I'm sad and angry about Dream getting away with cheating because his audience is mostly kids. I made an emotional video about it that you can watch here if you're interested: https://maxkarson.com/an-open-letter-to-dream

I also have a few questions for the community:

1. If RNG manipulation is only detectable across multiple streams that provide a large dataset, what is being done to prevent this in other Minecraft 1.16 runs?

2. If 1 in 7.5 trillion = proof of cheating (and it does), then why is Dream not banned? Is he simply too big to fail? Or is it again because his fans are kids, and would not support the ban because they don't understand the math?

3. Does anyone have any suggestions of how to deal with the broader problem of being able to slightly manipulate RNG? I mean, anyone who knows basic statistics can calculate what you could reasonably get away with (tripling ender pearl drop rate was obviously way too much) and then tweak things in their favor?

4. My own suggestion: make it a legal category. Dream was cheating for a reason--restarting the game over and over makes for boring content and boring runs. What if there was a speedrunning mod/edition that gave better drop rates so speedrunners could focus on skill?

1. RNG manipulation is allowed if you’re manipulating the RNG through actions within the game itself. What’s not allowed is using external tools or modifications to change the RNG. As for how the Minecraft community is seeking to detect things like that, you need to ask them.

2. The site doesn’t ban people for cheating, each community handles it separately on their own. Ask the Minecraft community why they haven’t banned someone from submissions if you want to know more.

3. This is not as large a problem as you might think. There are very few cases of people that I know of who actively modified the source code of their game to change RNG chances. This hobby runs a bit on the honor system that people aren’t using modified versions of games, but if you have concerns about specific games and runners’ ability to cheat, you can discuss that with the community for those games.

4. Categories are decided upon by the game’s community, all suggestions can be directed towards the mods of a game and their category request process should be followed.

Listen, I get being upset that someone cheated, but you’re getting a little extreme here in my opinion. Nothing that happened here is common in speedrunning, it just got a lot of attention because it was a popular user who did it. Cheating is not running rampant in the speedrunning community and most games have a good system in place to detect it and stop it. It’s not as large or as bad a problem as you think.

Communities police this stuff individually, so if you continue to have concerns about cheating in Minecraft, you can try to talk to that community about it. The site won’t have any opinion on it, they just host the LBs.

1. Ask the Minecraft community

2. Ask the Minecraft community (as I understand it, suspicions of cheating on one game isn't really enough to ban someone on all games)

3. Impossible on a game that allows mods, short of requiring someone to real-time record themselves opening every mod and every setting before attempting every run

4. Suggest it to the Minecraft community

I don't mean to be glib, but this is the general speedrunning forum. Your questions would be better directed to the Minecraft forums / mods / Discords / etc. You won't get very many answers here unfortunately.

Well I AM upset god dammit!!! Okay thank you both for your answers, I will give them my suggestions and see what they say.