In Minecraft, luck can turn quickly, especially when manipulated. Let’s go back today to the fate of MinecrAvenger, a crook under a vigilante mask.
In 2020, a distinguished member of the Minecraft community manages to flush out a strange flaw in the game of Dream, a speedrunner with several million subscribers established as favorites in the competitive rankings. Carrier of the movement which will highlight one of the most controversial cheats in the history of the Mojang franchise, he will be accused, a year later, of the same misdeeds. Here is the little story full of irony of a young fallen vigilante.
The Twins of Discord
To triumph over Minecraft 1.16, it is well known that the luck factor is a prerequisite. On the cubic map, the law of random drop reigns supreme and smiles on those who show enough patience and devotion; you have to cross your fingers to hope to snatch the resources necessary for victory, the one that snatches a warm cry of joy from you when the player’s avatar deals the fatal blow to the final boss, the dragon who sleeps on the lands of Ender. Before reaching this stage, you must have collected 12 ender pearls by killing Endermen or, more quickly, by doing a little bartering with Piglins, two creatures in the game. By throwing a gold bar at the last, it will drop an object of its choice and not necessarily the famous pearls that you covet. The next step is to turn your loot into Eyes of Ender by combining it with Blaze Powder, which is obtained from Blaze Rods, hostile floating creatures. These eyes will show the way to a fort, home of the gates to Ender. As you will have understood from this paragraph full of subtleties, the path to success is not a long calm river. And in Minecraft version 1.16, all of these quoted elements emerge from a newly generated world.
When skills alone cannot completely satisfy the multiple demands imposed in a minimal time, it may be tempting, for certain speedrun competitors, to use devious or even dishonest means. In the same way that an athlete in bad faith would dope himself before a big competition, the disloyal speedrunner injects his fallacious codes into that of the game. So type “Minecraft cheat” on YouTube and you will be able to contemplate a slew of popular nicknames freshly incriminated. That of Dream will certainly not escape you; In 2021, this famous videographer who culminates millions of subscribers on YouTube sees luck smiling at him a little too much during one of his games.. It is another player with a pseudonym worthy of a vigilante, MinecrAvenger, who will sound the alert on this anomaly in a tweet: “Do you know that Dream exchanged 266 gold bars in 24 hours of streaming and that 41 of these exchanges gave pearls? the probability is 15.41%”. A few community investigations and dozens of irrefutable proofs later, Dream who will have denied some time will finally admit having cheated “by accident” and will be stripped of his records. A plug-in mistakenly left enabled would be the source of all this contention.
If MinecrAvenger has meticulously devoted himself to these scholarly calculations, it is because he too is a competitor in a scene where impartiality must be checked with a fine-toothed comb. It was probably by watching his twin – baptized Nice Twice – register his name in a few rankings that he fell in love with the discipline. The brothers regularly travel in duo and at full speed the maps. Then quite quickly, MinecrAvenger gains confidence and systematically dethrones his brother by a handful of seconds in each category of the game. Nice Twice relegated to the background, MinecrAvenger gravitates alone in the Top 1 and 2 of several speedrun grids on the Speedrun site .com. Some of his records remain unattainable over the past two years. And in addition to being very skilled, he is extremely lucky. Maybe even a little too much.
The lazy dragon
This November 9, 2022, Karl Jobst, videographer at the origin of a long line of investigations into the world of speedrunning, publishes the fruit of new research in a video called “The biggest cheater in the history of speedrunning has finally been caught”. In it, he recounts that on November 28, 2020, a little over a month after his vindictive tweet towards Dream’s imposter, MinecrAvenger performs a brilliant run in a different category than the fallen champion.. Here, the seed (the code) used in the world generation process is the same for all. Thus in each game, the player finds the same terrain, the same structures and the same biomes. If this stability drastically reduces the luck factor, some elements are still random, such as where the speedrunner is introduced into the world. Not only does MinecrAvenger benefit from a favorable entry, but it even pays for the assistance of a dolphin willing to cross the waters at high speed.
