Minecraft Legends is a new real-time strategy game launched by Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, which has been received very poorly by critics. However, a dedicated community has banded together to try and make this game fun and balanced competitively.

Irish Coffee Cake, a 26-year-old veteran gamer and YouTuber, has been active in the Minecraft Legends community.

“So, the game itself did not launch with proper matchmaking features, which made people create ‘looking-for-game’ discords,” he said.

The only two options to start an online player-versus-player match is hosting a public lobby, which is a slow and counterintuitive matchmaking system where random players can join and leave during a match with zero repercussions.

The second option to start a PVP match is to invite seven friends to play a 4 vs. 4 game, which is practically impossible for the average person because very few people have seven friends ready to play a game at any moment.

Since the matchmaking is not up to industry standard, the active player count dropped significantly from a 5000-player per peak at launch to around 500 players during a 24-hour peak, according to SteamDB.

Age of Empires 2, a real-time strategy game similar to Minecraft Legends, had approximately 26,000 active players during launch and then dropped to 20,000 players in a 24-hour peak the same week according to Steam Charts.

The average drop-off within the first week of an online game is 19%, but Legends stood out with a 90% drop-off rate.

”To start an eight-player lobby, it would take upwards of 30 minutes at a bare minimum if you were just one or two people,” Irish Coffee Cake said. “So, it was a little annoying to look for a game.”

To play a competitive match, players would join many “looking-for-game” Legends discord servers to ask as many Legends players as possible if they are available to start a match.

In spite of the matchmaking, Irish Coffee Cake is currently running a competitive tournament for Minecraft Legends.

“Instead of, you know, letting [Minecraft Legends] taper off, why not try to grab as many people as possible and make something fun to make a tournament,” Irish Coffee Cake said.

This tournament has seven teams ranging from four to eight players ready to play. It will be streamed on Irish Coffee Cake’s Youtube and Twitch channels.

Despite running a tournament to increase the game’s viability, Irish Coffee Cake still fears for its future.

“If they don’t patch Legends by the middle of May, it’s gone,” he said.

Explaining the meta of the game, Irish Coffee Cake said that the game is collecting resources faster than the enemy team to rush the enemy base with high-level troops that ultimately just win the game as there is no way to defend the rush.

“A proper RTS has mostly a fifty-fifty playing field,” Irish Coffee Cake added.

However, Minecraft Legends utilizes procedural generation to create the map and due to this one team may have a resource advantage against the other team.

The randomness of resource generation and the early game rush for collecting resources make most games one-sided based on which team spawns near the most resources.

Despite all the flaws Minecraft Legends has, Irish Coffee Cake said, “Legends offers you the field itself, which is a really cool concept. … It has potential for sure.”

Irish Coffee Cake believes that the game can still be revived with a vibrant modding community as other game communities have. In the Warframe community, they made their own maps because of how unbalanced the regular maps were with the tools the developers had provided.

The map modding actually made the game more competitive and let players express their skill and knowledge of the game instead of relying purely on luck.

In the Minecraft Legends community, there are some players that have been able to change the map already by altering the source code.

Hopefully, in the near future, there can be standardized mapping for Minecraft Legends and a better matchmaking system.