The Biggest Cheating Scandal in Minecraft Speedrunning History

a few months ago the biggest cheating scandal in the history of Minecraft speedrunning came to light in this video we're going to look back at the extent of the cheating how the player was caught and maybe most importantly why he did it when you think of cheating in Minecraft speedrunning odds are the first person that comes to mind is dream he's definitely the highest profile cheater in the game's history as his Cult of Personality brought in people from all over the Internet both for and against him as one of the bigger mistakes in his career was slowly brought to light and proven maybe you also think of players like dram who didn't become popular from cheating but were so bad at it that millions of people gathered to point and laugh at their attempt to trick us if you're a fan of our Channel maybe you think of big Tony or floby but the most successful cheating scandal that's been uncovered in the game's history the cheater who had gained the most respect and trust and who had even helped the community in meaningful ways over the years is none of these people in fact if you hadn't already heard about it he's probably one of the last people you'd expect to be a cheater the player who set several records in the game was a moderator of the official leaderboard and was the very first person to notice dreams increased luck and accuse him of cheating was himself a cheater this is the story of the most successful cheating plot in the history of Minecraft speedrunning this is the story of Mind Revenger [Music] foreign [Music] get into all that let me tell you about the sponsor of today's video World of Tanks I don't know about you but I often sit in my room wondering what's missing from my life and quite often the answer is tanks in World of Tanks there are over 600 different types of Tanks including destroyers artillery light medium and heavy tanks so there's always a new way to play you can also upgrade and modify your tank by earning experience so you'll have the 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sponsoring us and now let's get into the video we're gonna break down the specifics of the cheating of mine preventer or Eric as we're going to call him for the rest of the video but I'm also interested in the why of it why do cheaters cheat for attention for accolades for money or are they just trying to create a feeling of accomplishment and self-worth however shallow it might be whatever the reason happens to be cheaters have existed in almost every competitive setting in human history there's a good chance you've cheated or tried to at something in your life cheating isn't even always a terrible thing you never want to be cheated personally but say someone who needs to feed their family profits off of a casino that's raking in cash all night so that's such a bad thing of course when it comes to Minecraft speedrunning cheating doesn't benefit anyone except the cheater because of its popularity Minecraft has dealt with more than its fair share of cheaters over the years and in that time we've learned a lot about who cheaters are the stereotypical image of a cheater is someone who sort of comes out of nowhere shoots up the leaderboard and gets a world record way faster than you would expect a new player to but the most successful cheaters that we know of have come in a different form players who have played the game genuinely for a while gained trust and respect in the community and even have trust and respect of their own for others in the community but decide that the prospect of a world record is just too much to pass up flowby was one of these players repeatedly getting top times presumably building towards a world record before his house of cards came crashing down but his faked runs consisted of a few good runs none of them World Records over the course of a few months nothing we've seen to this point even comes close to the magnitude of Eric's cheating and while these models of cheaters are people who are motivated by the clout and opportunities that come from a world record the subject of this video is a different case let's learn a bit about it Eric was always an important figure in the Minecraft speedrunning Community he set many world records over the course of two and a half years was a member of the leaderboard moderation team for a time and of course was the one who initially called out dream on his suspicious luck in speedruns while he's best known for his world records on set seat runs where Runners play a specific seed that they've practiced and ran before Eric's first world records came on random seeds that he was playing for the first time where he set several Co-op world records with another player Nice twice Nice twice is important to this story Beyond just these Co-op runs but we'll talk about him later soon after he started setting Co-op World Records Eric made an important contribution to the speedrunning community publishing a video tutorial on how to one cycle which is the fast method speedrunners use to kill the Ender Dragon this video is how I and plenty of speedrunners who are actually good at the game first learned to one cycle so it's not like this guy was necessarily just in it for personal gain he also contributed to the community that's important to remember as we move into the details of this cheater and what exactly he did as we touched on earlier something that set Eric apart among speedrunners cheating aside was how much experience he had in all facets of the game by the time he was exposed he'd had some success us and pretty much every major version and category of Minecraft