if you get popular cool. I just wish the people that gave me this advice would follow through with it on their own. If popularity is not what’s desired here, why are so many people complaining that someone’s run is getting popular? I thought that didn’t matter.  When I left high school, I thought I was leaving the high school drama. When I joined the speedrunning community, I thought joining a community where people played games from before the 1990’s, the high school drama for sure wouldn’t exist. But I guess it still does, and it really sucks.

My last remark is that people should stop being bitter on social media, on their streams, and in just real life. If you don’t like what Seth Bling does, don’t watch his stream, don’t follow him on Twitter, and don’t talk about him. But when I see people with 1K + followers on Twitter starting unnecessary drama, I think about what the 1k people are thinking. How many would be runners saw that and decided not to join the community and get pushed away. That’s what makes me sad. Let’s stop doing that crap and be a little bit nicer, not just for you, or Seth Bling, but for everyone.