YouTuber Dream rose to fame with speedruns of Minecraft. Currently, he has over 15.6 million subscribers on YouTube. However, recently, all his records were stripped by the community. He is alleged to have cheated.
What happened? Already in October 2020, another Minecraft speedrunner accused Dream of cheating. While these tweets have since been deleted, it was specifically claimed that Dream obtained rare items too easily.
The suspicion was raised that he might have manipulated the drop rates. Subsequently, the operators of Speedrun.com, a platform for such records, conducted an investigation.
In December, they published a 29-page evaluation of the allegations, which relate not to one, but several of his record runs. They concluded that the chances of the drops, as Dream obtained them, are about 1 in 177 billion. This seemed so unlikely to the operators that the records of the YouTuber were removed from the platform.
How did Dream respond to the allegations? Dream shared his mod folders online following the allegations. However, he had repeatedly made changes himself, so there is no guarantee for this compilation.
Dream responded to the allegations in a video and also found third parties who checked the calculations of Speedrun.com and claimed to have found errors.
The chances were supposedly not as low as the document claimed. Although he has contested the results, his records remain excluded from the leaderboard for now.
Dream got rare items too often
What is the goal of the speedruns? The aim of the speedruns is to complete Minecraft. For this, one must enter the Nether and defeat the Ender Dragon. Good speedrunners accomplish this in less than 15 minutes.
In these speedruns, two items play a particularly important role in reaching “The End,” a special region:
- The Blaze Rod
- The Ender Pearl
However, both items are primarily obtained through random drops. The Blaze Rod has a 50% drop chance from certain mobs in the Nether, while the Ender Pearl is obtained quickest in exchange for gold with the Piglins. However, the chance for this is only 5%.
And this is precisely where Dream is alleged to have cheated.
What did the speedrun community discover? Dream is said to have obtained the Ender Pearl 42 times, while he only killed 262 enemies. This increased his average chance to 15%. He received the Blaze Rod 211 times from 305 mobs – a chance of 70%.
This diagram shows how much luck Dream had (blue), how high the actual curve should be (yellow), and how another speedrunner performed (red). The green bar represents an above-average luck of 1 in 1,000. Even above this line, Dream managed to perform well.
What makes the whole situation so complex? At first glance, it doesn’t seem so absurd that Dream managed to get so many Ender Pearls with a higher chance. However, when delving deeper into the statistics, such consistent luck is more than unlikely.
While the speedrun community is very confident in their statements, many fans of Dream, in particular, question the results.
Those who want to delve deeper into the case and the topic of probabilities can find an interesting video from YouTuber Karl Jobst here:
What happens now? Both sides have not come to a common opinion, yet they have asked their communities to refrain from negative comments and hate messages towards each other.
However, Dream has immensely benefited from the hype around his Minecraft speedruns. In 2020, over 12 million new subscribers joined. His latest videos are still getting between 20 to 60 million views.
While Minecraft remains very popular and is still widely viewed on YouTube, a spin-off of the game is not faring so well:
Minecraft Earth survived just over a year and will be discontinued in 2021