from the Obscure to the popular even getting World Records on Duos and Trio's runs however the first Domino which would send his speedrun Empire toppling fell during a run in perhaps the most classic of categories set seed glitchless is where speedrunners take a seat they're already familiar with one that's optimized to get you to the end as fast as possible and then attempt it over and over again until they get a time they're satisfied with it's Minecraft speedrunning in its purest form with RNG minimalized and raw skill and mechanics being most important even random seed Runners are known to play set seed from time to time as a way to hone their skills away from the unpredictability of randomly generated worlds that said Minecraft is an inherently random game and even on a set seed not every variable can be controlled at least not legally in September of 2022 Eric decided to stream some 1.15 set seed runs using the optimal seat at the time which spawns the player in a tiger Village on this seed you take obsidian from the village chests to build two portals one to enter the Nether and one to exit the nether into the stronghold now despite the fact that the world itself is unchanged every time you play the chests are in the same locations and so forth the chest loot can vary which is where the element of Randomness we were talking about comes in in order to get enough obsidian to build two Nether Portals there has to be at least 20 blocks total in the blacksmith chests obsidian has a 25 chance of generating at all so there are only going to be about 1.46 obsidian per chest on average if there's enough obsidian to build a portal it's a really efficient way to travel to the strongholds but as you can imagine Runners usually lose a lot of time resetting due to sub-optimal loot Eric had no such problem during his 37-minute VOD he found well a lot of obsidian and was getting pretty consistent nether entries to the point where even Nice twice commented on how abnormal it was you have another entry yeah clearly he was getting very good loot and reviewing the footage made it clear just how good that Loop was over the course of 37 minutes Eric opened 290 total blacksmith chests and found a whopping 769 obsidian about 2.65 obsidian per chest compared to the expected 1.46 an increase of about one obsidian per chest might not seem too crazy but over such a large sample size it's more than just pretty lucky it's one in almost 28 billion lucky reasonably at this point a lot of people started to assume something was up but as many a YouTube commenter or twitch chatter will tell you you can in fact get lucky 117 billion humans have lived over the history of our planet obviously someone was going to come across some Godly blacksmith loot sooner or later that person wasn't Eric though because before long Strat developer Matthew Bolin came out with some pretty damning evidence there are over 281 trillion different ways that the items in blacksmith chests can be arranged in Minecraft and bowling used software to go through every single one of these combinations as it turned out two of the chests Eric had opened on the recording didn't match with any of these combinations the items were arranged in a way that is literally impossible for vanilla Minecraft taking us from near certainty to proof positive that he had cheated by modifying chest loot this was a shocking Revelation to say the least for the Minecraft speedrun Community given Eric's years of experience and prominent position on the mod Team all of his built up credibility being washed away in the blink of an eye the question at this point was just how deep the deception went and as soon as the cheating news broke a lot of eyes went back to one run in particular for that we'll have to go back to October of 2020. when something happened that nobody at the time really knew how to explain Eric was playing some SSG runs on the 1.16 dolphin Seed where Runners grab obsidian from a Village Blacksmith swim across a body of water to a ruined portal and then travel to the end via the nether after managing some quick nether entries and mastering the route to the stronghold Eric gets to the end and the dragon perches fast like really fast at first glance it didn't seem to make sense but some theorized that there was a possibility such a fast perch could have been caused by a rare glitch this plus the fact that we just didn't know as much about the inner workings of the game as we do now meant that nobody was too suspicious Eric messed up the one cycle anyway so the Run was probably under less scrutiny than a completed world record and to help his case he had no history of cheating of course looking back at this run Eric no longer has that benefit of the doubt the biggest element of luck in setseed runs is the dragon perch when the dragon flies to the middle of the island allowing speedrunners to kill it with beds the amount of time this takes is mostly out of the runner's control and world record contenders and setsy glitchless need some of the fastest Dragon perches that are possible in the game basically the way perching works is that the dragon path finds through the end using a series of invisible nodes above the ground once the Dragon Gets within a 30 Block radius of a node it can continue on to the next one in its path once the path reaches the center of the end the dragon can perch at the exit portal the fastest purchase you'll see come when the dragon takes a two node long path and that's what it seemed to do in Eric's run but on closer inspection the perch was faster than should be possible given what we know about the game the dragon would spawn at y-128 