#instead throwing shade on the mods calculations without explaining his own

[zeta-in-de-walls]

Dream’s speedrunning

Hey guys, I don’t usually make posts like this but I’ve kinda been following this drama for a while and felt like discussing it. Heh, Idk. I’m no expert ofc. 

See, I’m a bit dismayed to find I do indeed believe Dream definitely is guilty of cheating in his minecraft speedrunning. I figured I’d explain my thoughts.

For those who are unaware, a couple months ago, Dream did some livestreams where he streamed Minecraft speedrunning in version 1.16. He did six sessions which were all hours long. Over that time he did hundreds of piglin trades to get ender pearls. 242 trades in fact!

 And that’s where the issue comes in, as ender pearl drops from piglins are rare - there’s 4.73% of an ender pearl trade. From this number of trades, you’d expect 242*4.73% = 11.4. That’s the average, obviously there’s bound to be a little deviation but the higher the sample size, the closer you’d expect it to be to the average. 

Dream got 42 ender pearl trades. That is many, many, many standard deviations from the mean. That number is incredibly suspicious and it is effectively impossible for it to be explained by ‘good luck.’ Now you may be thinking that the whole point of world record times is to find that instance where you get astronomically lucky, but this wasn’t just his world record pace run - this was from all the runs in the streams, including the bad ones. It gets worse when the mods also examined Dream’s blaze run luck and found it was also way above the norm. Both of these combined being incredibly fortunate is even more unlikely to happen naturally. And these are two of the most important factors in a minecraft speedrun. 

But wait. What about bias? When speedrunning, you’d stop trading after a successful trade - that would skew the result to be slightly higher, right? True! The speedrunning mods apparently tried to account for that, giving Dream some benefit of the doubt. And, just in case their calculations for Dream were way off they decided to try it on other speedrunners and see if they also get astronomically high luck, suggesting the problem is with their calculations and not with Dream. They examined other speedrunners and not one of them were anything close to Dream’s high odds! 

For comparison, they examined Illumina (and others but Illumina was the luckiest they found) and found he had a string of good luck, such that his odds of getting it legitimately were only 9%. Dream’s luck meanwhile? 0.000000000565% Errr... yeah. And these were using the exact same calculation method. Dream’s numbers are not natural. For that reason, Dream’s records are completely unverifiable as his game must have been tampered with in some way to have achieved such results. 

Now Dream made his response video and got someone else to write a paper on it. Apparently this person used a different formula that gave Dream much more benefit of doubt. And came to the conclusion that Dream’s odds were not 1/7.5 trillion, but 1/10 million. I believe that he also included runs Dream had done earlier in the year - a good month before the six streams where Dream is thought to have been cheating. The obvious answer is that Dream only changed the odds before those six streams, as his odds were normal before then. Remember, they don’t think Dream was always cheating, they think he started cheating with those six streams - that’s why the runs before then are not relevant and in fact damn Dream further in some respects as it makes it more obivous that his game has been tampered with recently - rather than that he’s always had a faulty version of the game with weird luck installed that just so happens to improve the odds of the two things most crucial to speedrunning. So if you add some extra irrelevant data to your sample to skew it, it looks less implausible. 

Now you may think 1/10 million odds can happen. But its just more likely that Dream tampered with the odds and modded the game - its apparently a very easy value to change. Even if you have no experience in mods, you literally change one value -the ‘weight’ of ender pearl drops from piglin trades. It would be equally easy to undo and share files showing no evidence of cheating of cheating to the mod team when requested. Prior to these runs, Dream had complained a lot about the RNG in 1.16 and how it ruined his speedrunning experience. Given how much it frustrated him, the motive for changing the odds to benefit him is there. Instead of owning up to it, he’s digging in his heels which is a shame as anyone would have immediately accepted him changing the odds to make the game more fun to play while streaming. But he’s denying it.