Its real chance lies above all in the last quarter of the game: the dragon, capable of taking more or less time before perching on the zone which will make it vulnerable, seems here very quickly inclined to receive its sentence. Thanks to that, MinecrAvenger then performs a 2 minute 21 second race filmed and posted online which dumbfounds the public, rightly so. Because a late reading of the game code will reveal that the minimum time between which the player enters the Ender and can see the dragon roosting is 23 seconds. MinecrAvenger, in an act seemingly every bit as heroic as the name it bears, completes this streak in 21 seconds. Two small seconds of difference which quickly sows a big doubt.
Counter Uno
On September 5, 2022, MinecrAvenger signs a new exploit and completes Minecraft version 1.15 in just 2 minutes and 6 seconds. Champion of his category, he is ahead of second place by 8 seconds. A dantesque gap that raises the eyebrows of the most observant. After the Dream scandal, not everyone is fooled. And you will now have understood, to find the flaw in the game of a cheater, you have to look at the numbers. In this version 1.15 (set seed), the player must collect 20 Obsidian blocks in the blacksmith chests in order to build two portals to the End: one to enter, one to leave. The task is particularly difficult, the chances of finding 20 being 1 in 479 and the number of resources that the chests can contain being random each time. So when MinecrAvenger picks up his colossal batch of Obsidian without even flinching, a certain ExeRSolver takes it to heart to comb through the speedruns captured by the record holder.
In fact, I count Obsidian from his vod 2.06 1.15 and it’s blatant. I’m not done yet and I’ll calculate the odds when it’s good but, it’s so obvious.
I counted 769 obsidians from 290 smiths (~2.65 obsidians/smith while normal is ~1.46). The probability of having 769+ of 290 blacksmiths is 3.576123787609349E-11. Disregarding the last round he was beaten, that becomes 748 Obsidian from 288 smiths, the probability of which is 2.422794128251741E-10.
This is enough to ignite the powder and mobilize a few dozen other amateur statisticians. And if you’ve followed the Dream case closely, you’re probably familiar with the aplomb and energy invested by entire communities in laying out hundreds of incriminating figures on solid PDF reports. Without dwelling on it at length, let’s come directly to one of the convincing results: blacksmith chests can have 281 trillion different arrangements. But in MinecrAvenger runs, two of them could never have existed. And then we discover the latest errors, even more grotesque, which can even make you laugh: videos of runs cut and patched together, betrayed by a timer that performs a strange ellipse or buttons that teleport. Doubt is no longer allowed, MinecrAvenger has been cheating, and has been for almost two years. The story then takes the turn of a macabre fairy tale in which even the names of its characters sketch barely subtle Manichean characters. In the shadow of a twin emeritus, MinecrAvenger, nicknamed the evil twin in a plethora of comments, modifies the code of his game with a gesture that some would describe as Machiavellian.
confession time
MinecrAvenger receives the same sentence as his friends: his records are erased from the surface of Speedrun.com and he is banned from his community. On Twitter, like many others, he begins by denying: “I was banned from http://speedrun.com due to impossible chests and too high obsidian rates based on a VOD of only 37 minutes”. Then like many, he admits having cheated, without engaging in languorous arguments.
I admit to cheating in Minecraft speedruns by injecting my own code into mods
— MinecrAvenger | Eric (@MinecrAvenger) December 3, 2022
I admit to cheating in Minecraft speedruns by injecting my own code into the mods
End of the story. In an old video dubbed “Why Dream is rightly angry that he was caught cheating in a movie”, the videographer ably remarked, “It’s only because Dream has so many people watching it, so many be careful, that there were just a handful of people who are so attentive to what is happening that they were able to count all the trades he made”. Ironically, MinecrAvenger gained notoriety the day it aroused suspicion about Dream’s luck. A year later, he will suffer the same fate. As for his twin brother, he seems to put things into perspective rather well.
Since MinecrAvenger betrayed me and I have no one to hang out with, are there any groups looking for a new member?
No, I didn’t know he was cheating. He lied to me and abused my trust. But I will still celebrate Christmas with him. (Source: Twitter)