fly down towards the first node but then change direction towards the next node before it had gotten within the 30 Block radius other Runners tried for months to replicate these purges figuring out how to get the dragon to fly down this quickly would be a major time-saving breakthrough but of course they never achieved anything like it because it just wasn't possible Eric had been using a data pack to alter the dragon's flying Behavior not merely increasing the odds of good perches but inducing perches that would be straight up impossible in the normal game he'd also been using that same data pack to alter dolphin spawns in the body of water between the village and the ruined portal giving him increased chances of a swimming speed boost and thus better reset efficiency clearly changing the blacksmith loot tables was not a one-time Ploy for clout or attention Eric had a pattern of cheating in Minecraft's most competitive Speed Run categories going back at least two years and it was soon discovered that the scandals went even further back than that Eric had been cheating well pretty much since he started speedrunning Minecraft his first known faked run was all the way back in June 2020 on 1.14 Scentsy glitchless and at that point he was keeping it simple no data packs or impossible chests yet just splices some of which were virtually undetectable and some of which were more obvious that last one was actually from Eric's first major attempt at cheating random seed categories his 22 minute 47 second 1.16 RSG run in August 2020 that was top 10 on the leaderboard at the time and helped him gain respect as one of Minecraft's top speedrunners aside from the blatant splice which is an insult to editors everywhere you've got what looks like the exact same world as the supposedly random seed saved on the dashboard as far as the Run itself hindsight is 2020 and it's definitely more obvious that the Run was faked given that we know Eric's history as a cheater and are actively looking for suspicious gameplay but that being said much of it isn't too far off from what we're used to seeing from the big Tonys and flowbies of the world the way Eric moves while looking for the stronghold is really strange almost like he scouted the seed before and of course as we now know he had at this point having put himself toward the top of the leaderboard through questionable means for 1.14 1.15 and 1.16 SSG plus some random seed runs for good measure Eric was finally satisfied he had achieved his Wildest speedrunning Dreams realized the error of his ways and decided to settle down and live happily ever after is that true no it isn't we have to keep winning we have to win more the one major version left for Eric to conquer was 1.8 1.8 set seat glitch list is a lot different from what most SSG fans might be used to because it was the last update before the end fight was changed to its modern form instead of perching at the exit portal for easy one cycling like it does now the dragon in 1.8 charges the player directly since the dragon never settles in any one area 1.8 SSG players have to kill Enderman for pearls Pearl up to towers and then blow up the end crystals as the dragon charges them in order to do damage whether the dragon chooses to charge the player or not is a massive RNG factor in any 1.8 run much like the perch in newer versions The Dragon charging you as you're on the ground collecting ender pearls can kill your run but if you're at the top of a tower waiting to blow up an end Crystal and the dragon isn't coming anywhere near you that can be a huge time loss in short there's a lot that can and will go wrong but amazingly over a stream where Eric played out 17 runs nothing really did the dragon didn't charge him a single time when he was killing Enderman and then every time he would throw a pearl up to a tower which happened a full 16 times over the course of the stream the dragon would continue to where it was going and then choose him as its next Target we talked to speedrunner eliotex to get a sense of just how unlikely this chain of events was and according to him the chance of the Dragon charging the player when it chooses a Target is very very roughly one in four four to the 16th power that's a one in four billion chance pretty lucky but we also need to include the times where the dragon nicely decided not to charge him at the times it would have been inconvenient as he was collecting ender pearls for the chance of the Dragon not charging each time Eric was collecting pearls elitex gave a rough estimate of anywhere from a one in five to a one in two chance since the amount of time it takes to gather pearls can vary greatly from run to run it's tough to pinpoint an exact number and so elliotex ended up going with a very generous one and two chance we wouldn't want someone to be accused of cheating due to an imprecise estimate so you might as well give Eric the benefit of the doubt alright so you've got a one in four billion chance of the Dragon charging every time Eric purls to a tower and then you've got a 50 chance of the Dragon not charging when he's collecting pearls which happens 17 times and it comes out to a 1 in 562 trillion chance I don't think luck explains that especially given all the cheating history that's been uncovered over the past two years so while we've far from covered every instance of Eric cheating we've gotten through a handful of the most notable and damning places where he was caught and still I keep coming back to the question of why did he do it remember his contributions to the community early on his tutorials his leaderboard moderation him exposing other cheaters why