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Clay "Dream" recently opened up a pastebin post on the speedrunning controversy involving him that took place in December 2020.
Dream is the Minecraft YouTube and streaming sensation that took the world by storm with his manhunt series, plot-heavy survival-multiplayer server ("SMP"), various in-game mods, challenge videos, and skilled speedruns.
In December 2020, Dream broke the 15 million subscribers mark, and in the same month, was stripped of his title on the Minecraft Speedrun Leaderboard due to official's conclusions that he was cheating.
It was a long-lasting argument between Dream, third parties, and moderators at speedrun.com. This resulted in a plethora of proof working against either side. Initial analysis was done on Dream's in-game luck with item drops and concluded that there was only a one in a nearly three billion chance that his luck could've happened in a vanilla and unmodded version of Minecraft.
Dream conducted a rebuttal analysis through an anonymous third-party that concluded that the specific sample chosen by the speedrun.com moderators to conduct analysis on was cherry-picked to make his item drop luck look better than it was.
However, most of Dream's arguments against this decision took place through various tweets online. As we know now, these heated online responses have been a source of haunting guilt for the streamer.
Dream's perspective of the speedrunning controversy
May 30th, 2021 — at around 7:08 AM EST, Dream posted this on Twitter:
It simply said "about speedrunning" and directed readers to a pastebin link. Once opened, this link led to a reasonably lengthy paragraph written by Dream himself.
Readers can read the paragraph in its entirety on pastebin here. Dream's personal perspective on his side of the speedrunning controversy is over 2000 words. It's strongly recommended that readers read the original post, as it's the way that Dream intended this response to be worded.
Dream's response is very genuine and acknowledges many aspects of the speedrunning controversy that fans have felt ill about.
Dream uses a mod that slightly enhances pearl drop and endermen spawn rates, mostly for his challenge videos. One example being his shock collar stream. He does this so recording the video or stream doesn't drag on and becomes inefficient just for the sake of having "unmodded" item drop rates.
This mod was accidentally turned on during the run he submitted to the Minecraft Speedrun Leaderboard. This meant that the analysis done on his speedrun was correct, and there was a modified client enhancing his drop rates.
This mod was designed so that it wouldn't show up while running, so it feigns the appearance of unmodded Minecraft. Dream didn't realize this client had been running throughout his speedrun and submitted it thinking he speedran on an unmodified version of Minecraft.
When investigations began on his speedrun and statistical analysis began to prove that his drop rate chances were improbable without an enhancement, Dream felt this was an unjustified attack on him.
He didn't know enough about math to make his own counter-argument, and he admitted that there had been beef between him and certain moderators contributing to this investigation that weren't fond of him.
"I felt like I had been publicly smeared in a way that I have no clue how to respond to."
His guilt stems from how he reacted and lashed out at the moderators and people trying to prove he cheated. There are a lot of now-deleted tweets and videos that viciously lash out at those conducting the analysis.
Dream took these down after realizing his own fault in the situation. He's carried the weight of being cruel to these moderators when they were, in reality, completely right about what they were trying to prove.
"I felt really terrible for the mods because I dragged them through the mud even though they were mostly right. I still feel as though the mod team was extremely unprofessional when dealing with it, but they’re a group of volunteers just trying to do their job and in their eyes I was some cheating sob youtuber who didn’t care at all. Maybe in their position I would have treated me the same. I was an asshole back to them which didn’t help at all either."
Dream's relationship with these moderators and others involved in the controversy hasn't improved. Dream attempted to repair the relationship by donating all the money that came from his controversial video, but they declined his offer.
It's clear that this situation has been impacting him greatly for a while. It's brave of Dream to reveal his side of the story, especially after receiving so much grueling backlash after and during the initial controversy.
