The Biggest Cheating Scandal In Speedrunning History

hello you absolute legends speedrunning has changed back when i began this hobby the most notoriety you could ever hope to achieve was having your name printed in the high school section of a magazine of course no one else would care but it was cool nonetheless speedrunning websites were far too nice for anyone but the speedrunners themselves to even know they existed no one knew what speedrunning was no one cared what speedrunning was and outside of this small group of people you competed with there was no popularity to be gained nowadays the biggest speedrunners have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers i personally think this is a great thing and i love the fact that something i've enjoyed for many years is starting to gain traction in the wider gaming community but increases in popularity don't just bring positive changes there are catches that need to be considered and addressed cheating has always existed in speedrunning as it has in every competition but in the past it was just something that was addressed within communities and there was no public spectacle about it when a speedrunner with 14 million subscribers gets accused of cheating by a community it's a big deal whether you want it to be or not the youtuber dream has the biggest following in speedrunning history and on the 12th of december one of his minecraft speedruns was removed from the leaderboards under the assumption that it was achieved while cheating more specifically he was accused of modifying his game to give himself increased luck dream for his part completely denies these allegations assuring his fan base he is innocent many people are confused about who to believe understandably so as the crux of the original argument stemmed from complex mathematics and unimaginable numbers like 1 in 7. 5 trillion the simple reality is that most people will not and likely cannot understand the evidence being put forth by both parties many people have jumped to their own conclusions which is typical human behavior but many people are also unsure and are unwilling to make a judgment either way a lot of people perceive me to be an expert in this area and are curious as to what my conclusion might be well in this video my conclusion is what you're going to get unlike many other channels who covered this scandal as soon as it broke i specifically waited to hear both sides of the story before even attempting to pass judgment too many times people have been destroyed by allegations that ended up being completely dismantled by the defending party patience is a virtue and it's not one that many possess even if the conclusion doesn't change people deserve the right to present their case in this video i want to do three things summarize the evidence of both sides explain how and why something like this might happen and provide my thoughts on whether or not dream is guilty based on my own research i hope you enjoy now before we go on if you look behind me you'll notice i have some epic new posters and they come courtesy of this video sponsor displayed display offers legendary metal posters that not only look awesome but are also extremely easy to mount requiring no tools and leaving no lasting marks these artworks are created by really talented artists and with 1. 4 million artworks available there are a ton of great options with goldeneye 007 being one of my favorite games ever i got this amazing looking piece and i'm also a huge lord of the rings fan and i thought that this one looked absolutely fantastic it really is beautiful another great thing about this plate is that they plant a tree for every disc plate sold which goes a long way to helping the environment now disblades are launching a new year's eve sale where you can get up to 35 off in order to take advantage of this great discount all you need to do is click the link in the description these posters are really good so definitely check them out now before we get into it some of you will be asking who is dream dream is an extremely popular minecraft youtuber who exploded in popularity over the past two years going from nothing in early 2019 to currently having around 15 million subscribers dream did not find success on youtube through speedrunning but instead created popular videos that were either funny or covering interesting topics whether that would be explaining minecraft mechanics or modding the game to create cool effects by the end of 2019 he had already started amassing a huge audience pulling in millions of views per month but a dream didn't truly shine until 2020 where his channel exploded part of his success was due to a new series he started producing called minecraft manhunt he marketed the videos with titles like minecraft speedrunner vs assassin and the premise is that he attempts to speedrun the game while being hunted by one or more human players i think this type of marketing strategy is really good for speedrunning as a whole as it's important to remind people that speedrunners are legitimately skilled at the games they choose to play even outside of trying to beat games quickly in march dreams started submitting official speedruns to the speedrun.

com leaderboards even attaining multiple world records it's fair to say he is extremely knowledgeable and talented at the game on the 23rd of june something very important happened java edition 1. 16 was released on the minecraft speedrun leaderboards you will notice that the leaderboards are split into three sections pre 1. 9 1.

9 to 1. 15 and 1. 16 plus the reason each category splits these versions into different leader boards is that the strategies that can be applied are vastly different depending on the version you play whenever a minecraft update is released it may affect a core mechanic that might enable better faster strategies and in the case of 1.