would someone who obviously genuinely cared about the game and the community turn his back on the values that are so important to everyone else involved that seems so important to him in the rest of this video I'm gonna try to find an answer to just that question let's start with the basics the most obvious and most common reason that someone would cheat at a Minecraft speedrun is for clout and if you get a world record you get views people learn your name and if you follow that record with more content you get an audience if you're good at what you do that audience will keep growing and you can even start making money best example of this is curry way who parlayed a 1.16 RSG world record in 2020 into over a year spent with streaming and making Minecraft videos as his full-time job not to mention two hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube but I don't buy the idea that Eric just did it for cloud in over two years of being a top speedrunner in the game he only managed to get 9 000 subscribers on YouTube yes he cheated multiple World Records but he also cheated tons of runs that weren't World Records you could say that he was building credibility but the extent to which he was faking runs that no one really cared about feels almost obsessive to me plus if you want cloud in Minecraft speedrunning there's a very clear route to the top 1.16 random seed glitchless it's the most popular category the most competitive category and the one that made Minecraft speedrunning as popular as it was at its peak now Eric did fake a 1.16 RSG run but it wasn't the world record and it was back in 2020 before the version had fully blown up sure this category has more scrutiny than the other ones Eric kept coming back to and you could maybe say he just wasn't confident that he could get away with it but I don't know I just don't believe that over two years of Faking more than 20 runs he couldn't have managed to gain more clout than 9 000 subscribers so if it wasn't for the clout then why another idea to turn to comes in the form of a player we mentioned earlier nice choice Nice twice or Jonas is notable here because he joined speedrunning around the same time as Eric held important world records of his own and is generally closely associated with Eric if that last point is ringing some alarm Bells it is important to note that nice twice and Eric are also twin brothers so it does make sense like Eric Nice twice has enjoyed a lot of success and at one point held Minecraft speedrunning's most sought after world record 1.16 RSG a record that as I mentioned Eric never achieved now Nice twice and Eric have always been on good terms at least from an outsider's perspective but it's not too far-fetched to imagine that a sibling rivalry could have played a role in Eric's descent into cheating that's not to say there was any ill will or jealousy involved necessarily but as anyone with a sibling myself included will attest there is a constant level of underlying competition from professional athletes to politicians you see story after Story of siblings pushing the other to better themselves with every achievement and while every situation is unique of course the same kind of thing could definitely happen with two brothers playing at the top level of one of the most popular Speed games in the world so if that's the story you buy into that's fair enough but I'm not quite done here for one thing Eric and Jonas throughout their careers haven't even focused on the same runs Jonas has been largely a random seed player and Erica set seat players so that competitiveness wouldn't have directly stemmed from getting better times now to find out why Eric cheated I want to ask a bigger question why does anyone cheat I'm almost certain that you watching this video Have Cheated at some point in your life at something no matter how small it was why are all humans in some form or another driven to cheat to find out I turned to the knowledge of someone who's spoken at length on the subject the esteemed author and Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan O'Reilly there are two basic principles of the psychology of cheating that we should understand off the bat when people cheat it isn't always about a reward but often it's simply about feeling a sense of power or control over outcomes think about some of the hardest single player games you've ever played a very large portion of us have cheated at a game in single player mode before simply because the game might be too hard and games are about having fun of course any Minecraft speedrunner will tell you that speedrunning is not about having fun and there is an obvious discrepancy between cheating and single player which is ethical and cheating in multiplayer which is not the second principle we should understand is that risk always plays a factor in the decision to cheat if the benefit of cheating doesn't outweigh the risk of getting caught both in terms of likelihood of being caught and the severity of the consequence then we don't cheat if the benefit outweighs the risk then a lot of the time we do Dan O'Reilly has spoken many times about the experiments he conducted about the psychology of cheating and I'll put my sources in the description but I'm gonna try to explain the essence of his findings and use them to answer our question for his experiments O'Reilly got a group of Volunteers in a room gave them a set of math problems where they wouldn't be able to finish every problem in five minutes and after five minutes would ask them how many problems they finished the amount they said would be how much money he would give them in dollars it might seem like