Dream is a very popular YouTuber and Minecraft speedrunner whose subscriber base grew by 12 million between January and November 2020 and now has about 23 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.5 million followers on Twitter The number of Twitter followers has reached 1.5 million. However, by the end of 2020, some viewers began to suspect that he was cheating on his speedrun record, which led to problems.

The legitimacy of Dream's stream was questioned because of the unusually high drop rates of two key items: ender pearls and blaze rods. These two items are what speedrunners rely on to reach the end of the game as quickly as possible. So when the speedrun.com moderators analyzed Dream's six speedrun streams, they found that the odds of getting these drops were "unfathomably small" at 1 in 177 billion. Yes, one in a billion.

While this does not completely eliminate Dream's luck from the realm of possibility, it was enough for the moderation team to conclude that the events in his run "cannot be modeled by any sensible, conventional probability distribution."

"There is no situation in the natural environment in which barter and blaze drop are dependent or biased to any noticeable degree. There is no way to manipulate these values by chance during an RSG speed run, nor is there any way to intentionally manipulate them using only conventional methods." The only sensible conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that the Dream game was modified to manipulate pearl barter and rod drop rates.

After an investigation, Dream's speed run was not accepted and the record was removed. This resulted in further reprisals: Dream denied accusations of cheating, the moderation team refused to investigate the files Dream claimed to have used during the run, accusations of fraudulent calculations were made, and a huge social media spat ensued between supporters of both parties. Later that year, Dream apologized

for its initial reaction to the decision, saying that it "deserves respect," although it clearly still disagrees with it.

That seemed to be the end of it until this past weekend, when Dream tweeted "about speedrunning" with a link to a Pastebin post. After the post was "reportedly" deleted by another user, he deleted the tweet, but the post itself was later restored. In it, Dream admitted that he had indeed used a mod to adjust the drop rate, although he claimed it was unintentional.

Dream explained that in "challenge videos" created prior to the Minecraft 1.16 update, he increased Enderman's spawn rate and pearl drop rate so that he would not have to waste a lot of video time hunting for pearls and blaze rods. 1.16. The update complicated the process, so instead a server-side plugin was created that slightly increased the rate; Dream thought that might be a problem, but since it was completely server-side, it shouldn't have any effect on the client, and in any case, the mod was not running Since it was "99% certain" that the mod was not being run, it was "kicked out". Also, the logs showed that only the fabric API was loaded and nothing else, which ultimately proved to be inaccurate. As it turns out, so were the other assumptions about the mod's impact.

"I spoke with the developer and eventually, when working on the mod stuff, that he added the same improvements from our challenge server to the client-side mod to work in single player, like the shock color videos and other "single player" mod videos I found out," explained Dream.

"This was only in the early renditions of the mod and was removed when the developers realized that that type of video could be done on a PC hosted server. This actually included several other things that, as far as I know, were not mentioned at all during the controversy. Enderman's eyes have a low chance of breaking when thrown, and Enderman drops pearls at a fairly high rate (I don't think it killed Enderman much, so this didn't catch my eye.)

Following this discovery, which Dream estimated happened "a couple of months ago," he removed the response video, but did not comment further on the matter for fear of rekindling the drama.

"I figured the matter was over and it was a story to tell in a few years when no one cared anymore. I told a few people, only to find that the community had been through enough drama already and felt it was pointless," he wrote. 'I didn't want to be at the center of a controversy for the hundredth time. It was an unfortunate situation that made me feel bad, like I couldn't defend myself in good faith any longer.

Carl Jobst's December 2020 analysis of the Dream speedrun controversy

But that mindset clearly changed last week when Dream's old speedrun was also removed. This is a very common procedure when a speedrunner is found to be cheating, and Dream said it was "fair treatment," and asked supporters not to direct their hatred toward the speedrun.com moderators as a result. But it also prompted him to declare more publicly.

"I don't really know what to expect from this, but I just feel like I have a huge burden on my shoulders and I need to unload it," he wrote. I think this whole situation has been very bad for everyone involved, it's been the worst few weeks of my life, and I wish I could go back and do something different because it still affects me every day."

"I'm sorry to anyone I let down or disappointed. I always try to be the best person I can be, but that fiasco was not the best I could do, or even close to it. I hope this brings some closure to those who needed it and I really want to move forward with positive vibes, as I have tried so hard to promote as much as possible."[12

The controversy does not seem to have damaged Dream's popularity: his latest video, posted a month ago, now has over 40 million views. He also seems to have smoothed things over with Geosquare, who was one of the speedrun.com moderators behind the initial investigation.

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