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 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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 7.5 trillion this is already unlikely but it's also slightly misleading this figure was the probability that anyone in the minecraft speed running community would ever get luck in any variable that was comparable to dreams the actual probability of dream getting this luck in the specific way he did was far far lower in conjunction with the release of their paper the minecraft moderators also removed dream speedrun from the leaderboard this caused a huge public reaction with many youtubers covering the story and the video uploaded by geosquare amassed millions of views this forced dream to respond which he did on the 23rd of december dream uploaded a response video accompanied by a report written by an anonymous third party dream had hired to review the moderator's findings in the video dream claimed that the moderators were wrong and that the actual odds were much lower the figure provided in the document was 1 in 100 million however again this wasn't the probability that dream got this lucky it was the probability that anyone got this lucky ever but dreams expert didn't just extend these scope to speedrunners which is what the original paper did this new report considers that if a hundred thousand people played minecraft there is a one in 100 million chance that a single person would ever get that luck this response paper was not received well by those with a background in math or statistics numerous critical and basic errors were cited but at the end of the day i don't think arguing about math will get us any closer to the truth the minecraft moderators stand by their original calculations and claim that the math dreams expert put forth is incorrect so where do we go from here luckily there is a way we can make further progress to confirming the true odds now we are going to look at simulations if you wanted to know the true probability of certain insane luck factors occurring in minecraft you might think we would have to play minecraft for trillions and trillions of years and tally the results but luckily this isn't a requirement the mechanics of minecraft are governed by code and code is all you need to accurately simulate particular outcomes dream played 24 hours of minecraft and totaled 262 trades with piglens and 305 blaze kills it might take a human 24 hours to do this but a computer can run the exact same underlying code literally millions of times per second ultimately we can and have run trillions and trillions of simulations to see what kind of drops we could expect so the question is after trillions and trillions of simulations do we see the type of luck that dream experienced the answer is no in fact it's not even close there are many different simulations being run by many different people and not a single one has come anywhere near the types of rates that dream experienced for all intents and purposes it is impossible to replicate what happened the results of multiple simulations have also been cross-checked with the same math used by the moderators to find dream's odds and they agree with the results this means that figures such as one in a million one in ten million or even one in a hundred million are demonstrably false now before i proceed to my conclusion i need to address the question of why a good player might cheat many people suggested that because dream was good there would be no reason for him to cheat but the distinction that needs to be made is that speedrunning is not just about skill it's also heavily reliant on luck and it doesn't matter how good you are if you don't get the luck you need you simply can't get the time that you're truly capable of in my experience when it comes to luck based games players don't cheat to get a faster time they cheat to get a time faster in order to understand how slight increases in probability affect the investment required when grinding for a time i will use an example for something that i did myself the most famous world record i ever achieved was a time of 52 seconds on damn agent in goldeneye 007 hundreds of people have 53 seconds but i am the only one with 52 but that's not because i'm the best player in fact there are quite a few players out there that would be capable of achieving 52 seconds the reason i have the time and no one else does is because i'm the only person that has put in enough time to get the required luck you need the main issue is that in order to get 52 seconds you likely need three guard boosts but each of them is pretty rare it is so rare that i can only recall getting all three boosts in a single run a total of three times in 250 hours of play 250 hours is a long time to play the same minute long level over and over again if it were a full-time job it would take six weeks to match and that's not including time spent researching strategy optimizations now let's say i doubled the chances of one of those three guards boosting me forwards the resulting probability would still be very small and honestly probably wouldn't ever be detected by anyone watching but it would ultimately make a huge difference on how much time i would need to spend playing instead of playing for 250 hours i may have only needed to play 125 hours if i doubled the chances of all three guards boosting me i may have only needed to play just over 30 hours and again doubling a tiny number still results in a tiny number but it has massive implications over many runs let's assume for a moment that dream did increase the end of pearl barter rates how much time did he ultimately save well given that there are multiple barters per run the increased odds compound very quickly on average in order to get the same bar to lock his dream you would need to play between 300 to 900 hours and this is before even considering the increased drop rates for blaze rods hundreds of hours is a long time but this is what minecraft speedrunners put into the game in order to get the crazy times they do hundreds of hours is a big investment for anyone but for someone like dream especially i would guess many of you have no idea how absurd the monetary value of those hours actually is people might ask why speedrun at all if you don't want to deal with the randomness well the simple fact of the matter is that speedrunning is fun while many people don't enjoy the lottery aspect almost every other element is fantastic video games are fun to play and not everyone is going to be an esports pro speedrunning gives us a way to compete in a casual and fun way the luck element is likely the worst part and many people who still enjoy speedrunning just don't want to deal with it now it is time to finally find out did dream actually cheat i have spent the last few weeks engrossed in this entire scandal i have read the reports conversed with experts listened to the interviews read the reddit posts and many people were sending me pieces of information because they knew i was going to make a video most of the issues people expressed to me in my opinion were distractions or based too heavily on emotions i don't really care what people's opinions on dream is i'm not as concerned with questionable decisions dream might have made both in the past and in response to the cheating allegations i also don't care to make people feel a certain way towards dream after this video regardless of what i think you should ultimately decide your own values and act accordingly i wasn't a dream fan nor did i watch his content but in my investigation i watched a few of his videos and they were very entertaining i completely understand why he is popular and if anything i see his success as an inspiration on what can be achieved i also want to become more successful on youtube so it's a really good example of what's possible but ultimately all i can do is look at the facts the ender pearl barter rates and blaze rod drop race in dream streams are for all intents and purposes mathematically impossible dream and his anonymous expert may beg to differ but unfortunately their conclusions do not match with the trillions and trillions of simulations that have already been performed the math that the moderators put forth does match with these simulations however making them more credible but aside from the raw math the fact that dream experienced these increased rates in the perfect way to benefit a speedrunner makes it even more damning the very two items that were causing speedrunners so much frustration were the very same ones that were affected on top of this dream's behavior doesn't help his case before these streams dream publicly complained and expressed dissatisfaction around these exact items afterwards dream was intentionally deceptive stating that the run was only a 16th place time when in fact it was fourth place when submitted but even this is deceptive up until the very end dream's run was world record pace entering the end portal room ahead of the world record at the time the only reason the run ended up slower was because there weren't enough isa vendor already placed in the end portal forcing him to look for more pearls dream's increased luck did set him up for the world record and he likely would have achieved it if it weren't for external factors preventing him from doing so that same misleading tweet also falsely claimed that the investigation was about whether the run had too good luck but the run itself did not directly impact the conclusion of the investigation the investigation was surrounding his entire six streams totaling 24 hours of play this misleading statement caused many of his fans to have the incorrect assertion about what happened this deception can't be an accident as dream was exactly aware of what the investigation was about for two months lies and deception don't necessarily confirm someone cheated but they do put into question everything they say after that point if you publicly lie once the next words that come out of your mouth shouldn't be trusted dreams response video was also misleading but i don't automatically hold that against him everyone deserves the right to defend themselves and the inaccuracies presented in the video may just simply come down to ignorance of the subject matter given all of the available facts i believe the only reasonable conclusion is that the dream was playing on a version of minecraft that had been altered in order to give himself an unfair advantage the how and why are something that likely can never be answered definitively unless stream decides to share that himself this is because there are multiple ways of achieving the same goal in saying all of this i am not ignorant to the fact that many people will ignore evidence and believe what they want to believe and honestly i don't really care about trying to persuade those people i am mainly invested in the speedrunning community itself and it seems to be fairly unanimous in the conclusion that dream cheated at the end of the day the rng manipulation was spotted and the run was invalidated the public nature of the event will also likely dissuade people from trying to do the same in the future what i will say is that if anyone is attacked for believing dream cheated this is likely due to malevolence the evidence is so overwhelmingly stacked in a single direction that you cannot and should not blame anyone for coming to the only rational conclusion conversely if someone wants to believe dream is innocent that is their right and they also shouldn't be attacked conversation about this topic is great after all it's an extremely interesting story but arguments over this particular issue don't seem to be worth the cost as always thank you so much for watching you absolute legends i hope you are having a fantastic day and i will see you in the next video this is rigged against me and in my favor [Music]