individual dollars is a pretty small incentive to test cheating but keep in mind these are college students so a dollar goes a long way when asked how many problems they got done the test subjects could answer with any number they wanted even if it was totally unbelievable and they would get their money and not be questioned but what O'Reilly found is that no one really did that instead of some people cheating a lot and some people staying clean virtually everyone cheated a little bit bumping their answer by maybe a few dollars they are taking advantage of their ability to cheat but they're not doing anything awful O'Reilly calls this the fudge Factor we want to feel good about ourselves so we don't cheat a lot but we can cheat a little and still keep our conscience clean I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of the rest of the experiments but here's some more of O'Reilly's interesting findings on cheating when the monetary incentive for cheating was increased people cheated the same amounts when the probability of getting caught cheating increased people still cheated the same amount when instead of math problems Christians were tested on remembering the Ten Commandments they didn't cheat at all when they were reminded of their values of morality they chose not to cheat when people that shared an identity in common with the subjects cheated in a very obvious way cheating went up and when people that were part of an opposing identity in this case a student from arrival College he did in an obvious way cheating went down these are all fascinating dives into the psychology of cheating but what really sticks with me with respect to Eric is the idea of the fudge factor maybe the reason that he never faked one of the highest profile speedruns is because it was too much for his conscience you might roll your eyes at that but remember all the evidence we have that he genuinely does or at least did care about the Minecraft speedrunning community on the other hand it's also important to look at Eric's response to getting caught he admitted to the stuff he couldn't get away with while still denying the allegations that he thought couldn't be proven then he finally admitted to all of it and started transparently begging for cloud on Twitter it's easy to look at that and say that that was his motive the whole time and I admit that the reason that Eric cheated might be just as straightforward as most of the cheaters we cover on this channel but in my opinion what I see here is someone who was frustrated with his performance maybe wanted to get some attention maybe wanted to beat his brother maybe just wanted to feel personal satisfaction and decided to try cheating out once he absolutely wasn't approaching this from an experienced lens or a place of expertise when he started cheating I think once he cheated once and got away with it it was that feeling of power and control that shot to him power is one of the most appealing and addictive things in the world and for as long as he didn't get caught there was a little voice in Eric's head urging him to do it again or to go even farther I think that even if there had been no incentive at all no clout or records to be gained by continuing to cheat Eric still would have done it and as for the begging for clout I think when Eric got caught something that he poured a ton of time into over the past two years Came Crashing Down very fast his reputation his validity his online presence and what clout he did have I think once all of these things were threatened he panicked and wanted to make the most out of the situation to salvage and cultivate the attention he did have and that is all in all why I think Eric cheated this isn't in any way in his defense he still cheated and when it comes to repercussions and judgment the reason he cheated doesn't matter at all but who knows maybe thinking about this kind of thing can make it easier for us to catch cheaters in the future or maybe this was just an excuse for me to go on a tangent about something I find interesting I also want to hear what you guys think do you think Eric cheated purely for clout or was it more complicated than that let me know down in the comments section regardless thank you so much for making it this far in the video if you want to learn more about the cheated run specifically check out the videos by lowest percent and Nice twice that are linked in the description if you enjoyed this video liking leaving a comment or even recommending it to a friend really helps us out so much and be sure to check if you're subscribed to see more of our content now that the two of us who work on these videos are settled in the college we've got a big year planned and if there's anything specific you want to see from us in 2023 tell us down in the comments section remember to go to the link in the description to download World of Tanks and use promo code tankmania to get a ton of free benefits as always thank you so much for all the support and I'll see you in the next video [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Weekly Thing

Views: 743,582

Keywords: minecraft, minecraft speedrun, minecraft speedrun world record, speedrun world record, minecraft world record, minecraft 1.16, 1.16 world record, speedrunning, speedrun, world record, analysis, reaction, commentary, the weekly thing, twt, the weekly thing minecraft, the weekly thing speedrun, fake speedrun, fake world record, fake minecraft speedrun, minecraft fake speedrun, fake minecraft speedrun be like, minecraft fake speedrun be like, fake speedrun reaction

Id: LvKZ6gjFnMY

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023