The infamous Dream Minecraft speedrun controversy continues to be talked about constantly. Even though Dream has more or less admitted to cheating, it consumed the last year. When speedrunning is brought up, it seems like Dream was on people’s tongues. What makes this such a big deal? So a streamer cheated in a speedrun. That’s terrible, but is it really a big deal? When you are the second-biggest Youtube creator of that year, and was the number one breakout star of 2020? Dream’s humongous following makes this a big deal, far and above the cheating. It shows people that they can just cheat and it’s okay.
Problems With The Speedrun
Speedrun.com is responsible for a variety of categories of speedrunners and the runners in those game categories. Back in December, the Minecraft team for Speedrun posted a video that went over a two-month investigation. The target? Dream’s 5th place run earlier in the year. A great deal of high-level math was done to prove that Dream cheated in his speedrun. It also came with a 29-page paper, that had graphs and more. It did take into account potential bias, also.
These are people studying maths and science and are more or less experts when it comes to Minecraft numbers. At this point, Dream was outright denying any claims of cheating, and went on Twitter to say:
“Sad to see people jumping on the hate wagon before hearing any opposing view point. That’s just how the internet works though!”
The problem is the triggers and item drops Dream needed for this specific situation are bordering on impossible. You need two items to get to the end of Minecraft, and trading with Piglins is arguably the fastest way to get one of them. For these trades, there is a 1 in 177 billion chance of getting as many successful trades as Dream did (42 out of 262 times).
For the mob drop rates in his streams, there was a 1 in 113 billion chance of these things occurring. There’s no proof at this point, but the Speedrun team believes Dream is modifying the game in some way. Then there came accusations from Dream that the investigation was flawed, and that the mod team was threatening to leave over it, but Geosquared, one of the mods went on record to say this wasn’t true. Any speedrun can be subject to scrutiny, especially when it appears someone was unrealistically lucky. It’s genuinely unfortunate that there were so many young, impressionable viewers taken in by how good Dream was during this Minecraft run.
Heck, there were people that simulated the run, and after literal billions of runs, that same luck wasn’t replicated. The problem isn’t that he cheated, in the eyes of this viewer. The problem lies in that he cheated, lied about it, denied it, threw accusations around, and finally admitted to it – sort of. If this wasn’t a run being submitted on Speedruns.com, it likely would have faced less scrutiny. People would still accuse him of being too lucky maybe, but it would not have faced that same scrutiny by the speedrun moderators.
Admitting It, Deleting It, Karl Jobst
On May 30th, Dream admitted to his actions. Well, sort of. Dream admitted he was playing a modded version of the game. He claimed he thought the mod was server-side (and did increase the drop rates of Elder Pearls). He went on to say he had no intention of cheating:
“In our challenge videos, before 1.16, we always increased the enderman spawn rates and pearl drop rates out of convenience[…] It makes the videos better because we don’t spend hours looking for pearls or spend so much time farming blaze rods (a totally RNG thing, mostly pearls). When 1.16 came out[…] A server-side plugin was made for our videos that slightly increases the rates.”
very well made video. criticizes me for things I deserve criticism for and criticizes others for the same. lots of respect for you. whole situation was definitely a huge learning and reflecting experience for me. excellent journalism
— dream (@dreamwastaken) June 30, 2021
Sadly, the Pastebin Dream originally posted has since been deleted. He apologized for “dragging them [moderations] through the mud,” and claimed when he realized he cheated, there was an extreme sense of guilt. So Dream admitted to the Minecraft speedrun cheating, in a roundabout way. He “accidentally” cheated. Karl Jobst, a speedrun content creator produced a video that runs a bit over an hour and is incredibly in-depth on the situation.
Perhaps the most interesting part is the revelation that Dream contacted an Astrophysicist to attempt to back up his claims of not cheating. Jobst doesn’t really side with Dream in the video, but he constructed a sound argument. Jobst pointed out on Twitter that he’s not trying to make anyone believing anything. He just wanted people to have as much information as possible.
Dream had a very positive response to the video as well:
“very well made video. criticizes me for things I deserve criticism for and criticizes others for the same. lots of respect for you. whole situation was definitely a huge learning and reflecting experience for me. excellent journalism”
Karl Jobst did an excellent job of tying up the loose ends of this situation, offered as much as he could in the way of facts. The fact that was lies upon lies upon lies, and even when he admitted to cheating, he claimed he didn’t know, it was viewed as just another lie. One of the big things that perhaps led to Jobst doing his investigation was that people weren’t claiming Dream was cheating based on facts. Instead, it was based on his personality and character. People who lack serious knowledge of how Minecraft works were condemning Dream for cheating. Let’s be clear, this writer has no serious knowledge of Minecraft either. So watching Karl Jobst’s video was incredibly interesting.
So yes, Dream ultimately did cheat. We’re hoping he learns from this and grows, and if something like this happens again, it doesn’t lead to nearly a year of lies and scandal.
