With 15.4 million channel subscribers and his videos racking up between 20 and 60 million views, it's safe to say that 2020 was one hell of a year for Minecraft YouTuber Dream. The speedrunner quickly became a household name, garnering millions of followers, and between January and November of last year alone, his subscriber base grew by 12 million.

Even if you don't know much about the breakout YouTube star in 2020, you may have heard about the controversy surrounding his record-breaking performance. For those of you who are wondering what the heck happened and need a brief explanation, here is a breakdown.

Dream's popularity is largely due to YouTubers' Minecraft speedrun videos (in which they try to complete a game as quickly as possible) and their Minecraft Manhunt series. Dream's speedruns are constantly breaking records, and he has surprised many viewers by making his name on the Minecraft World Speedrun Leaderboard. During this success, doubts arose about the legitimacy of some of his runs, especially accusations that Dream was tampering with the game to get better luck.

In October 2020, a fellow Minecraft speedrunner (whose tweet has since been deleted) reported that a run posted by Dream earlier that month had a higher RNG drop for a key item, and that run ranked 5th on the world leaderboard.

Minecraft speedruns are managed by a team of moderators at speedrun.com, and the accusations prompted the team to launch an investigation; in December, they published a 29-page research paper summarizing their two-month investigation and an accompanying YouTube video

It is thorough.

It was a thorough report, and after many statistical graphs and mathematical calculations, the team came to the conclusion that Dream was cheating by modifying the game. When the moderators announced their decision, Dream categorically denied the accusations, but has since respectfully accepted the team's conclusions without admitting fault.

So what is being discussed?" Key to the debate over Dream's run is the Minecraft drop rate for the two items. Minecraft speedrunning is based on how quickly one can get from the starting point of the game to the end point, and is heavily dependent on crafting. To reach the ending in the shortest amount of time, it is important to obtain two key crafting items, the Ender Pearl and the Blaze Rod, both of which are dependent on RNG enemy drops. The Ender Pearl can be obtained by trading gold for in-game creatures called piglins, while the Blaze Rod drops after defeating certain mobs.

It is interesting to note here that the method of obtaining these two items is relatively new; Mojang released a major update last June called the Nether update, known as 1.16. Bartering with piglins to obtain Ender Pearls and collecting Blaze Rods from mobs became the best strategy for speedrunning. The chance of a piglin dropping an Ender Pearl was extremely low at 5%, while the Blaze Rod had a higher drop chance at 50%.

Because of this low item drop probability, speedrunners rely on luck when bartering with piglins. Dream's stream notes that he was always very lucky when he had to collect both ender pearls and blaze rods. speedrun.com moderators took six of Dream's live streams and conducted a survey. The results showed that Dream succeeded in bartering the ender pearl 42 out of 262 times and collected the blaze rod 211 out of 305 mob kills. In other words, Dream was dropping important items at a higher rate than expected.

When sampling bias is taken into account (we recommend reading the entire report for details), the paper finds that the likelihood of obtaining a drop received by Dream is "unfathomably small" and the probability of legitimately obtaining a successful Dream trade is 1 in 177 billion. The paper concludes that "the Dream game was modified to manipulate the drop rates of pearls and rods." While it is impossible to definitively prove this accusation, unless Dream admits to it, the team used extensive data to support its decision and removed his run from the leaderboard. For further calculations, we suggest watching Carl Jobst's video.

In response, Dream denied the accusation and agreed to send the moderation team a file showing what was in his mod folder at the time of the run. When asked if he had changed the file, Dream said he likely did, since he changes the mods he uses when he switches Minecraft versions (which, to be fair, is quite normal for Minecraft players). The moderation team decided that this decision was not valid because the file could have been deleted after he streamed it. Dream then made available for download a file that he claimed was uploaded "10 minutes after the stream" and contained a mod folder.

Dream posted a video on Twitter containing a report conducted by an anonymous third party he hired to review the speedrun.com team's paper. The document examined a larger sample pool from Dream's speedrun and claimed that the moderators had made a mistake in calculating the drop rate and that Dream's lucky drop rate was more likely than claimed. Dream posted a rebuttal, but there was still disagreement over the calculations and the moderators are sticking to their decision.

Despite their disagreements, both sides have come to accept the other's opinion, especially after the uproar on social media. both Minecraft's speedrunning moderators and Dream had to tell their viewers to stop sending negative words and hate. I had to; this particular run by Minecraft's content creator remains removed from the leaderboard and will be looked at sharply no matter what Dream does in the future on this scene.