Channel: Karl Jobst

Views: 3,416,976

Rating: 4.85572 out of 5

Keywords: minecraft speedrun, minecraft, dream, dream cheated, speedrun cheater

Id: f8TlTaTHgzo

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/hsvstar2003]

"Players don't cheat to get a faster time. They cheat to get a time, faster." Quote of the day from Karl Jobst

[u/PunishedChoa]

The section at 15:45 where Karl talks about why a skilled speedrunner might cheat is the best part of the video, IMO. We've all seen the math but the whole mentality element is something that Karl really articulates well.

[u/Groenboys]

Even if his conclusion was predictable, I am happy he made a video about this. Karl is one of the biggest channels in terms of speedrunning and having as big of a voice like him call out Dream is great. I also like that he took the angle of simulations since those are pretty damning and most people seem to forget them aside from using them for "gotcha" moments.

[u/TheREexpert44]

Dream totes cheated. I dont think it can be denied at this point

[u/pitofanavocado]

When Karl Jobst calls you a cheater and a (bad) liar, RIP run.

[u/ChopieOB]

The fact that the trillions of simulations couldn't even come close to Dream's odds is the most obvious evidence here.

[u/LeakingErection]

haha dream doesn't give a single FUCK about this, he literally just celebrated 15 mil subs. guy knows he got away guilt free

[u/fbslyunfbs]

tldr; Around 22:35, Karl says he believes the only reasonable conclusion is that Dream played on a modified version of Minecraft, giving him an unfair advantage.

[u/GothicLogic]

I think the biggest thing that needs to emphasised is sure you can calculate the odds of any speedrunner getting the luck Dream did but I do think that the number is a lot closer to 20 sextillion than 7.5 trillion. The probability of any speedrunner getting that luck who is vocal about their dislike of the RNG involved, vocally frustrated that they can't seem to get all the pieces to fit together and also vocal about their end to speedrunning once the goal is achieved makes me feel like accounting for certain biases aren't even necessary. Truly feel like it's asinine to think anything other than the most obvious cheating occurred.