16 this is exactly what happened now players were able to barter with the neutral mobs in the nether called piglens piglens love gold and when you give a piglet a gold ingot it will return the favor with a random item there are many items a piglet can give you but when it comes to speed running we are only interested in one particular item and that item is ender pearls in order to understand why ender pearls are so important we need to know the end goal of the game in order to beat minecraft which is obviously the point of these speed runs we need to defeat the ender dragon the ender dragon resides in a separate dimension that can only be accessed through the end portal in order for an end portal to be active each of the 12 surrounding blocks need to be filled in with an item called eye of endo izavender can only be obtained through crafting and in order to craft an eye of ender you need two items an ender pearl and blaze powder so without being bogged down in these specifics like food management and the collection of tools etc the aim of a speed run is to acquire ender pearls and blaze powder craft is a vendor find an end portal which is located in a stronghold enter the end and defeat the ender dragon this is why 1. 16 was so game changing as collecting ender pearls through barters with piglens is much faster than the previous strategies there is a catch though when you give gold to a piglen the odds of them giving you ender pearls is only 4. 7 percent these odds aren't great they are slightly improved by the fact that you can barter with multiple piglens but ultimately many runs ended right here because the piglens refused to cooperate if you do get lucky you can save a bunch of time which is why the world record with 1.

16 is 5 minutes faster than the previous versions but if you don't get lucky there is nothing you can do but reset and try again minecraft was already heavily dependent on lock factors and this new mechanic just made things much worse players would spend days or weeks without finishing a single run because they simply couldn't get the ender pearls from piglens on top of this you also needed to get lucky and find a fortress within the nether the fortress is a necessity because it houses blaze spawners which spawn blazes when you kill a blaze it has a 50 chance of dropping a blaze rod remember blaze powder one half of the ingredients required for isa vendor you get it from blaze rods so the nether is a very special place in 1. 16 you get ender pearls from piglens and blaze rods from blazers both essential ingredients to creating izavendo the nether was also a frustrating place and many players voiced their dissatisfaction about how much rng the new runs needed including dream who lamented about his lack of luck but thankfully dream's luck was about to change several months later in october dream would stream his attempts at speedrunning 1. 16 he performed six streams totaling 24 hours of speed runs concluding with a new personal best of 19 minutes and 25 seconds dream's streams were incredibly popular with tens of thousands of spectators and it wasn't just casual viewers but speedrunners as well one such speedrunner was minecravenger who holds the world record in the any percent set seed category minecravenger is very experienced with the game and noticed something strange about dreams streams dream seemed to be experiencing very high luck and was getting pearl trades much more often than you would expect after noticing this discrepancy he went through every stream and collated the data for every trade that was visible his findings showed that instead of trading pearls at a rate of 4.

7 percent piglens were trading pearls at a rate of 15 3 times higher minecravenger tweeted out his findings which slowly but surely began to stir doubt among players and moderators alike if the data was true this was extremely concerning as consistently getting trays at this higher rate is so improbable that there could only be one explanation tampering with the game the minecraft speedrunning moderators immediately began their investigation they needed to be absolutely sure that the raw data was correct you can't form a reliable conclusion using incorrect numbers they needed to track every trade over a 24-hour period and they needed to do this multiple times to make sure there were no mistakes the final tally was 42 ender pearl trades out of 262 total trades which amounts to an average pearl trade rate of 16 more than three times higher than normal the probability of getting this many trades is one in 177 billion this is already incredibly strange but the rabbit hole was about to get much deeper given that doubt had begun surrounding the legitimacy of dreams runs due to these improbable events people started to investigate other random elements do you remember the two items we needed to collect to create eyes of ender the first were ender pearls and the second were blaze rods when the data surrounding the drop rate for blaze rods was collected it showed that dream collected 211 rods out of 305 blaze kills this total is just shy of 70 percent given that the standard drop rate for blaze rods is 50 the probability of having this many drops is 1 in 113 billion it just so happened that the very two items you needed to collect in order to reach the end were dropped at almost impossible rates when combined the probability of this happening is 1 in 20 sextillion this number is so large or small however you want to look at it that it is totally and utterly incomprehensible the moderation team proceeded to spend two months investigating and confirming these probabilities statistics is a complicated field and there are some unintuitive pitfalls that can lead to some biased conclusions they wanted to be certain that if they did suggest dream had altered his drop rates they had very very good evidence on the 12th of december the moderation team released a paper outlining their calculations and conclusion which was accompanied by a video uploaded to youtube by one of the moderators geosquare the paper stated that the only sensible conclusion that can be drawn is that dream's game was modified in order to manipulate the barter and drop rates in their calculations they provided a final probability of 1 in 7.