At the end of last year, an incredibly popular Minecraft streamer was mired in a controversy that concluded he had cheated in his record-breaking speedrun of the game. Now, Dream has offered an explanation for his actions.
The question of whether Dream did cheat in his momentous speedrun was sparked by the RNG drops of the items players require in order to reach the end of the game. In October 2020, another speedrunner pointed out that Dream seemed to see noticeably higher RNG drops for those items in a run that put the streamer in the top five players globally. As all Minecraft speedruns are moderated by a team from speedrun.com, they took this accusation about Dream at face value and produced a research paper on six of his speedruns and an accompanying YouTube video on their findings. The moderators agreed that Dream had manipulated the game to make it easier to acquire ender pearls and blaze rods. According to their calculations, there was an "unfathomably small" chance of Dream's successful barters between Piglins being legitimate. Like, one in 177 billion. That's what we're talking about here.
Blimey, it's all a bit stressful to me. Speedrunning, cheating, mathematics-ing. I'm going to take a few and watch this brilliantly blocky recreation of The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in Minecraft instead.
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At the time, Dream denied the findings of the report and the aforementioned accusation, and even hired a third-party to review the paper that speedrun.com produced. As emotions were running high, communities from either side were told to stop sending negative messages to each other in defence of Dream or the Minecraft moderators. In late 2020, the streamer explained that while he still disagreed with the verdict and the removal of his record, he called the decision "respectable." However, last weekend, he stated in a Pastebin post that he had been using mods to change the drop rates of those vital items in that run.
Before he began the run, he was "99% sure" that the mod wasn't active as he had a server-side plugin after the 1.16 update altered the original adjustments. Because it theoretically wouldn't have had an impact on the client, Dream disregarded its existence. He discovered that it had an impact while talking with the developer a few months ago, which led him to pull his response video on the controversy, but he didn't go public with the knowledge as he felt like the hatchet had been buried.
"I'm not really sure what I'm expecting out of all of this, but I just felt like I had a huge weight on my shoulder and I want to get it off," said the streamer. "I think the whole situation was extremely sh*tty overall for everyone involved and I wish that I could go back and do things differently because it was some of the worst weeks of my life and still impacts me every day."
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"I'm sorry to anyone that I let down or disappointed. I always strive to be the best person that I can be and that whole debacle wasn't the best that I can be or anywhere near it. I hope this brings some closure to anyone who needed it, and I really want to move forward with positive vibes like I've been trying my best to promote as much as I can," concluded Dream.
Featured Image Credit: Mojang