Dream Speedrun Cheating Controversy

About

Dream Speedrun Cheating Controversy refers to confirmed allegations of cheating made against Minecraft YouTuber and speedrunner Dream in October 2020 which were supported with convincing evidence in December 2020, with Dream's version 1.16 Minecraft speedrun record being removed. In May 2021, Dream admitted to cheating but claimed that he did so inadvertently.

Background

On October 19th, YouTuber^[1] Shell Guy posted a nine-minute video in which he accused popular Minecraft YouTuber, streamer and speedrunner Dream of modding the game to manipulate RNG in order to grant himself a faster time in the any% glitchless category of version 1.16 of Minecraft: Java Edition, which ultimately resulted in Dream achieving a 19-minute speedrun record which was at the time the 5th fastest time in the category. The video (currently unlisted) received over 200,000 views in two months.

In the video, Shell Guy claimed that Dream had likely modified his game to alter the barter success rate for Ender Pearls, an item necessary to finish the game which can be obtained by trading with Piglin mobs with a 4.73% chance.

On December 11th, 2020, Speedrun.com's Minecraft speedrun moderation team posted^[2] a 29-page paper containing extensive circumstantial evidence that Dream modified his copy of the game in order to manipulate drop rates of certain items. In addition to confirming Dream's abnormal success rate with Ender Pearls barter, the research also highlighted Dream's success with obtaining Blaze rods (extracts shown below).

Also on December 11th, 2020, Speedrun.com Minecraft moderator Geosquare uploaded^[3] a video summarizing the paper's contents. The video received nearly 1 million views on YouTube in three days.

On December 11th, 2020, Dream was stripped^[4] of his version 1.16 record (originally 5th fastest and at that time 16th fastest globally).

Developments

On December 11th, 2020, Dream^[5][6] made a series of tweets in which he responded to the run being removed by denying the accusations of cheating and announcing that he would be making a response video (screenshots shown below, left and right).

On December 12th, 2020, Dream^[7] made a Reddit post in which denied the allegations and stated that the statement that he "regularly deleted his mod contents" made in the video was false. On December 13th, Dream^[8] posted a link his modpack folder and a log list for mods loaded at the time of the speedrun in question.

Dream's Video Response

On December 23rd, 2020, Dream^[11] uploaded a 23-minute video response in which he presented an independent probability analysis supposedly performed by a practicing astrophysicist (video was later deleted by Dream, reupload shown below). The analysis concluded that the chance of Dream's getting a lucky Ender Pearl barter and Blaze Rod streak varied between 1 in 10 million and 1 in 100 million and not 1 in 7.5 trillion as stated in the analysis presented by the Minecraft speedrun moderation team. In the video, Dream denied all allegations of cheating.

I care more about defending my character than a dumb leaderboard position.

On the same day, Dream released^[12] a document containing the 19-page probability analysis (extracts below).

So if you think ”if Dream would have chosen to modify his numbers then this is the only place within the eleven stream set that Dream would have modified them”, then you should lean toward the 1 in 100 million case. If you think Dream could have chosen to modify his numbers in between any stream, then these odds should come down substantially to 1 in a 10 million. If you think that if Dream modifying things, he would only have done it at the beginning of all eleven streams in question, then the data show no statistically significant evidence that Dream was modifying the probabilities, given that he was investigated after it was noticed that he was lucky. […]
Even in the worst case, the probabilities are not so extreme as to completely rule out any chance that Dream used the unmodified probabilities. There are reasonable explanations for Dream’s ender pearl and blaze rod probability, potentially including extreme ”luck”, but the validity and probability of those explanations depend on explanations beyond the scope of this document. […] In any case, the conclusion of the MST Report that there is, at best, a 1 in 7.5 trillion chance that Dream did not cheat is too extreme for multiple reasons that have been discussed in this document.

Dream's Admission to Cheating

On May 30th, 2021, Dream admitted in a Pastebin^[13] post that he indeed had mods installed on his version of Minecraft 1.16, but was unaware of them at the time of his run. He explained that after the drama had subsided, he and his team discovered that mods installed in version 1.15 of the game which he used for challenge runs had crossed over into version 1.16, which caused the high drop rates of key items.

Online Reactions

In the days following the decision to remove Dream's record and the evidence uploads, the allegations became a popular subject of discussions both in the speedrunning community and the Minecraft community. On December 12th, 2020, speedrun YouTuber EZScape^[9] reviewed the allegations and the evidence during a livestream, later uploading the video to YouTube (shown below, left). On the same day, speedrunner DarkViperAU^[10] posted a video about the controversy (shown below, right).

Additionally, memes about Dream having unbelievable luck gained popularity online, particularly in the form of GIF Captions.

Search Interest

External References