Smasher:MagicScrumpy

MagicScrumpy "scrumpy"
Character info
Melee mains	Peach, Young Link
Personal and other info
Real name	Jeremiah Joslin
Birth date	September 4, 1997
Location	Ann Arbor, Michigan
Miscellaneous info
Skill	Low level (retired)

MagicScrumpy, or simply scrumpy, was a smasher from Michigan that was very popular for his content creation, where he specialized in creating mods and TASes for Melee on YouTube. By 2017, his main YouTube channel, which focuses on Melee, exceeded over 100,000 subscribers; his second channel titled "redfuzzydice" had over 40,000 subscribers; his Twitch channel had nearly 9,000 followers (and non-public amount of subscribers); and his Twitter account had over 12,000 followers.

Series

MagicScrumpy produced a number of different video series centered around Melee, though most of the videos are no longer available online:

• What If?: A series focused on changing an aspect of a character and then featuring a TAS montage that shows off what it would look like if the character had that changed trait, typically taken from another character. These videos could range from tame concepts like "What If Fox Had Falco's Shine?", to concepts that were entirely absurd like "What If Fox's Lasers Were Falcon Punches?". This series was the bread and butter of scrumpy's channel, making up the majority of his content.
• Rebalancing Melee: Also known as the "Viable" series, scrumpy rebalanced characters to make them better or worse, and occasionally overpowered. This series would prove controversial however, as aside from frequent criticism scrumpy received for his balancing decisions in these videos, it would become subjected to a plagiarism scandal.
• Turbo Mode: These videos were montages where scrumpy mods Turbo Mode into Melee and produced flashy tool-assisted combos utilizing it.
• WarioWare: Smash Bros Edition: A short-lived series that featured parodies of the WarioWare games if they were Melee-themed.
• Shitty E-Sports Commentary: A short-lived series where scrumpy voiced famous Smash moments in the most monotone voice possible.
• Miscellaneous Melee Videos: This playlist that contained Melee videos with no main theme.

Controversy

600 Hours & TAS

Uploaded on June of 2015 was one of MagicScrumpy's most notable videos, a supposedly non-TAS Young Link combo video titled 600 Hours, titled such because scrumpy claimed to have gotten the footage for the video over the course of playing 600 hours of Netplay. The video got a lot of attention on his channel and in community spaces, for being a very impressive combo video full of elaborate advanced technique usage that featured a character seldom-seen in competitive play. The community largely believed the video was legitimate at the time despite scrumpy never demonstrating any exceptional skill at the game before or after the video, with scrumpy himself claiming that "3 minutes of highlights over 600 hrs of gameplay can make anyone look good", but it came under greater scrutiny in late 2016 when multiple community members started accusing the video of being tool-assisted, albeit with mostly circumstantial evidence. However, prominent community statistician PracticalTAS took note of a reddit comment bringing up a much more decisive point as to the nature of 600 Hours, with the comment pointing out how scrumpy recorded his footage using the 20XX Melee Training Hack Pack, which features a "rainbow" modification of Final Destination that periodically cycles through stage colors. The Final Destination colors that appeared in 600 Hours were greatly inconsistent with the timer values they appeared at (assuming the standard Netplay match setting of 8 minutes), prompting PracticalTAS to investigate the video further.

On November 25th, 2016, PracticalTAS posted his full study of 600 Hours on r/SSBM. Alongside the inconsistencies in the Final Destination colors, PracticalTAS observed an unnatural, greatly lopsided distribution in the tens digit of the starting timer values on each clip, with 12 out of 19 combos starting at timer values of ...:5X, and 4 out of the remaining combos starting at ...:3X to ...:4X. Using a chi-squared statistical test and comparing 600 Hours to other well-known combo videos, he concluded that this deviation was statistically significant by "several orders of magnitude," which could not be explained by random chance. PracticalTAS concluded that 600 Hours was TAS, arguing that MagicScrumpy had changed the starting timer and stock count to lower values to hide that his combos were not done in the middle of real games, but rather immediately as each game started, using tool assistance to execute each one.

MagicScrumpy did not publicly address this issue for months; however, members of his public Discord posted screenshots of him reacting inappropriately to the situation while it unfolded. Notably, he admitted to putting unskippable advertisements on 600 Hours to gain revenue from those looking to scrutinize the video, and harshly attacked the community, while dismissing the accusations as "drama" that he would disprove once the initial outrage had settled. Around this time, community members remembered that he had submitted 600 Hours to a combo video competition hosted by MIOM with a cash prize of $100 USD for 1st place, although he did not win. This further fueled the outrage, with many denouncing him for submitting a tool-assisted video, viewing said action as dishonest and fraudulent, which would irreparably damage his reputation in the Melee community.

Months later, on March 2nd, 2017, MagicScrumpy posted a Pastebin link on his Twitter account responding to the situation, which he has since deleted. He admitted that parts of 600 Hours were tool-assisted or staged, but maintained that some clips were real; however, he did not indicate which of the combos fell into which category. He claimed that the song he wanted to use for the video was too long, and that he did not have enough real clips to fill out its length, leading him to fake some of the combos to fill the empty space. scrumpy also claimed that he was unaware that the combo video competition had a cash prize. The community largely deemed his apology somewhat insincere before it was removed.

SD Remix Plagiarism

On November 29th, 2016, Ripple posted a reddit thread on r/SSBM showing that MagicScrumpy had copied exact data values from Melee: SD Remix for his Rebalancing Melee series and claimed them as his own. Ripple claimed that he had plagiarized from SD Remix's Zelda, Link, Donkey Kong, Ness, Mr. Game & Watch, and Bowser; of particular note was his plagiarism of a mistake that the SD Remix team had made involving an attempt to make Link's up smash connect properly. This would only further damage his reputation in the competitive Melee community, particularly because he had previously criticized SD Remix at the outset of his series for making characters too powerful.

Following the accusations, MagicScrumpy removed the download links for each of the plagiarized "Rebalanced" characters, but did not make a formal statement addressing the controversy. However, in 2017, when asked about what happened to his Balanced Melee mods in a Reddit thread, MagicScrumpy responded. He stated that he felt burnt out with the Melee community and called it obnoxious, referring to the comment sections of his videos being mostly "joke suggestions" and how it made him feel like a "content monkey." He also referred to the community as unappreciative of his work. He made no reference to the plagiarism allegations.

The majority of MagicScrumpy's videos were hidden from the channel in early April 2022 after the issue was brought to light again that year, and the channel remains abandoned, while MagicScrumpy himself has not been involved in the Smash community in any known capacity since.

Trivia

• MagicScrumpy was known for speedrunning other games such as Super Mario Sunshine, which his channel featured some videos of. He also became a subject of controversy in the speedrunning community however, when a Super Mario Bros. speedrun he uploaded to his channel and submitted to the speedrun.com leaderboard was later found to be TASed.

External links

• Twitter account
• YouTube channel
• Second YouTube channel
• Twitch channel ^{(dead link)}